Homilies
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Homily for a Vigil for Peace – Our Lady of Dolours Chatswood – 16 December 2025
Last Sunday evening, our parish along with members of other Christian Churches in the city of Willoughby gathered on the concourse at Chatswood for a beautiful evening of Christmas Carols. The night resounded with the sense of gentleness and peace, both of which lie at the very heart of the Christian Christmas story. Our evening finished with the sense of harmony and hope. At exactly the same time, on the other side of the city, at Bondi, others, too, were gathering with festivity to mark the Festival of Lights, Hanukah, itself a narrative of memory and hope. Their evening finished with unimaginable pain and distress. How do we reconcile these two…
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Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of BVM – 8 December 2025
Over the last weekend, we became acutely aware of the summer heat and the devastation of fire. We sense that a difficult summer lies ahead. The merciless heat and the threat of fire leave us living beneath a kind of pall—an atmosphere of uncertainty and fragility. How deeply we long for cooler, safer days. It seems to me that this experience of living under a looming difficulty mirrors, in a small way, what we celebrate in this remarkable feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. For this moment, all creation, weighed down by heaviness and fragility, has longed. Tired of the inhibitions and distortions of the flawed condition into which…
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Second Sunday of Advent – 7 December 2025
Christmas is often a time when we re-unite not only with family, but also with friends with whom we have not been able to enjoy a great deal of contact over the year. Even though we may be wondering how we might get through all that needs to be done in the next couple of weeks, I am sure most of us are looking forward to the time of Christmas at which we renew our bonds with one another in such a special way. Christmas is an expectant time, and as the time towards Christmas becomes shorter we have an increasing expectancy about it – I suppose for all kinds of…
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First Sunday of Advent – 30 November 2025
We begin our Advent journey toward the Festival of Christmas by lighting, week by week, the candles of our Advent Wreath. Each flame represents one of the great blessings that Christmas reveals to the world: hope, faith, joy, peace, and love. These are the true gifts of Christ’s birth—gifts not simply to admire from afar, but blessings meant to be birthed in us, especially in this Jubilee Year, when the Church has invited us throughout to rediscover the mercy, renewal, and freedom that God longs to give. The candles will light over the next four weeks burn in a world shadowed by anxiety, conflict, and uncertainty. Across nations and neighbourhoods, and…
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Commemoration of All Souls – 2 November 2025
One of the most precious things we have when someone we know and love dies is a photograph of them. Photographs bring back memories of time spent together, of stages in a person’s life, of the events that characterised their life. But a photograph not only keeps alive the memory of the person it depicts. Most importantly, a photograph evokes a whole relationship. The photograph becomes a powerful symbol of the bonds we had with this person and becomes the means by which we continue to savour the history of our relationship with them, its seasons, it joys, its regrets – and most importantly, its continued hopes. Yes, even in…
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30th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 26 October 2025
Sebastian Moore, the English Benedictine writer, once wrote that we need conversion not so much from sin, as from innocence.[1] It was a curious declaration: we need conversion not so much from sin, as from innocence. What may he have meant by this enigmatic pronouncement? Perhaps, he was alluding to the aspect of us that wants to have everything and everyone perfect, the part of us that that expects everything about us and around us to be ideal. We demand that our relationships, our marriages and our families be ideal even as we struggle in the recognition that they are far from so. We demand that our jobs and professions…
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29th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 19 October 2025
There can be many times in our lives when we know the temptation to lose heart. Sometimes life’s events simply take away our strength to keep hoping. And we are inclined to despair. It is difficult for us not to lose heart. Yet this Sunday we are told a story by Jesus about never losing heart. It seems that we are to be like the importune woman, while God is presented like the judge who eventually gives in to our persistence. But perhaps there is another way of looking at the story Jesus tells us. I recall a writer, Megan McKenna putting it this way: she was in Mexico sitting…
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28th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 12 October 2025
In his book, “Beyond Belief,” Hugh McKay, the Australian social researcher outlined the deep vein of ambivalence about religion that runs through Australian society: on the one hand many Australians do not actively worship, yet they still like to see local churches operating, and we still turn to churches to baptise our children and to educate them.[1] Around two thirds of Australians say we believe in God or some ‘higher power’, but fewer than one in ten of us attend church weekly. So those of us gathered here for Mass are an extraordinary minority no matter how mainstream we might consider ourselves to be. And all of his means 90% of the population…
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27th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 5 October 2025
We have explored before something of the nature of parables in the Gospel and the techniques the parables use to communicate their meaning. One of these techniques is hyperbole: something is overstated to make a point. It was an excellent technique in an oral culture, used to the art of storytelling. The hyperbole itself is not to be taken literally. It is the point of the hyperbole that demands our attention. The use of juxtaposition is another technique: two statements are put aside each other, one informing and opening the meaning of the other. However, the use of juxtaposition in the texts of Scripture indicates to us the importance of…
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26th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 28 September 2025
Here we are at the weekend of football Grand Finals! Whether we are AFL supporters or Rugby League followers, the country is abuzz with the excitement of challenge over this weekend and next But this weekend spare a thought for another football league which I came to know when I lived in Melbourne many years ago. In that Aussie Rules league in Melbourne there were six teams each from a different welfare agency. One year, in the A Grade competition, the Melbourne Street Demons beat the Salvation Army by 42 points. They had started the season sleeping in squats, on park benches and in doorways. Their coach remembers gathering the…