One of the most memorable Masses I have attended was in a little parish church in the Chianti district of Tuscany. In many ways it was a rather ordinary liturgy but what made it extraordinary for me was the presence on the sanctuary throughout the Mass of a Downs Syndrome man and an intellectually disabled man.  They were there in the form of altar servers although most of the work was done by the intellectually disabled man.  Nonetheless the Downs Syndrome man was with the priest throughout the liturgy:  sitting beside him high on the presidential step and even standing beside him throughout the Eucharistic Prayer.  That was the amusing part because at this…

In so many ways the Gospel reverses the ordinary way that we think about things.  It certainly reversed the ordinary expectations that first century Palestinians had about God and the signs of God’s favour.  In the society of the time wealth was a sign of God’s favour, a sign of God’s blessing.  The underlying logic ran that the wealthier you were the more God was smiling on you. Therefore, those who were poor were looked upon as those who had missed out on the blessing of God, and at worst, who were cursed. Jesus, however, confronts this logic.  And he confronts this logic by putting forward poverty as a virtue.  The first hearers of the…

In a beautiful comment on the gospel for this Sunday Pope Francis observed some year ago:   “God did not want to come into the world other than through a family. God did not want to draw near to humanity other than through a home. God did not want any other name for Himself than Emmanuel. He is ‘God with us’. . . He is the God who from the very beginning of creation said: ‘It is not good for man to be alone’. We can add: it is not good for woman to be alone, it is not good for children, the elderly or the young to be alone. It…

A very happy Father’s Day to all our fathers, grandfathers, and mentors! We pray that this day be one of blessing for each of you, and that you grow in your amazement of your God-given vocation to truly encourage the life of another.  The populist American writer, Robert Fulgham once told of a story of Frank Marshall, an international chess player. During a competition many years ago, Fulgham relates the incident in which 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…

Often enough our literary artists, our writers, offer invaluable social observations.  They have the gift of intuiting the deeper currents and the mood in the nation long before many others.  The Australian novelist, Tim Winton is a fine example of this. Some time ago, Tim Winton observed that his great passion for the Australian landscape, which is shared by many of us, may have, however, an underlying anxiety attached to it. He remarks how the Australian landscape was such a shock to the first Europeans who arrived here: “How they loathed it for failing to be Europe.  How infuriated they were at its ‘perversity’, its odd weather and backward running rivers and kooky…

During the week a friend told me that on average he receives on his mobile phone 120 twitter messages a day. Twitter, as we know, is just one of the many web-based means by which we can let any number of people know the latest news that is occurring in our life.  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 twitter messages astounds me.  However, we seem to live increasingly in…

I’m sure all of us have at some time enjoyed the English television comedy, “The Vicar of Dibley.”  You will recall at the end of each episode, the vicar tells Alice, the church warden, a joke.  The joke is often quite funny but Alice never quite gets it.  She applies a literal logic to the joke, and she tries to reason the joke out, all of course to the frustration of the vicar.  I often think that before many of the stories of the gospel and before the parables of Jesus we are a bit like Alice in the “Vicar of Dibley.”  We apply to what we have heard a logic that is quite foreign…