Homilies
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20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 18 August 2024
In the late 20th century, there was a famous Catholic writer in the United States named Flannery O’Connor. In one of her short novels, The Violent Bear It Away, an eccentric old man catechises a young boy, his great nephew, about the Eucharist: “You were born into bondage and baptised into freedom, into the death of the Lord, into the death of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Then the child would feel a sulliness creeping over him, a slow warm rising resentment that his freedom had to be connected with Jesus, and that Jesus had to be the Lord. “Jesus is the bread of life,” the old man said. The boy…
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18th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 4 August 2024
Recently, a friend told me that on average he receives on his mobile phone 120 social media messages a day. Facebook, Instagram, X, Whatsapp – all wonderful means by which we keep connected with one another. We enter a short message, like, “I am enjoying a walk in the park” and immediately all those on our contact list are made aware of this significance! As someone who struggles to keep on top of any number of daily emails, the thought of receiving over a hundred social media messages astounds me. However, we seem to live increasingly in a cultural climate where many feel an extraordinary need to let the world…
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Homily for ACU Xavier School for Preaching – 3 August 2024 Feast Day of St Dominic
The American writer, Robert Fulgham once told of a story of Frank Marshall, an international chess player. During a competition many years ago, Marshall made what is often called the most beautiful move ever made on a chessboard. In a crucial game in which he was evenly matched with a Russian master player, Marshall found his queen under serious attack. There were several avenues of escape, and since the queen is the most important offensive player, spectators assumed Marshall would observe convention and move his queen to safety. Deep in thought, Marshall used all the time available to him to consider the board options. He picked up his queen –…
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16th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 21 July 2024
We all probably feel from time to time the need to get away from it all. Most often this is a result of life getting out of hand for us, and it all becoming a little too much. We long for a freedom from all the pressures that seem to impinge upon our time and energy. Space and freedom is a luxury few of us have, but we long for it often enough. Though most often this longing comes about as simply the felt need to be free of the stress we might be experiencing, the spiritual tradition has long recognized the need for us to withdraw from time to…
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15th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 14 July 2024
It is often lamented today that the rites of initiation into adulthood have been lost. We no longer have those rituals which mark the passage from childhood or adolescence into maturity. However, it has been suggested, not without merit, that perhaps one of the principal rites of passage today is overseas travel. We often hear of young people taking time away. With few resources they head off to distant places where for six months, twelve months or more, they move from country to country, culture to culture, working and touring. Often enough they return home then with a new sense of identity and ready for a commitment to work, or…
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4th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 28 January 2024
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 – 26 January 2024
We have a natural instinct for stories. As Pope Francis once wrote: “From childhood we hunger for stories just as we hunger for food. Stories influence our lives, whether in the form of fairy tales, novels, films, songs, news, even if we do not always realise it . . . Stories leave their mark on us; they shape our convictions and our behaviours. They can help us understand and communicate who we are.” [1] We delight in weaving stories. For this reason, there is a link, as Francis identifies, between the words, ‘textile’ and ‘text’. Both come from the Latin word, ‘to weave’ (texere). Yet we know the capacity we have…
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Third Sunday in Ordinary Time – 21 January 2024
I am sure that some 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 – 14 January 2023
I once 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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Solemnity of Mary Mother of God – 1 January 2024
It is not unusual for us to hear from children the questions, “Who made God?” “If God has made everything, who made God?” “When did God begin?” Of course, God has neither beginning nor end. God is. Yet, to imagine something that has no beginning, that has always been, is not possible to comprehend. I think it is slightly easier for us to imagine something that may have no end, for we have a glimpse of eternity in our own experience of time, but to imagine something without a start is difficult indeed. We can apprehend such a mystery, but we cannot understand it cognitively. To contemplate such a mystery requires the recognition of the…