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ANZAC Day – 25 April 2025
I have often shared it in the past, but I would like to share again today the scene in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings in which one of the main characters, Sam, says at one stage, “We shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport,…
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Easter Morning – 20 April 2025
One of my favourite lines out of the Church Fathers writing nearly 2000 years ago is from the 3rd century Clement of Alexandria. He wrote simply: “Christ our Lord turns all our sunsets into dawns.” It is Christ our Lord who turns all our sunsets into dawns. This day we proclaim that dead ends have given rise to new possibilities. Where diminishment and decay might be expected, there a new invitation is always available. A new possibility has dawned into the world. The future is given to us as a pure gift. And by how more powerful a way does the Christian Tradition express this than situating the Resurrection on the first day of the week at…
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Easter Vigil – 19 April 2025
We are as those who think in stories. To tell a story is a defining mark of our human existence. And the stories that we remember, the stories that have meaning for us, are the stories detailing the search for love, for power, for redemption. We never tire of hearing these stories. This is why we watch films, why we watch television, why we become engrossed in literature. In the stories played out in front of us, we see reflected back to ourselves some fragment of that for which we ourselves are searching. If as humans we are those for whom the experience of ‘story’ is a vital expression of our existence, so, too,…
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Good Friday – 18 April 2025
Some years ago, I was introduced to the thought of the psychotherapist Ernesto Spinelli. Spinelli had a keen sense of the inter-relatedness of human life – that our relationships with one another are the very stuff of existence. He understood very well that we are our relationships, that we exist in relationship or not at all, and that we see everything in the world, especially ourselves, in light of those relationships. It is our relationships that fashion our very sense of the world, and how we exist in the world. However, if this be the case, then an inevitable uncertainty about life begins to emerge because I can never fully know with complete…
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Mass of the Lord’s Supper – 17 April 2025
A former parishioner of mine, recounted to me how, many years ago, she went to Mass at her local parish. It was a weekday Mass, and the priest asked for a Eucharistic Minister to assist him. And so Rachel stood up and came forward. “The Body of Christ . . . Amen . . . the Body of Christ . . . Amen.” Person after person came forward and the repetition of her statement and prayer somehow began to sink into her bones. The last person came up and with something of an exuberant glee exclaimed in a loud voice – but more than loud – a joyous voice., “Amen!” Straight after Mass, Rachel…
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Palm Sunday – 13 April 2025
Today, throughout the world, marches for peace are held. Palm Sunday has become a day on which rallies for peace are staged in many of the cities of the world. It leads us to ask what is it about this day that speaks of peace, of the hope for peace? Though many who march for peace today may not even be Christian, and though perhaps a number of people take part in the walks do so for quite a mixture of motivation, nonetheless it would seem that the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem that we commemorate on this day has something that speaks of the possibility of peace. How is this so? It…
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Fifth Sunday of Lent – 6 April 2025 – Fifth Reflection on Hope in the Year of Jubilee – Becoming Agents of Hope
Through this season of Lent, we have been exploring the theme of Hope, the focus of our current Year of Jubilee. We have reflected on how hope arises from our needs, on how hope opens us to the future, how it is guaranteed by our faith in Christ Jesus and in his Resurrection, and how it is our Christian answer to the encounter of evil because it is a pronouncement that the evil is never the final word, that something bigger is at work. And now we come to the final reflection in our series: how each of us is called to become an agent of hope. Do I offer…
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Fourth Sunday of Lent – 30 March 2025 – Fourth Reflection on Hope: Christian hope as the assertion of the absurdity of evil.
In this Year of Jubilee, from the beginning of our season of Lent, we have been reflecting on the focal theme of the Jubilee – hope. We began by reflecting on how hope rises from those situations of limit in our life. We come across a limit, as it were, and hope takes us beyond this into something beyond that limit. In this way, hope is linked to our hungers, our needs. And yet, secondly, we reflected on that we would not hope if we did not have a sense of future, that there was a future. We hope to the extent that we believe there is a future. And who…
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Third Sunday of Lent – 23 March 2025 – Third Reflection on Hope in the Year of Jubilee: Christ, the Source of our Hope
Over each Sunday in the Season of Lent in this Year of Jubilee we have reflecting on the nature of Hope which is the focal theme for the celebration. We began our reflection thinking about how hope rises in our hearts from our hungers, from our needs. Last week, we spoke of how our sense of hope is premised on our belief that there is a future. We only have hope in our hearts if we believe there is a future; no future no hope. And so, hope opens spaces for us to move into the future. In this third reflection, we come to ask in whom can we place our…
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Living Creatively in the Tension between Tradition and Context – Keynote CSNSW Student Safety Forum on Consent and Respectful Relationships – 17 March 2025
Some thirty years ago, I was introduced to the work of the American philosopher of religion, David Tracy. At the time his writing was quite prolific, though he retired early due to poor health and has only recently returned to writing. Notwithstanding, he has been one of the formative influences in the development of my own thinking. Tracy took the context of postmodernity seriously. He understood it, recognising both its possibility and its limitations. And wondering how one might speak the life-giving word of the Gospel in its midst, he proposed conversation as the theological method best suited to the times. In a postmodern environment, conversation is our only hope,…
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