Standing Up

A few years ago a Vatican department wrote to the Australian Bishops giving them a few tips. One of them was that the Australian sense of egalitarianism can work against the emergence of greatness. There was a bit of outrage about this, but it has to be said that the tall poppy syndrome is deeply rooted in Australian cultures, both indigenous and non-indigenous. We are expected to not excel too much lest we get too proud of full of ourselves. That in itself is a fair call, but the natural consequence is that we hang back with the crowd and underachieve.

In Jesus time the cultural constraints were similar. You followed in your father’s trade and did not make too much noise about it: you certainly never tried to be better than your father. The rage of the people of Nazareth, unacceptable to us, was justified in the cultural mores of the time. Jesus seemed not to ‘know his place’ and therefore threatened the stability of the society.

That is all true, but we know that Jesus had something more. He knew God.

Jeremiah comforts the people of Israel with a radical disclosure. God knows them, God cares for them, and God protects them. How easily the people of Israel forgot that time a time again. How easily we forget it as well. Jeremiah reminds the people of Israel that God wants them to brace for action, he wants them to stand up and take their place in society: Stand up and tell them all I command you. How can the people of Israel do that, how can we in our turn do that? Simple: God knows us, God protects us, God calls us.  Jeremiah tells us: They shall fight against you but not overcome you. True, life is not a walk in the park, it is an adventure, and as all adventures are, it has the full gamut of experiences from the sublime to the terrifying.

This is the life that Jesus grasped. This is the challenge he stood up and claimed in front of his kin in the synagogue in Nazareth. The secret is that it is our challenge as well, shared by Jesus with us, shared by Jeremiah with us in the knowledge that we do not do it alone, for we take up the challenge together, and it is divine.

Our faith urges us forward to take up our place. St Paul talks of growing up spiritually. He speaks of seeing his life and future more clearly. He speaks of the three pronged base of his growth: faith hope and love, the three gifts that come directly from God that spur us into action, that spur us forward to be more, to be greater, to rise up above the blanket of mediocrity that can stifle and suffocate good people.

There will be great challenges for you and me this year, this month and even this week. Use your faith to claim them, the rise up and make a difference to your life, our town and the world.

Homily OLQP Broome 2nd  Feb 2013, Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

He Dreamed a Dream

A few weeks ago I watched Les Miserables in Sun Pictures. There is that extraordinary scene where Fantine, the destitute and despairing mother played by Anne Hathaway, meets Jean Valjean. He sings “I Dreamed a Dream’, lamenting how she dreamed and trusted, but now the terrible end of death is in sight. Valjean enters and pledges to continue her dream that “love would never die, that God would be forgiving.”

Fantine dies peacefully, but the world is changed because of her dream.

We need to dream!

 In 2009 Susan Boyle, a middle aged, poor, rural, Catholic Scottish woman who embodied everything that was not a pop star, dreamed that that her voice could lift others. She sang Fantine’s song on Britain’s Got Talent. Her instant success lifted the spirits of millions who felt pushed down because they didn’t fit in to the perfect mould of the ‘beautiful’ people.

In our liturgy today there are two dreams. Two men, six hundred years apart, stand in a public place, unroll scrolls and dream out aloud.

Nehemiah tells the story of the Babylonian Captivity. In 586BC the Persians conquered Jerusalem and deported most of the population to modern day Iran. Eighty years later, with their spirit, culture and faith largely in tatters, they came home. Standing in front of them, Ezra dreamed of renewal, a rebirth of faith, culture and hope. He galvanised the battered nation and urged them forward. They responded.  After seventy more years of hard work this was symbolised in the dedicating of the new temple in Jerusalem in 516BC.

Centuries later, Luke began his Gospel recording how Jesus spoke to a nation in chains. Colonised by Rome and oppressed by a religious system that had lost its way, Israel was in captivity of spirit and body. When Jesus stood in the synagogue in Nazareth, his home town, he spoke to a dejected and cowering people. He was an educated man, and knew that he could lead a people by taking a risk and dreaming out aloud.

After all, the worst they could do was kill him.

Jesus dreamed and two thousand years later we are being invited to share the dream. The difference between his dream and Ezra’s is that Jesus has a dream that is timeless. For the reign of God to be alive in our midst, it needs to be lived in each and every generation. The text Jesus read started to be fulfilled in the first century AD, and is being fulfilled today, even as we speak.

Dreamers are not considered highly in our culture, and the word itself is often used as a put down, but Jesus was not talking of idle dreamers who would see no action and no commitment. Christian dreamers are filled with passion, energy and hope. They know that they can’t do everything themselves, but can be part of a greater reality. St Paul reminds us that we are all part of the one reality, even though we do different things with our different abilities. “Now you together are Christ’s body; but each of you is a different part of it.”

You and I need to dream. We dream seeking for a brighter future, a more perfect reality, a world more like the kingdom of God. We look around us and have the choice to bury our heads or to stand up and listen to the dream out loud, to accept the hope that is offered to us and put it into practice in our lives and parish today. We can’t do it alone, but working together we can achieve wonderful things. 

