There is a perspective in theology that regards the event of Pentecost as the birth of the Church.  On this day, the Spirit is poured out on the disciples.  They are released from their disillusionments and their fears; they are enSpirited and emboldened to go out and to preach the good news that the life of Christ is more powerful than death, that the self-sacrifice of his love has overpowered the forces of selfishness and suspicion, that the future stretches out beyond us as a constant invitation full of possibility.  Our dead ends have become new beginnings; our sunsets have been changed into dawns. Yes, on this day the Spirit overwhelms our timidity,…

I chanced to read recently that there is nothing more intimate nor more remote as the face of a lover.  It brought to mind the observation of the French writer, Jean Mambrino in which he prays, “You wanted me to tell you once more about the interval that brings us together. I need that interval to be, to become. It is the interval which frees you. It arouses your desire, opens your countenance.”[1]  Mambrino was speaking of a core tension in our life, the tension between absence and presence.  We need both in order to understand ourselves and one another.  Yes, in the bonds that join us to each other absence can become a way of…

All around us now here in Wahroonga the leaves have changed colour and are beginning to drop to the ground. As the writer Joyce Rupp observes, “some people tell me that they don’t like autumn because it reminds them too much of the inevitability of death. The leaves falling from the trees onto the barren, brown earth makes them feel sad and lonely. The leaves are subtle reminders that we are asked to let go of many things throughout our life.  Every time we surrender something, we connect with our death, with the ultimate moment of letting go.”[1] Indeed, as this same writer recognizes, “Seeing death in any form – autumn leaves…

Though we live our life on them today – and especially now during this time of pandemic during which we are almost completely reliant on them and cannot imagine how we would operate without them – I will never forget the first time I accessed a computer and went online – which, amazingly, was only some thirty years ago. I remember the sense of awe as my laptop hooked into the computers of institutions around the world for the first time.  Suddenly, I was part of the communication revolution and with it the information revolution.  Whatever of our ambivalence about this revolution in the past, through this current period of social…

The late English writer Daniel O’Leary related a striking moment of epiphany narrated by the Irish mystic John Moriarty.  Moriarty was walking through muddy patches in the meadow near his Kerry home, wondering how those ‘hints of heaven’ could emerge from such a drab place.  “How could something so yellow as a buttercup come up out of soggy brown earth?” he asked.  “How could something so purple as an orchid and so perfect as a cowslip come out of it?  Where does the colour and perfection come from?”[1] As were the first disciples, we are surprised by the power of life when it appears, and often in the most unlikely of places and experiences.  As…