Life in a Parish is changing all the time. People come, stay and move on.
Archbishop John Dew of Wellington, New Zealand is a person I admire when it comes to knowing people personally.
Love is the greatest power in the world. To be possessed with love is to be filled with a power, which will not be denied.
There have been few times in my life where Jesus’ invitation to join Him on the water like Peter, have really taken me by surprise to the point of running away. These were very difficult moments when fear, doubt and confusion would take control of my life at that moment in time.
I still could remember vividly an experience I had in the interior of Ghana, West Africa, where I ministered from 1998 – 2000 amongst the Asante tribal peoples.
If you enter in any Filipino house, the first thing that the owner will ask you, and it is almost like a greeting, is, “Have you eaten?”
At Te Papa Museum in Wellington, New Zealand I saw some boys and girls holding some paper and being asked to answer some questions, but in order to do that they have to run and find the answers located in different exhibitions all over the museum.
Several years ago, I was invited to attend an international interfaith conference in Italy.
The ‘Opening Prayer’ for Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time prays ‘show favour, O Lord, to your servants and mercifully increase the gifts of your grace, that, made fervent in hope, faith and charity, we may be ever watchful in keeping your commands’.
I grew up in the tropics of the south pacific in an agrarian society. We are very familiar with working the land, sowing seeds, raising crops and harvesting its produce.
THE early morning sun struck its first shafts of warmth through the panels and bezels of the stained glass wall of St Francis Xavier's Parish church near North Sydney station
Talking about the apostles Peter and Paul, we may immediately think of the two greatest missionaries of the infant church, the two founding pillars of the Christian mission.
I recently came across this story which somehow stuck with me for quite a while.
Tong, aged 13, lives with the Missionaries of Charity in my neighbourhood, just next to our Parish and the Mother of the Perpetual Help Centre in Nong Bua Lamphu Thailand. I have known him for quite some years, he joined Bible-sharing seminars and youth outings and is that kind of a teenager that doesn’t cause any trouble – others do sometimes.
In almost all cultures, we show our hospitality by offering people food. For many of us, we see food as a way to connect
Friends, we come once again to what’s been described as ‘The Preacher’s Nightmare’ the Trinity Sunday.
One of the biggest temptations amongst modern day Christians is to think exclusively about the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Holy Triune God, as if they have some secret strategies of controlling and directing her movements within and without the boundaries of their churches.