The dream is alive and active in Broome today, even as we speak: you are invited to live the dream in Christ.

Homily, 3^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C, OLQP Broome,  27^th January 2013.

Santo Nino in a New Land

I am told that in some parts of the Philippines, the Christmas season is not considered over until this feast has been celebrated, and over the last week many of you have spent quite a lot of time preparing for the celebration today. In a real sense, the Feast of Santo Nino began here in Broome a week ago and culminates today.

During the time of preparation I saw people who have a wide range of gifts and talents come together to organise this event.  There were those who could plan, organise, sing, play music, create, construct, clean, dance, serve, and read. All who were involved are part of the Church, who share in the one spirit, just as St paul tells us in the letter to the Corinthians. As part of the one reality, the one family of the church, we come with what we have to offer to make this community, this parish, and this town a place where God’s Spirit shines. In doing this, the faith and life that is inside us is able to emerge.

So what has Santo Nino got to do with this?

In this beautifully constructed shrine, we see the tiny statue of the Christ Child, the Holy Infant, Santo Nino. When we look at him, he doesn’t really look like an infant because of his dress and crown, but even more so because of his face. His face is not that of an infant, it is of a much more mature and wise boy. This is where we will start to discover the gift of the Christ Child.

The Christ Child comes to us with the energy, faith and trust of youth. He has not learned to be afraid or embarrassed in the way that we do as we grow. He is who he is: young, vibrant and he will set out to conquer the world! He is the one who calls us here today. He is the one for whom we have prepared this beautiful celebration, and he asks us to join him.

In many places in the Philippines, and here after Mass, women will dance holding the image of Santo Nino, celebrating and rejoicing. This is tradition of many years in that country that has now been brought to us in Broome. You are called to live your faith. In some who come to Australia I see that strong faith made weak by a materialism and easy life that is enjoyed by many in this country. Santo Nino calls you as he calls all of us to hold him high and be happy, be joyful and be proud of our faith.

To prosper in our faith we need to support one another, to be there for each other and to encourage one another in faith, not to hold each other back. Today’s gospel shows us how Mary encouraged Jesus as a young man to begin his ministry and lead people to God. He did this when people were together, happy and enjoying themselves. The other day I was told that this feast is largely a cultural one for many people, not a religious feast. The person who said that did not realise that our religion is incarnational. Jesus became one like us so that we could be raised is be like God. Christ is with us when we are celebrating, dancing, building one another up, defending the weak, caring for the poor. During this Mass we bring all those feelings, thoughts and actions together and put them in front of the image of Santo Nino and remember that God is here with us. Soon we will bring bread and wine to celebrate and remember that the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross continues to hold and nurture us in this country at the start of this New Year.

Filipino people were the first Catholics in Broome, the first parishioners. The challenges faced by Fr Nicholas and his band of Manillamen as they were called were great, but they did not give up and the faith of the church in Broome is the result. Now the numbers of Filipinos is growing again and you have brought us this gift of the Feast of Santo Nino. May we all be encouraged by your faith and vitality. May you proudly hold your statues of Santo Nino high and proclaim the wonders of God among all the peoples . 

Homily Feast of Santo Nino, 20th January 2013, 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C, 

Our Holy Families

The Christmas crib tells us of a wonderful story that is almost too good to be true. In fact, many believe that it is not true, that it is just a fairy story. This clear, clean story is wonderful for our young children, but as we grow older it loses its punch. However fondly we experience or look back on our childhood, we cannot identify closely to this family. For us it is one that just exists in books and art. The Holy Family, for all intents and purposes, comes from another planet.  

As we mature we need to leave behind the glossy story and look at what is in the scriptures and tradition; for it is there that we will find the Holy Family, living and true.

The Jewish tradition was similar to that of our Aboriginal cultures in Australia. Women were promised to older men who took them as wives when they were mature enough to assume the duties of married life. Acceptable as it was then, this is not the ideal of any young woman today. Mary was pregnant before Joseph had taken her to his home, and with paternity unclear (at least publicly), there was huge trouble brewing. Socially, Joseph made it worse by accepting this woman into his house, probably bringing more shame on an already suffering extended family. Banished to a cave on the edge of town, they camped out with shepherds and then went on the run from Herod. Finally, in the Gospel passage today, Mary and Joseph lose their son, not in the supermarket for five minutes, but for three days!  This is the real story of the real people who are in our crib. It is by contemplating this reality that we can connect it with our own.

This Family is Holy because together they strive to do God’s will. Holiness is the spiritual quality derived from participation in the life of God. It is empowering, it lifts us up and we come to the realisation that we can become so much when we live in God. In this encounter we realise our own lack of completeness (or to put it another way, our own unworthiness), but rather than being beaten down by this realisation, we are lifted up by the same Christ we see in the stable.

Put under a microscope, it could be aside that the Holy Family was unique, at best unusual, and this is our invitation into their life, their holiness.

