Homilies
-
Trinity Sunday – 4 June 2023
The Feast of the Trinity that we celebrate this Sunday brings us to the very question about the image of God that we have. As Christians, we imagine God as Trinity. The Trinity is the central mystery of our Christian faith: the uniquely Christian understanding of God that we have. No other symbol captures our Christian experience of God which is at one and the same time of wild urgency and delicate intimacy. How else can this experience of God as wild urgency and delicate intimacy, this experience of God as so deeply and overwhelmingly relational, be expressed than through this image of a Tri-unity. Through Jesus we have dared to imagine God as Trinity,…
-
Ascension Sunday – 21 May 2023
We are often used to saying, “distance makes the heart grow fonder.” Sometimes, though, we are not so sure. We know how long-distance friendships or relationships suffer for lack of contact, it seems that the saying is true only when actually come into contact with each other from time to time, or when we are constantly reminded of the one we love. Then, the separation we experience with someone we love does act to deepen our love. This is why the photos of those we love but who have died become so important to us. Our constant reminder of them through these symbols means that our love does not extinguish but that, in fact, our…
-
Sixth Sunday of Easter – 14 May 2023 (Mothers’ Day)
On an extensive property midway between Condobolin and Lake Cargellico, some 800km west of Sydney, a Kenthurst man, Walter Brachmann, has built the most beautiful shrine dedicated to Christ the King. It is an extraordinary enterprise: out in the back of nowhere, on the edge of the immense Australian desert, stands this majestic little chapel. I have come to know of it because a friend of mine, a Franciscan brother Dominic Levak has taken up residence there, living the life of a hermit. Dominic spends the day in the saturation of the stillness and silence of the vast Australian outback, tending to simple chores, reaching out to a local aboriginal…
-
Third Sunday of Easter – 23 April 2023
Though we live our life on them today and take them completely as granted as if they have always existed, I will never forget the first time I accessed a computer and went online – which, amazingly was only some thirty years ago –such a short time ago, on the scale of things. 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. In my more recent years, social media has come to the fore of many people’s lives, and communication between people takes…
-
2nd Sunday of Lent – 5 March 2023
The account of the Transfiguration is given us each year on this the 2nd Sunday of Lent. Each year we hear a different version of the account. This year the version is from the gospel of Matthew. Though there are differences between the three accounts from each of the gospels, there are clear similarities as well. Jesus and his disciples are on a mountain. There is the sense of being in solitude. There is a cloud. The inner luminosity of Jesus becomes apparent. The figures of Moses and Elijah are in the heart of the experience. The essential filial identity of Jesus as Son of the Father is revealed. The…
-
6th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 12 February 2023
At the Law Institute in Melbourne there is a restaurant called, “The Bottle and the Snail.” It is named after a famous law case in the early 1930s, the case of Donoghue and Stevenson.[1] A young lady had drunk a bottle of ginger beer and as she was finishing it discovered a snail at the bottom of the bottle. Within a few days she had fallen sick, but at the time there was no legal apparatus by which which could gain any kind of compensation. Eventually the case was taken all the way to the English House of Lords which accepted the principle in common law which is now the…
-
Australia Day – 26 January 2023
There is always discussion about the date of Australia Day. Is the 26th January the most appropriate day to celebrate our national identity? One imagines that every year, the discussion will re-ignite, and only time will tell how the question is resolved. However, it strikes me that the very question itself highlights an essential element of our identity as Australians. Perhaps, our identity itself is marked by a question. It is a question that is inevitable given that we are people who live in the intersection between two perspectives. And we live, unsure of how to resolve these two perspectives. In the Australian experience, the most ancient of peoples intersect with the most modern,…
-
Memorial Mass for the late Cardinal George Pell – Our Lady of the Rosary Cathedral, Diocese of Broken Bay – 16 January 2023.
At any funeral, one of the most remarkable experiences is listening to the eulogy of the one whose life is celebrated. For a few brief moments it is like being at the window of the person’s life; something of the radical uniqueness of the person’s life, their story and their journey are glimpsed, how their life was inter-woven into the stories and journeys of others. Yet, even when we hear a eulogy, we realise that the memories being shared cannot fully capture the person who is mourned. Indeed, even our own most special memories of the one we love are but glimpses of the mystery of who they are. Yes, our memories hold…
-
2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 15 January 2023
“Scapegoating” is a term we are well used to. We know the tendency of a group being assailed with problems to shift blame onto one individual. He or she must wear the group’s guilt and is sacrificed accordingly. Ordinarily, this person is ironically innocent of the group’s crime. That is also of the nature of scapegoating: there is an inherent injustice about its use -an innocent party is made to be responsible for the group’s woes. How we saw this play out in the extraordinary miscarriage of justice in Victoria in relationship to Cardinal Pell’s conviction in 2018, and indeed continuing to be played out in some of the media…
-
Solemnity of the Epiphany – 8 January 2023
On New Year’s Eve last year, I was introduced to ChatGPT – the powerful, interactive search engine that is built with Artificial Intelligence. Its capacity is overwhelming, creating instant responses to questions that are as personal as they are detailed. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence to become an active partner in conversation brings us to a new threshold of the Communications Revolution. It suggests a new frontier of cyberspace. Clearly, the future belongs now to the engagement with Artificial Intelligence on a whole range of levels. It’s a brave new world. The remarkable thing, of course, about ChatGPT is just not its power to galvanise the scope of the internet,…