Sunday
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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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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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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…
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Third Sunday of Advent – 2021
Whenever I hear today’s gospel the first image that comes into my mind is a particular cartoon of Leunig. It is of one of his typical figures seated at a chess board which is against a window opening out to the night sky. The figure’s chess partner is indeed the night sky, the unknown, the mystery, God himself. “What then must we do?” – the question repeated three times in today’s gospel – seems to be such an apt title to the cartoon. “What then must we do?” It is the question with which we are confronted so often in our life which feels many times like a chess game…
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Second Sunday of Advent – 2021
Christmas is associated with family for us, and often enough with family reunion. Maybe family members who have been away for awhile are coming back home. Christmas is often a time, too, when we re-unite with friends with whom we have not been able to enjoy a great deal of contact over the year. Christmas is an expectant time, and as the time towards Christmas becomes shorter we are full of expectancy about it – even if this expectancy from time to time becomes a kind of dread! This kind of expectancy is, in different ways, at the heart of the Christmas mystery, and today’s gospel takes us to this…
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First Sunday of Advent – 2021
There used to be a Chinese curse which went, “May you live in interesting times!” It is hard to know whether we live under this curse, but we certainly live in a time of great change. As Pope Francis himself remarked, it is not even that we live in an era of change, but that we live in a change of era. And it is this that make the times even more interesting. The hardest challenge for us in a situation of change, is to listen deeply, to be alert for both the dangers and the possibilities. In fact, the full Chinese proverb goes, “May you live in interesting times…
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Christ the King – 2021
Historically, the feast of Christ the King, which we celebrate on this the last Sunday of our liturgical year, is a recently initiated celebration, stemming from the late 19th century when the Church had been displaced from the centre of power but was desperately seeking to regain its influence. The celebration of the feast acted as a defiant reminder to the emerging independent social and political systems where the ‘real power’ lay, so to speak. Today the feast can speak of a sovereignty and a rule in imagery that can sound quaint to our own ears. Despite the difficulties of the history of the feast day, Jesus himself does not…
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33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2021. Filipino-Australian Catholic Community of the Central Coast Commemorative Mass for San Pedro Calungsod and San Lorenzo Ruiz
The year now, of course, has the sense of beginning to wind up. The delayed HSC exams are unfolding, the committees we might be on are having their final meetings for the year, the diaries are filling up with all the end of year social activities we try and fit in before Christmas. So, too, the Church’s liturgical year is coming to its end. Next week it comes to its finality in the celebration of Christ the King, and then we begin a new year in the life of our Church with the season of Advent. As we do come to the end of our liturgical year we are invited…