On the evening of the Easter Vigil, the greatest moment in our Christian year, we light the Easter Candle and proclaim the Risen Christ. Its soft glow celebrates the victory of Christ’s life over death, the conquest of love over fear. This year we do so in a climate of national and international anxiety. It is a time of shadows – the shadow of irrational panic-buying, hoarding and public brawls; the shadow of unemployment and financial insecurity; the shadow of profiteering; the shadow of disconnection from our community of faith and its sacramental life; the shadow of concern about our health and the health of our families. We have come to live…

“Take up your cross and follow me.”  These words are at the very heart of the Gospel. They are there so that these same words might be at the very heart of our discipleship.  Perhaps we have become so used to these words.  Yet, they are some of the most confronting words we will ever hear:  “Take up your cross and follow me.”   For the significance of the words to remain fresh we have to keep putting ourselves back into the time of Jesus and wonder at how the first disciples would have heard these words. The cross was a familiar sight in first century Palestine.  Crucifixion was the preferred method of the Romans of…

Throughout the 20th century worked a famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead.  It is hard to imagine another anthropologist who has taught us as much about the nature of human community. Mead was once asked what sign we had about when civilisation began.  The expectation was that her reply would concern the discovery of some ancient artefact such as a tool, or a weapon, or a segment of art.  Instead, she simply replied, “a healed femur.” A healed femur bone is the sign we have of the beginnings of civilisation.   Why did this famous anthropologist claim this?  She claimed this because for the first time we had an indication that a community had cared for someone.  Previously, there would…

In the mid 1990s, Arthur W. Frank published a landmark and fascinating study on people’s response to illness, entitled, The Wounded Storyteller. As a professor of sociology at the University of Calgary, Frank considered the various ways we respond to our illness, particularly the illnesses that are chronic in their character. He identified a number of responses that we make to our experience of such illness ranging from denial through to resignation – none of which were especially helpful in learning how to live in the fullest way in the face of our illness.  What he suggested as the most redemptive or transformative pathway was what he termed as being the wounded storyteller:…

Last Friday evening in Rome, Pope Francis presided over what was named, An Extraordinary Moment of Prayer in which he blessed the city and the world, a gesture ordinarily reserved for Easter Sunday and Christmas and the election of a new pope. In so doing, he reflected on the situation that has now gripped the world. “The storm [in which we find ourselves] exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities. It shows us how we have allowed to become dull and feeble the very things that nourish, sustain and strengthen our lives and…