Sunday
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3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 26 January 2025
Every day the images of people who suffer are put before us – whether it be in Gaza, or Ukraine, or even in our own country. In some ways we become inoculated against what we see. We turn over the channel, and go back to what we were doing. We look for something more entertaining, not perhaps alluding to the fact that news broadcasts on television and social media are edited in such a way to keep us entertained in the first place. The problems are too big for us to think about, the places of which they speak too far away, too foreign. And even though we shake our heads by the…
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Christmas 2024
It is often remarked that it is children who make Christmas. Often, they are at the centre of our thoughts and practices when we come to celebrate Christmas – whether it be our own children, or grandchildren, nieces or nephews. Christmas is an enchanting time for children – they are full of expectation and excitement. Their sense of wonder at the decorations, the music, the family customs, Santa Claus, and our gift-giving are all infectious. We lead them to the crib, and we bend down to their level and see the scene through their eyes. The characters of Mary and Joseph, the baby Jesus, the shepherds, the wise men and…
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Fourth Sunday of Advent – 22 December 2024
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 – the theme of the Year of Jubilee which Pope Francis will open on 24 December, Christmas Eve. It has often struck me that in Australia we have our own particular experience of hope. From penal settlement and convict experience, through to the mythology of the pioneer farmer, and to the shores of Gallipoli, the experience of so many migrants beginning life anew here, and extending even to our fascination with sport, Australians, historically, have defined themselves as those who often find themselves…
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First Sunday of Advent – 1 December 2024
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 at this time, but we certainly live in a time of great change. As Pope Francis himself remarked recently, 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. Because of the uncertainty of change and the insecurity that pervasive change engenders in most of us, it is easy to resist change and to defend ourselves from its demands in different ways. We can develop a…
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26th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 30 September 2024
We have come to the time of football finals. For the teams and the supporters they have one thing in mind, and everything else falls in accordingly. Single mindedness is a quality we often associate with sport. It’s the very attribute that brings excellence of performance and success. Some call sport the religion of Australians but of course sport is a very different experience than faith. In sport we get what we put into it. Our skill grows in proportion to the amount of dedicated training we apply. In sport we master a range of techniques and then through the continual exercise of those skills we perfect them and have…
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23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 8 September 2024
When Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee he breaks from the standard expectations of his family and society. Jesus steps out with daring. As St John Paul II wrote, “Jesus presents himself as filled with the Spirit, ‘consecrated with an anointing,’ sent to preach good news to the poor.”[1] The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (Lk. 4:18-19; cf. Is. 61:1-2). There is a term in…
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20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 18 August 2024
In the late 20th century, there was a famous Catholic writer in the United States named Flannery O’Connor. In one of her short novels, The Violent Bear It Away, an eccentric old man catechises a young boy, his great nephew, about the Eucharist: “You were born into bondage and baptised into freedom, into the death of the Lord, into the death of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Then the child would feel a sulliness creeping over him, a slow warm rising resentment that his freedom had to be connected with Jesus, and that Jesus had to be the Lord. “Jesus is the bread of life,” the old man said. The boy…
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18th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 4 August 2024
Recently, a friend told me that on average he receives on his mobile phone 120 social media messages a day. Facebook, Instagram, X, Whatsapp – all wonderful means by which we keep connected with one another. 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 social media messages astounds me. However, we seem to live increasingly in a cultural climate where many feel an extraordinary need to let the world…
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16th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 21 July 2024
We all probably feel from time to time the need to get away from it all. Most often this is a result of life getting out of hand for us, and it all becoming a little too much. We long for a freedom from all the pressures that seem to impinge upon our time and energy. Space and freedom is a luxury few of us have, but we long for it often enough. Though most often this longing comes about as simply the felt need to be free of the stress we might be experiencing, the spiritual tradition has long recognized the need for us to withdraw from time to…
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15th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 14 July 2024
It is often lamented today that the rites of initiation into adulthood have been lost. We no longer have those rituals which mark the passage from childhood or adolescence into maturity. However, it has been suggested, not without merit, that perhaps one of the principal rites of passage today is overseas travel. We often hear of young people taking time away. With few resources they head off to distant places where for six months, twelve months or more, they move from country to country, culture to culture, working and touring. Often enough they return home then with a new sense of identity and ready for a commitment to work, or…