Today, let’s pray for students who are returning to school for the new year, especially those who might be worried by a lack of academic ability.
Blog
Australia Day
I’m a New Zealander living in New Zealand writing an Australia Day reflection. Our two nations are united by generations of friendship through good times and bad.
Word of God Sunday
Pope Francis has named this Sunday, the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, as Word of God Sunday.
beauty
In gratitude to Roger Scruton for his work, and as a prayer for his eternal experience of the fulness of beauty, I share one of his best-known video teachings.
a cathedral teaches
There is an old adage that we build our buildings and then our buildings build us. This is most true of a Catholic church
two men
The scriptures given for today’s feast of the Holy Innocents presents us with two men, one a photocopy, the other an original
how sense-able
“The greatest joy in life is to feel Jesus Christ alive and beating in the flesh of your own thought and your own heart. All the rest is a swift illusion or dung.”
grace
A Grace before Dinner that you may find useful this Christmas
new appointment
Even when we don’t feel we are close to God the fact is that God remains present and active, even when life takes a new and unexpected turn as it is for me
NLO @ work
Something a bit different today. Earlier in the year I was appointed to work with the National Liturgy Office of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Latest Posts
decluttering
Fasting has become fashionable.
While many religions promote fasting as a hard but necessary practice, fasting has never really taken off as an attractive and life-giving movement. Until now maybe?
choose life
Yesterday morning I was at Nazareth House, a Christchurch retirement community, for Ash Wednesday Mass. This Wednesday Mass is a weekly appointment for me and I look forward to it and the conversations with the residents before and after Mass.
the inner life
While the visible and external world of healthy religion is inspiring, a maturing faith requires an openness to the inner life. The external practices and precepts of religion are signs that point us towards a deeper reality, a world where integrity is found, becoming ourselves in relationship with the divine.
a new spring
Today, the day before Ash Wednesday, is commonly known as ‘shrove‘ or ‘pancake’ Tuesday.
This day is more widely known in many parts of the world as Mardi Gras (ie fat Tuesday), or ‘Carnival‘ (literally ‘goodbye meat’). These celebrations began years ago when the fasting really was tough: 40 days without meat or dairy products hence the bingeing on pancakes to empty the larder.
I recall at this time last year a friend who lives above the equator Facebooked: “Spring is in the air and it is GOOD!” That may be true for the northern hemisphere, but here in the south the leaves are beginning to turn and fall: it’s almost Autumn for us.
Lent as ‘spring’? That doesn’t sound right.
thriving ?
It’s hard to know what to say when greeting grieving family at a funeral. In that awkward and unrehearsed moment we want to get it right and offer some real comfort. Several years after his own mother’s funeral a grieving son was still laughing when recalling one church leader who took both his hands as he stood at the hearse and commented “if it’s not one thing it’s another”.
That’s been on my mind a lot these days with news of day after day suffering in every part of the world. After the Auckland floods earlier this months there was the Turkey Syria earthquake with a death toll nearing 50,000 and now the cyclone devastation in the north of Aotearoa .