The Israelites in their forty years in the desert were journeying from captivity to freedom, but the struggle of their desert years made them vulnerable to attack from every temptation as today’s first reading continues

Over the last month I have had the opportunity to work with many people across Aotearoa and further afield. In every retreat and seminar I have been with committed and faith-filled people who often feel as though they are on the periphery of the Church

The pics I use on these daily posts are sometimes snapped by me, and often borrowed from free-use websites. I thought it might be interesting to move towards using only my own snaps, and then only those taken in the past 24 hours. We’ll see how I go.
I took the pic above yesterday morning on an early walk.

Perhaps we find the miracles of Jesus too difficult to understand. How can we cope with what we may not have seen with our own eyes?
Many people cope with the miraculous by reducing it to what they can understand. They say Jesus just increased the blind man’s psychological vision, or opened his eyes of faith rather than actually giving him physical sight.

Over the years I have celebrated hundreds of funerals, many well prepared with family and friends gathering to celebrate the life of the one they love. There are efficient funeral directors, beautiful flowers, glossy brochures, photographs and video presentations, eulogies and even artificial grass and sterilised sand at the graveside.

Christian faith makes sense.
And therefore living in relationship with Jesus Christ is the most sensible life of all.
This is why a spiritually mature person will be both aware of and sensitive to their environment, in touch with what they see, taste, hear, smell and touch.

I spent spent most of yesterday on the road to the small South Canterbury town of Albury where the community had gathered to mark the closure of their 120 year old church.  While i have never served as Parish Priest of the Mackenzie region I was driver for my 93-year-old uncle Jack who was priest for the Fairlie and Albury (and later Twizel) communities both in the 1970’s and the 1990’s.

I was interested to see what I have posted for this Sunday in recent years. On this third Sunday of Lent in 2011 Elizabeth Taylor had just died and I noted a link between today’s Gospel encounter with Jesus at a well and Elizabeth Taylor. While both women had been married many times that’s not the link I’m thinking of.