As I walked through the heart of European cities Cologne, Brussels and Amsterdam, I saw so many gothic church buildings standing in the midst of high energy bustling crowds below.

My Dad used to eat papaya and one day he decided to throw the seeds onto our lot near our house. Then he was surprised when one day the seed that he had thrown grew and soon enough it was producing fruit and my mum had no need to buy papaya anymore. You can just imagine how fruitful that soil was.

Earlier this month the Church celebrated Corpus Christi, the Feast Day of the Body & Blood of Jesus.

In many Catholic houses, you will see a picture of the “Last Supper” and with it hopefully the names of the twelve apostles of Jesus.

There is a song titled, “The trouble with hello is goodbye.” We all know that saying goodbye is never easy because of all the physical and emotional attachments that we have, especially if we have a close friend.

Many years ago I visited the parish of Santa Teresa, about an hour’s drive from Alice Springs. Travelling with me was a young man, Alexi, from Vanuatu who at that time had begun training to become a Divine Word Missionary. Alexi had a fantastic head of hair, a wonderful, very distinctive Afro.

Today is the First Sunday of Lent, and  today’s Gospel is taken from the opening of  Matthew, chapter 4.  We hear the well known, dramatic story of Jesus’ temptations in the desert which takes place before he begins his public ministry.

During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln was asked, “How can we get rid of our enemies?” He then asked his generals about their war strategies so that they could win battles. Then Abraham Lincoln said, “We can get rid of our enemies by making them our friends”.

Jesus, through the Gospel this 6^th Sunday of ordinary time, reminds us to live out our Christian life in the light of the moral values inspired and grounded on love, because God is love.

Imagine this scene in a movie we may have seen in the not so distant past. A condemned criminal sitting on an electric chair in the last minutes of his life, an executioner just waiting for the signal to pull the lever to activate the electric chair, a police officer looking at the clock waiting nervously until the clock strikes 3pm, the time of the execution, another police officer waiting for the phone to ring.