‘COMFORT my people, comfort them.’ says your God The prophecies of the Books of Isaiah are integral to our prayer and worship in Advent. It’s almost impossible to hear the opening of Isaiah 40 without also hearing the plaintive tones of Handel’s Messiah. This is a God who is invested in our lives. This is …
Category Archives: Monastic
Advent Alphabet (B)
BLESSED BLESSED is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled. Over the course of Advent we’ll trace the story of our salvation with all its twists and turns. It’s a story of promise and blessing, of anguish and exile. Through eyes of the prophets and biblical characters we …
Advent Alphabet (A)
As Advent begins the message is loud and clear: stay awake. Advent calls us to be awake and attentive to the many ways in which the Word made Flesh is already present in our lives. It calls us too to hope that all that weighs heavy in our personal lives, and the world, will be …
Mary Magdalene
John 20:1-2,11-18 As few years ago I read and article about Pope Francis where the writer talked about the importance of understanding his style of leadership, way of speaking and particular vocabulary. What stands out for me when I think of Pope Francis is his stress on the culture of encounter. Pope Francis wants us …
Feast of St Benedict
Proverbs 2:1-9Matthew 19:27-29 My son, if you take my words to heart, if you set store by my commandments,tuning your ear to wisdom, and applying your heart to truth:yes, if your plea is for clear perception, if you cry out for discernment,if you look for it as if it were silver, and search for it as for buried treasure,you …
Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Mark 5:21-43 This Sunday the lectionary offers us two stories which have been woven together: the woman with the haemorrhage and Jairus’ daughter. Both are stories of risk. Both are stories of faith. Both tell us something about how Jesus comes to save us. Last week we saw Jesus ‘save’ his disciples from a storm …
Birthday of John the Baptist
Luke 1:57-66,80 What will this child turn out to be? I have always loved this line from Luke’s account of the Birth of John the Baptist. The reader knows just who he will turn out to be. And yet, I am always caught up in a feeling of expectancy and possibilities. An earlier line in …
The Visitation
Luke 1:39-56 ‘Mary set out and went as quickly as she could to a town in the hill country’. When Mary sets out to visit Elizabeth there’s a sense of urgency and excitement. By all accounts Mary’s journey to Elizabeth won’t have been easy. Whatever we imagine the terrain to be like, the journey was …
Corpus Christi (B)
Exodus 24:3-8 Hebrews 9:11-15Mark 14:12-16, 22-26 Today the Church lays before us a series of texts which tell us about an important part of our faith story. Each text tells us something about the love relationship of the covenant which bound our ancestors and the new covenant which binds us now. Each text mentions blood. This …
Trinity Sunday (B)
Deuteronomy 4:32-34,39-40Romans 8:14-17Matthew 28:16-20 The mystics believed that we are all born with a capacity for God (Capax Dei).St Augustine believed that this capacity makes it possible for the human person to be re-formed through God’s gracious gift. It has become common place for society to be described as ‘post Christian’ or as ‘secular’. While it …