On the evening of the Easter Vigil, the greatest moment in our Christian year, we light the Easter Candle and proclaim the Risen Christ. Its soft glow celebrates the victory of Christ’s life over death, the conquest of love over fear. This year we do so in a climate of national and international anxiety. It is a time of shadows – the shadow of irrational panic-buying, hoarding and public brawls; the shadow of unemployment and financial insecurity; the shadow of profiteering; the shadow of disconnection from our community of faith and its sacramental life; the shadow of concern about our health and the health of our families. We have come to live…

“Take up your cross and follow me.”  These words are at the very heart of the Gospel. They are there so that these same words might be at the very heart of our discipleship.  Perhaps we have become so used to these words.  Yet, they are some of the most confronting words we will ever hear:  “Take up your cross and follow me.”   For the significance of the words to remain fresh we have to keep putting ourselves back into the time of Jesus and wonder at how the first disciples would have heard these words. The cross was a familiar sight in first century Palestine.  Crucifixion was the preferred method of the Romans of…

Throughout the 20th century worked a famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead.  It is hard to imagine another anthropologist who has taught us as much about the nature of human community. Mead was once asked what sign we had about when civilisation began.  The expectation was that her reply would concern the discovery of some ancient artefact such as a tool, or a weapon, or a segment of art.  Instead, she simply replied, “a healed femur.” A healed femur bone is the sign we have of the beginnings of civilisation.   Why did this famous anthropologist claim this?  She claimed this because for the first time we had an indication that a community had cared for someone.  Previously, there would…

In the mid 1990s, Arthur W. Frank published a landmark and fascinating study on people’s response to illness, entitled, The Wounded Storyteller. As a professor of sociology at the University of Calgary, Frank considered the various ways we respond to our illness, particularly the illnesses that are chronic in their character. He identified a number of responses that we make to our experience of such illness ranging from denial through to resignation – none of which were especially helpful in learning how to live in the fullest way in the face of our illness.  What he suggested as the most redemptive or transformative pathway was what he termed as being the wounded storyteller:…

Last Friday evening in Rome, Pope Francis presided over what was named, An Extraordinary Moment of Prayer in which he blessed the city and the world, a gesture ordinarily reserved for Easter Sunday and Christmas and the election of a new pope. In so doing, he reflected on the situation that has now gripped the world. “The storm [in which we find ourselves] exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities. It shows us how we have allowed to become dull and feeble the very things that nourish, sustain and strengthen our lives and…

There was an ancient tribe of people and the old leader of the tribe was dying. Summoning three of the younger members of the community, the leader spoke of the future. “When I die, one of you must succeed me as the leader of our people.  I want each of you to go out into the world and bring back something of beauty.  The one whose gift is most outstanding will succeed me.” The young people departed, walking through the city and countryside where their people lived and worked.  Some days later they returned from their travels.  The first brought a flower from the parklands, rare and beautiful and delicate with a preciousness that…

I shall always remember my visit once to a young 21 year old woman dying of AIDS.  Jeanine’s life had been a broken one of childhood abuse, drug use and prostitution. Yet, in the midst of all this she could say just before she died: “I sit here dreaming that I would like to work with other people who have AIDS who are not as well as I am, and write more poetry. I try and treat each day as a precious gift. I want to write about my life because it is a good story . . .  I also dream of my three beautiful nieces who I love more than…

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 disciples are summoned to listen. And then,…

A Professor walks into a classroom and he puts a large empty jar on the desk in front of the class. Then he fills the jar with golf balls and asks the class if the jar is full. To which they reply, yes. Then, however, he gets a container of small pebbles and pours them into the jar . . . naturally they fill the space around the golf balls. Again, he asks the class if the jar is full. To which they reply, yes. Then he brings forward a bucket of sand, and he pours sand into the jar and the jar has no difficulty in accepting this new…

One of the most curious aspects of the ministry of Jesus is both the place in which it begins and the message by which it begins.  It begins in Galilee, the territory of great oppression by the Romans.  As the writer, Miroslav Volf identifies, when Jesus begins his ministry, the Palestinian population “was suffering under the loss of national sovereignty to the Romans, as well as under a tense relationship between the Jewish aristocracy and the Herodian monarchy.  Economically, the majority were caught between the Roman and the domestic elites, both of which were competing with the other to expand their fortune, especially through taxation.  Dominated, taken advantage of, and threatened in their cultural…