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6th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2021
It was Teresa of Avila, writing in the 16th century, who remarked that we should all learn how to read the texts of the gospels in their original language. Well, I doubt that many of us will be able to fulfil her challenge, including me. However, one of the things we begin to recognise about Scripture is that often enough the English translation we are used to oftenfails to convey the meaning of the original Greek, the language in which the gospels were written. The use of the English phrase, “feeling sorry” in this account of Jesus’ encounter with a leper is a case in point. The original Greek illustrates…
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5th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2021
Healing is front and centre of Jesus’ ministry. Healing from the perspective of the gospel, however, is never effected simply by attention to physical disease. We know healing is not simply a physical phenomenon. It is a far more profound experience. Some writers would go so far as to suggest that all illness is a psychosocial reality – i.e., it places the person in a new relationship with their society – a relation which can either isolate a person further and compound the effect of illness, or relation that places the person at the centre of the community’s concern and, thus, in no small way, redeems the person’s particular disease. The most negative aspect…
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4th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2021
One of the privileges of our life is to be able to sit with someone else and to listen to their story and to hold their struggle to find meaning in their life. Sometimes those people with whom we might sit may have been struggling a long time, and alone. Sometimes they may have given up any struggle, and, rather, given in to the emotional or spiritual impasse they reached many years before. And sometimes they may have only just set out on a deeper search for themselves and for who God might be for them. Often, of course, we have no word to give, and the silence is hard to bear. On…
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Australia Day 2021
Recent events in the United States have been of great concern to us. Though the systems of democracy have remained intact, the events that have led to the presidential inauguration have demonstrated the fragility of democracy as a system of politics. The world has nervously awaited the peaceful resolution of the transition of power, recognising that such cannot be simply taken for granted. The flaws in the system have become all too exposed. Whatever of our own personal politics and how we may have viewed the outcome of the American election, all of us hope for a future known for its measurement and order. And the key to this in…
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3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2021
I am sure that many of us have heard the story of the chap driving in the country who stops to ask the famer which is the way to the city. Says the farmer to him in reply, “Oh, if I were going to the city, I wouldn’t start from here!” How often we give this very same reply to our faith, and to our relationship with God, and even with each other. We get caught in the thinking, that if I were going to relate to God better it couldn’t possibly be from how I am feeling at the moment. If only I didn’t have to contend with this pain or with…
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2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2021
Not so long ago, I chanced to see a rather striking sign outside a church. The text of the sign was simply, “Can you hear the voice of God in the silences of the day?” Can you hear the voice of God in the silences of the day? I was particularly struck by it because often enough we expect to hear God in another way. We think God speaks to us in an exceptional way, or that he only speaks to exceptional people, and, sadly, we don’t include ourselves amongst them. So often we will hear people say, “God never speaks to me,” or the question behind this conclusion which is “Why does…
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Feast of the Baptism of the Lord 2021
As the months roll on all of us are desperately waiting for the pandemic to be over. We wonder how long it will take for the situation to change, for restrictions to be lifted, for our lives to return to some of the normalcy we had before. We had hoped that our waiting might be over just before Christmas; however, as this new year has started we have realized that our waiting is not over, and that perhaps we will be waiting for the better part of this year. We spend a great deal of our life waiting – perhaps more than, at first, we care to realise. There are those…
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Solemnity of the Epiphany 2021
On Christmas Eve, the week before last, I gathered the children who were present at our Mass and I told them a story from far away Russia. It was the story of Babouska who, having met the wise men on their search for the newborn Christ, now goes in search of the Christ Child herself: “She travels on and on and on for years and years – but she never finds the little Christ-Child. They say that old Babouscka is travelling still, looking for Him. When it comes Christmas Eve, and the children are lying fast asleep, Babouscka comes softly through the towns, wrapped in her long cloak and carrying her basket…
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Farewell Letter to the Parish of Holy Name Wahroonga
Dear friends, The last week or so has been spent packing in anticipation of my move to the Parish of Chatswood. As many of you will have experienced, it is a strange experience to pack one’s life into boxes: it’s a time during which many memories are relived, and an occasion to appreciate the many different phases of one’s journey. Endings and beginnings. It is, of course the nature of life itself. As one of our parishioners, Dan Candotti remarked to me just the other day, a rhythm of setting out and intersecting. For the past ten years our own journeys have intersected. It has been an intersection of so…
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Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, 1 January 2021
One of the most significant lessons that I have learnt in life is about the necessity and power of paradox in our lives. Spiritual experience attends to sets of opposites; it does not seek to resolve them. In the paradoxes and the intersections of our life we are, as one writer puts it, we are “stretched out amid the opposites in [our] life, between hanging on and letting go, between involvement and surrender, between deep engagement and gentle detachment. This is [our] crucifixion and [our] joy. It is [our] crucible in all its insecurity and beauty, fragility and possibility.”[1] Our Christian spiritual framework lives and breathes irreducible sets of tensions – humanity…
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