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23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Podcast
The Gospel recognises that our relationships are never easy, including the relationships between fathers and their children which we mark here in Australia on Father’s Day. They are always fraught with the possibility of hurt, with disappointments, with projections, with disillusionment. Their demand is constant. Yet, it is what happens in and through them that determines our real sanctity. We do not grow in holiness by practicing more religion. We grow in holiness by practicing more listening, more humility, more love – by genuinely encouraging one another rather than putting wedges between ourselves. https://media.blubrry.com/davidranson/content.blubrry.com/davidranson/Homily_for_23rd_Sunday_of_Year_A.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSS
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23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
A key focus for the Gospel of Matthew is the relationships that constitute the Christian community. There is a way of living together and a way of relating to one another that is reflective of the Kingdom of God as inaugurated by Jesus, and that is ultimately indicative of the life of God, and there is a way of living and of relating that is not as illustrative. Fear, suspicion, resentment, bitterness draw people away from one another. Listening, humility, openness and dialogue bring people together. It is easy to identify which side of the ledger speaks of the life of God, and which does not. Writing in the 6th century, St. Benedict who drew…
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22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Podcast
One of the most radical truths we will learn in life is that which is expressed by the Australian novelist, Patrick White, “The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.” We can spend our whole life learning the meaning of this. It confuses us given that it is the opposite of what we want. It is the antithesis of the culture in which we have been immersed and which seduces us in subtle ways so that we become despondent because we find we are not as free as we think, not as in control as we want to…
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22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
In the anxiety with which we are living at this time, our uncertainty can easily translate into despondency. We see video clips of large sporting events, gatherings of people socializing and enjoying life, rallies of one kind or another, and we wonder when we will ever experience these opportunities again. Our Year 12 students are being denied the many rituals that mark the end of their school years. We feel the constraint of not being able to be with our families and friends who are interstate or overseas, especially at times of sickness and death. We are acknowledging that our experience of the pandemic will not be over any time…
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21st Sunday in Ordinary Time Podcast
Like the identity of Jesus, our own identity is an ‘event’ that discloses itself in and through a commitment to something other than itself. When we are somebody for everybody, so that nobody is just anybody, the question about our identity is given back its answer. When people see the way in which we live our life, would they too reveal back to us our own God-given identity, as bearers of the Christ, if we asked them who we are, as Jesus asks his disciples who he is? https://media.blubrry.com/davidranson/content.blubrry.com/davidranson/21st_Sunday_of_Year_A.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSS
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21st Sunday in Ordinary Time
Anxiety may well be observed as one of the defining characteristics of our age. Clearly, we are anxious about the situation of the pandemic in which we discover ourselves. So much that is uncertain stretches out before us. And yet, what makes this worse, I think, is a deeper anxiety that we were carrying even before we had to confront the coronavirus. Whilst, on the one hand, perhaps as never before, we have the opportunity to celebrate individuality and diversity perhaps as never before have we been less sure about who we are. In the musical, The Gondaliers Gilbert and Sullivan once suggested ‑ rather prophetically I think of our own time ‑…
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20th Sunday in Ordinary Time Podcast
Jesus is confronted with a Canaanite woman, a stranger, a foreigner, someone culturally entirely different from himself. At first he reacts as we all do in such a situation: defensively, even with hostility. But her presence persists. He hears her story. His perspective changes. This encounter becomes a turning point in Jesus ministry. https://media.blubrry.com/davidranson/content.blubrry.com/davidranson/20th_Sunday_of_Ordinary_Time.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSS
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20th Sunday in Ordinary Time
During my monastic years, I was involved in the project of inter-religious dialogue. Along with a Benedictine sister, a Buddhist monk, and a Hindu nun I pioneered what came to be known as Australian Monastic Encounter. It was a privileged experience, through which I visited a number of different monastic centres around Australia and enjoyed the hospitality of various Buddhist monks exchanging with them pathways in the spiritual life. In the work of inter-religious dialogue, we often detect great similarities and parallels between the religious traditions. Yet, we are also confronted with striking differences. Out of the desire to create a universal sense of fraternity, it has been a danger to try to…
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Solemnity of the Assumption 2020
At the end of his encyclical, The Gospel of Life, St John Paul II wrote, “Mary is a living word to console the Church in her struggle against death. By showing us her Son, she assures us that in him the powers of death have already been vanquished: “Death and life were locked in a wondrous combat. The Lord of life was dead; but now he lives triumphant.” Mary is a word of life to us because in her own journey we witness the triumph of the energy of life over the pall of death. And this victory speaks to us about what we most deeply desire in our life. We want to be fully loved,…
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19th Sunday in Ordinary Time Podcast
Christian peace comes not from the absence of conflict in life, but in the recognition that precisely in the conflict and storms of our life, someone is holding us, providing us with the assurance that we have a sense of identity larger than the conflict by which we are encircled. When we feel overwhelmed, not sure where to place our steps, it is the gospel that invites us to receive a gaze which comes to us from beyond our own confusion – a gaze which steadies us, assures us, invites us. https://media.blubrry.com/davidranson/content.blubrry.com/davidranson/19th_Sunday_of_Year_A.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSS
Homily Podcasts