Celebrating a wedding. It’s always a happy occasion, and one full of expectation! Indeed, every wedding brings before us something for which we all long: the simplicity of falling in love, the promise of exchanging a commitment to each other, the hope of beginning a life together. the midst of all the other troubles and uncertainties we experience in the celebration something with all the promise of being good, true and beautiful. And it fascinates us. Somehow it brings us home to ourselves. For many, their wedding is not the first time that they have exchanged a commitment to another person.  But at wedding there is every hope that this time the commitment will work.…

Imagine for a little while a moment in your life which was full of possibility.  Maybe it was when we first started school, or started work, or left home.  Perhaps it was a moment of commitment such as when we got married, or at the birth of our children.  A moment rich in possibility, full of promise!  Can we remember how there was no certainty about the future at that time, but somehow there was a sense that this what life was about?  All of life up to this point somehow seemed to come together and open out into the future.  And the something new was full of promise. Our celebration of the outpouring of the…

We are often used to saying, “distance makes the heart grow fonder.”  Sometimes, though, we are not so sure.  We know how long-distance friendships or relationships suffer for lack of contact, it seems that the saying is true only when actually come into contact with each other from time to time, or when we are constantly reminded of the one we love.  Then, the separation we experience with someone we love does act to deepen our love.  This is why the photos of those we love but who have died become so important to us.  Our constant reminder of them through these symbols means that our love does not extinguish but that, in fact, our…

Last Sunday, the fourth week of Easter, the Church’s liturgy explored the life of the Risen Christ through the imagery of shepherding.  Through this image of shepherding the Gospel of John develops the inter-relationship between the life of Jesus and our own lives.  The image speaks of the particular bond by which we have both our identity and our direction.  It is through this bond, and through this bonding, that we experience the life of the Risen Christ.  The bonds that unite us therefore are not incidental to our Easter experience; they are one of the primary means by which we touch the life of the Risen Christ How does…

Over these Sundays of Easter, we are introduced to the great post- Resurrection accounts, the stories of the way in which the life of Jesus becomes manifest to the first disciples.  These stories, of course, cannot be read in the same way that we might read a modern newspaper account of something that happened yesterday.  The gospels are not written from a modern sensibility.  Rather, the stories are complex theological reflections, in story form, on what the Risen life of Jesus means, and how we experience the reality that Jesus lives.  Each of the stories, including the one we have heard today, is an invitation extended to us, to wonder anew, and more deeply,…

Last weekend we celebrated how the life of Jesus has burst forth, no longer constrained by the fetters of death.  And we suggested that at the heart of this experience lay a question. On the first day of the week the women come to the tomb looking for something.  And there in the empty tomb, where they do not find what they are looking for, a proclamation re-orients and transforms, not only their own search, but indeed the human search itself.  The question with which they are greeted is simply, “Why look among the dead for someone who is alive? Just as discipleship of Jesus begins with hearing a question, “What are you…

One of my favourite lines out of the Church Fathers writing nearly 2000 years ago is from the 3rd century Clement of Alexandria.  He wrote simply:  “Christ our Lord turns all our sunsets into dawns.” It is Christ our Lord who turns all our sunsets into dawns.  This day we proclaim that dead ends have given rise to new possibilities.  Where diminishment and decay might be expected, there a new invitation is always available.  A new possibility has dawned into the world.  The future is given to us as a pure gift.  And by how more powerful a way does the Christian Tradition express this than situating the Resurrection on the first day of the week at…

Through this season of Lent, we have been exploring the theme of Hope, the focus of our current Year of Jubilee. We have reflected on how hope arises from our needs, on how hope opens us to the future, how it is guaranteed by our faith in Christ Jesus and in his Resurrection, and how it is our Christian answer to the encounter of evil because it is a pronouncement that the evil is never the final word, that something bigger is at work. And now we come to the final reflection in our series: how each of us is called to become an agent of hope. Do I offer…