“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I have been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” - … Continue reading Learning Life’s Lessons Through Simplicity.
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. (1 Corinthans 12:12,26) There has been much outpouring of horror, grief and … Continue reading The Body of Christ – #Sackclothandashes
In Saint Pope John Paul II's Letter to Artists he writes: “Beauty, like truth, brings joy to the human heart in a world so full of tears. The Polish poet Cyprian Norwid wrote that “beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work is to raise us up” (n.3). The beauty that results from the … Continue reading God’s Gift of Simple Beauty – A Mother’s Reflection
When Mary MacKillop was canonized in 2010 I was working at a Catholic bookshop in Melbourne. In the months leading up to the canonization the shop was inundated with every kind of Mary MacKillop piety that you can imagine. There were candles, key rings, bookmarks and medals but for some reason, in my mind, the … Continue reading This World is Not My Home – The Feast of St Mary of the Cross
St Dominic was a mendicant. Going place to place, preaching and begging for food and lodging. Perhaps it is apt then, that here in Australia, his feast day has moved around a little! Since St Mary of the Cross has taken the 8th of December, we celebrate his feast day today. Thank you to Fr … Continue reading Preaching the Poor and Vulnerable Christ
In the modern Western Church calendar the 26th July is kept as the Feast of Saints Joachim and Anne, the grandparents of Jesus Christ and the holy parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary. For many centuries all over the Catholic and Byzantine world, St Anne has been one of the most intimate and popular saints. Wherever … Continue reading Grandmother of Christ – The Tradition of St Anne throughout the ages.
“There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow.” J.R.R. Tolkien Most of us are familiar with J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic literary masterpiece, the Lord of the Rings, having either read the books … Continue reading The Seed of Courage – Tolkien’s Hope in Abiding Apocalypse
hubris: hjuːbrɪs: excessive pride or self confidence • (in Greek tragedy) excessive pride towards or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis. nemesis: ˈnɛmɪsɪs/ the inescapable agent of someone's or something's downfall. We live in a time of hubris. As a society, we have become enamoured with the goal of self actualisation. Apparently, this is … Continue reading Do You Know Who You Are?
What do you get when you put a fiery redheaded Texan woman, her husband, their unlikely conversion to Catholicism, and their six children together? You get One Beautiful Dream, which tells the shambolic and endearing journey of Jennifer Fulwiler in writing her conversion story Something Other Than God. Yet her latest release is more than … Continue reading Cultivating The Passion In Your Heart is Not An Impossible Dream – Book Review
The handing on of our faith to children has always been important, but we live in an age where relativism has confused the issue. How we feel about something seems to have more prevalence than the truth. In his recently published book, Educating in Christ , Dr Gerard O'Shea, from the University of Notre Dame in Sydney, … Continue reading Body, Heart and Mind – The Keys to Moral Formation
