Homilies
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4th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 30 January 2022
We all have our limits, our boundaries. At different times, in different places, with different people we are used to drawing the line in the sand. We take our stand from which we will not cross. We have our bottom line, from which we will negotiate no further. This of course is well understandable, and even necessary for a sense of self and identity without which we can have no genuine relationship. We are not simply reeds in the wind or chameleons who are constantly changing colours. We are constantly in a process of self-definitions, and sometimes that self-definition occurs negatively: we define ourselves as being not something or other.…
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3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time – 23 January 2022
Over the last week or so we have once again been struck by the enormous power of nature and the destruction that it can create. Our hearts have gone out to the people of Tonga in their experience of the volcanic eruption and the subsequent tsunami. We think too of the people of Afghanistan, of Myanmar, of Ukraine – in so many places, people live with violence and fear. The stories of the world’s grief can be overwhelming for us. There is every instinct for us to close off, to close down, to retreat into what Pope Francis calls the ‘globalisation of indifference’, to become as unaffected as possible. Perhaps…
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2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 16 January 2022
With the great interest in spirituality it is not unusual to come across approaches to spirituality that envisage it to be primarily about the quest for peace and harmony, a kind of self-satisfaction. In this sense becoming spiritual is about becoming at “one with myself”, “connecting to my real self,” finding a centre within myself” that promises to make be immune from all the ups and downs, and the many contradictions, of life. The self-help sections of bookstores are full of literature that promise we need never feel powerless again, that success is always within our reach, that vitality and beauty are always attainable if we but follow a few…
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Baptism of the Lord – 2022
With the Feast of the Lord’s Baptism the Christmas Season comes to an end. We began the Christmas Season celebrating the birth of a Child. As we began the season celebrating new beginnings, so we conclude the season. Jesus’ baptism represents for him a new beginning, the beginning of his ministry to realise his mission. This invites us to consider what new beginnings are being extended to us. How is God calling us, within our own circumstances, to move forward in our life? What are the new possibilities into which we are being invited so that our own hearts might not lose their freshness no matter our age? Our hearts…
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Epiphany of the Lord – 2 January 2022
We are but a day into the new year, a new year which has started with the most extraordinary sense of our vulnerability – our vulnerability before the power of a contagious virus, our control of which still eludes us after two long years. This Sunday we gather conscious of those we know who have been recently infected, who are in isolation, and who cannot be with us. A new year ordinarily starts with optimism and possibility. This year has started with enormous concern. Indeed, in the face of the historic moment by which we are gripped there is little room for appeals to optimism. They present as facile and…
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1 January 2022 – Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God
One of the most significant lessons that I have learnt in life is about the necessity and power of paradox in our lives. Spiritual experience attends to sets of opposites; it does not seek to resolve them. In the paradoxes and the intersections of our life we are, as one writer puts it, we are “stretched out amid the opposites in [our] life, between hanging on and letting go, between involvement and surrender, between deep engagement and gentle detachment. This is [our] crucifixion and [our] joy. It is [our] crucible in all its insecurity and beauty, fragility and possibility.”[1] A problem is to be solved. A paradox, on the other, is…
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Feast of the Holy Family – 2021
At my father’s funeral several years ago, I happened to meet a man whom I had not known before. When I asked him his connection to my father he replied, “Well actually my great, great grandfather was responsible for bringing your great, great grandfather to Tasmania.” I was fascinated by the information which resolved some confusion as to how my forbears came to Tasmania. The man at the funeral had the answer: Samuel Ranson arrived in the Port of Launceston on 12 August 1841 to be the overseer of Wickford’s – a property near the township of Longford, near Launceston. This disclosure opened up further discovery for me – that…
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Christmas Children’s Homily – 2021
The wonderful story of Christmas that we have just told never seems to tire of telling. It is a great story – a story through which we are brought to what is most important about life: the celebration of new life, the wonder at how God’s life comes into the world, the importance of two people, Mary and Joseph, placing their trust in God’s promises It’s a story which gives rise to many other stories, too, that seek to come to the meaning of what we celebrate this evening. Let me tell you one of these stories from far away Russia. It was the night the Christ-Child came to Bethlehem. In a country…
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Christmas 2021
After months of a smoke laden city towards the end of 2019, horrifying bushfires over the start of 2020, only to be followed by an historic pandemic with the dramatic national lockdown commencing in March of last year, people were ready to dance on the grave of 2020. No one was imagining the trauma of a more sustained lockdown in 2021, just as no one would imagine that its outcome would be such a concerning surge of new Covid cases as we face a new year. We are in the grip of a pandemic of a virus that will not yet yield to our control. The great moments of history…
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Fourth Sunday of Advent – 2021
The season of Advent that we have been celebrating in the time leading up to the celebration of Christmas this week is a season characterized by hope. It has often struck me that in Australia we have our own experience of hope. From penal settlement and convict experience, through to the mythology of the pioneer farmer, and to the shores of Gallipoli, and extending even to our fascination with sport, Australians, historically, have defined themselves as those who often find themselves pitched against an overwhelming odd with every prospect of defeat, yet discovering there a new sense of solidarity with one another. As Joachim Dirks once commented, The preoccupation with…