There’s an amazing immediacy about a baby. I was watching my 1 year-old nephew yesterday and every passing feeling gets expressed. Danny likes something he reaches for it, he smiles, his eyes light up. Danny feels bad he pouts, he screams, he sobs. No censorship. Full spontaneity. I’m guessing its an artifact of vulnerability. A …
Yearly Archives: 2005
Monday Week 8 Year I
Maybe I just haven’t reached that age yet but I find it hard to get worked up over death. Let me be clear: I don’t want to die and dying scares me silly but as to what happens next … well I’m happy right now to leave that to the goodness of God. But it’s …
Pentecost 2005
We ask for peace and forgiveness and we get wind and fire. I lived in California for nine years, in the Bay Area. There’s a wind that blows there in October. It’s a wind that puts the fear of God in you. For a few days the weather heats up, the air wheezes, and this …
Friday Week 7 of Easter
There’s a strange sense of time here: time approaching and time receding. Paul is trekking inevitably to Rome where he will die, and Jesus, beyond death, is promising Peter life … and death—a life spent nourishing and a letting go at its end. We chose this last part of John, as novices, for our vows. …
Wednesday Week 4 of Easter
I hate homilies that begin with an apology or a complaint … so I apologise about the following complaint! … Don’t the readings today leave you caught between two worlds? Acts is so prosaic—this happened, that happened: it could be the minutes of a meeting—and John is so … John—mystical, wordy, repetitive, obscure, strangely beautiful… …
Sunday Week 4 of Easter
The other years of the cycle of readings are a lot easier to handle than this one. They focus on the shepherd, on the one who guides us, the one who’s voice we know, the one we can be certain of. But today we have an image I find altogether more uncomfortable: ‘I tell you …
Wednesday Week 3 of Easter
The death of Stephen marks the beginning of a great persecution of the Jerusalem Christians. Saul thinks he sees his life’s work: to destroy the Jesus-movement entirely. But the way Luke tells it he only succeeds in spreading the gospel on the tongues of scattered believers. There’s an irony in the very word Luke uses …
Friday Week 2 of Easter
An image from this morning’s papal funeral has been haunting me all day: it’s the small, plain, rather ordinary wooden coffin in the middle of all the splendour and ceremony filling the square. Just a simple box. And around it cardinals and bishops, prime ministers and presidents, and weeping, cheering pilgrims from all over. Just …
Sunday Week 2 of Easter
It seems there are two ways for a preacher to play this gospel and in my time I’ve done both. Either doubt is a bad thing and Thomas’s a cautionary tale to make us believe blindly or doubt is good and Thomas is an image for us to imitate. The first approach is easy: John …
Sunday Week 4 of Lent
It’s a long story but it asks a short question: where should we look to see God? And this drama enacts two answers to that question: there’s an exclusion and an inclusion. And it all comes down to what you think the Sabbath means. Either the Sabbath serves to separate those who observe it—the good …