It is not an uncommon story to hear people who have visited countries where poverty is visibly overwhelming, coming home and saying how happy the people whom they encountered. It confuses us. How can people who have so little, have so much? How can we who have so much, through our systems of education, health and law, have such little happiness? Our thinking identifies happiness with what we have, with what we have achieved; and yet, often enough, it seems that those who have very little are the happiest people in the world.  How can it be that happiness seems to be in proportion to what one doesn’t have?   …

Last Thursday, our nation paused to observe a National Day of Mourning for the victims of the Bondi Terror Attack on 14 December last year. It was a day to remember lives cut short, families changed forever, and a community wounded by violence. It was a call to us to remember the victims of violence, to honour their lives, and to commit ourselves to a society where safety and respect for life are paramount. In the same week, we witnessed important legislative reforms addressing gun laws and hate speech — reminders that our society continues to struggle with the tension between freedom and responsibility, speech and safety, fear and hope.  This,…

January has its own distinct feel. The roads are quieter. Emails come a little slower. There’s space to breathe. For some, it’s been a time of rest; for others, a pause before the next surge of activity.  But now, the rhythm is beginning to change. Workplaces are stirring back to life. We are beginning to think about school again. The year, in all its demands and possibilities, is starting to press in on us again. And yet we are grateful that we still have another week or so before the holiday feel becomes a distant memory. Into this quieter moment, the Church puts before us a revelation in today’s gospel: “Behold, the…

In these days between Christmas and the New Year, in the great Octave of Christmas we focus our attention on a family. Not an idealised or sentimental family, but a real one: fragile, vulnerable, displaced, and living under threat. The Holy Family does not step onto the stage of history surrounded by safety or certainty. Almost immediately, they are on the move. The Gospel we hear today reminds us that this child is born into danger; that his parents are anxious, searching, sometimes confused; that their life together unfolds amid political violence, fear for a child’s life, and the necessity of flight. Jesus grows up not in a protected bubble,…

One of the most poignant memories I have of my mother’s funeral was the gesture that my father spontaneously enacted on the occasion. During the Lord’s Prayer he simply stood out from the pew and went and stood with his hands on my mother’s coffin and prayed the Our Father for the last time together with her.  It was a beautiful gesture reflecting their very long partnership of over 61 years.  My parents enjoyed a long partnership. But at the same time their partnership had not been without its difficulties.  In fact, for many years I think it was, for different reasons, no small struggle.  Indeed, some of my own earliest memories were…