In our families we live with many contradictions.  The family is the basic unit of society, and any society that has denied this has fallen into chaos. The family, consisting of a mother, father and children, is the best forum we can use to engender generosity, love and stability; it gives the best chance of providing security, culture and identity.  We need strong families: anything else is second best, or in modern parlance, not ‘best practice’. This may be the case, but last week I heard commentators on the radio giving advice on how not to end up in family fights on Christmas Day.  The family is the best safety we can offer for our infants and youth, yet we acknowledge that the majority of physical and sexual abuse happens in the family home. In our families we can experience the best and worst that human nature can exercise.

So what can you and I with our varied and unique experience of family life, take from this feast celebrating the domestic life of Jesus Mary and Joseph? The Holy Family began a journey when the Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary. It was never a smooth journey, and there were many tears, disappointments and heartaches. Mary and Joseph made it through because of their unswerving trust and faith in God’s promise, their huge capacity to accept each other, to forgive others, and hope in what lay ahead. This Holy Family is our family, their experiences our experiences, their faith our faith and their God our God.  

As we embrace the aura that surrounds the crib, resolve to make our families places of trust and faith, of forgiveness and acceptance, of hope in the future and like the unique family of Nazareth, places of encounter with God.

Homily on the Feast of the Holy Family, 30th December 2012, OLQP Broome.

Blessed are they who Believe

Yesterday I saw in the news that Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s leading academic proponents of atheism had said in an interview broadcast worldwide on Aljazeerah TV that: being raised Catholic is worse than child abuse, and further that the mental torment inflicted by the religion’s teachings is worse in the long-term than any sexual abuse[i]

Just in case you think that Dawkins is isolated and that his thoughts are not those of others, on Friday I was told that my name came up in conversation at a workplace function in Broome. The general consensus, as reported to me, was that Fr Matt was a good bloke, but that Catholic stuff is all a bit weird. The Catholics at that workplace agreed that the priest was not a bad bloke, but did nothing to answer the charge that all that Catholic stuff was a bit weird. Instead they all went a bit quiet, accepted the accusations, and missed the opportunity to stand up for their faith.

Today, if you and I are under any misapprehension that out beliefs are held by a majority of people and are not under attack, even by fellow Catholics, we are clearly wrong. In many ways we are back to where we began.

The nativity scene we have in front of us is very familiar, but before the euphoria of Christmas night, let us take a moment to consider the main players. We have the location, an shed or cave in a backwater town of a remote and troublesome Roman province. Shepherds are there, the lowest on the social rung: they slept outside with their animals. If they were in Broome they would be in the open on Kennedy Hill or the other side of Demco. Then we have two people who are truly extraordinary, who rise above the madding crowd and they are just as relevant today as they were two thousand years ago.

God has promised never to abandon his people. Mary believed that promise and was able to recognise God’s messenger in the Angel Gabriel. This enabled her to reach out to Elizabeth and in turn be affirmed in her faith. Joseph was likewise guided by God. He accepted Mary his young and pregnant fiancée, knowing the public ridicule and disapproval it would precipitate. Our two main players bucked the cynicism of the day because they believed that God was active in the world.

At Christmas we are given the chance to affirm our faith, a faith that if lived to the full is not socially acceptable to many in our world who prefer the soft and secular option.

Elizabeth may you say of us the same that you said of Mary: Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.

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[i] http://news.peacefmonline.com/religion/201212/151192.php

Christ the Only King

One hundred years ago the world went mad and descended into the mess that was to become World War One. German, English and French armies all declared loudly that God was on their side. Of course, God was supporting those who showed respect and dignity in the cause of peace, and there was not much of that to be found. In the soul searching after the war, many became disillusioned with faith and put their trust in ideologies such was communism, fascism and Nazism. The atheistic regimes that came to power in Russia and Germany were responsible for more deaths than in any conflict in history. Most of the deaths were planned so that a more pure society could emerge. In the midst of this tumult and burgeoning of militant atheism, the Church, declared the feast we celebrate today, the Feast of Christ the King.

The Kingdom we seek, the kingdom we build, is not of this world. It is not a kingdom that can be bought and sold, not one that can be taken by force, not one that can be built by political machinations. The kingdom we seek to build and be a part of comes directly from our faith and is based on truth and justice, and is of God.

Unfortunately, life has often never been that black and white. Members of the church have not always thought that a little bit of force here and there is a bad thing. The chaplains who chose to walk up and down trenches in the First World War declaring the enemy as the devil to be eradicated were at best misguided. Whatever they were doing, they were not preaching the Gospel of Christ the Universal King. Standing before Pilate, Jesus declared: I came into the world for this, to bear witness to the truth, and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice. Not many people listened to Jesus, and he was led to his death.

Today we find something of a parallel. Some have walked away from the church in the revelations of weakness and of seeming inaction in the face of misconduct. Over the last weeks the media have fed us with a constant diet of anger against the Church. The leadership of the Church has been seen as uncaring at best, and criminally negligent at worst. Whist some are using this as an opportunity to display rabid anti-Catholicism and discrimination, many are angry that we seem to have not borne witness to the truth, that we have not tried to follow our own advice.

Well, at least to some extent they are correct, and the upcoming Royal Commission will be a chance to be humble before God and move forward to concentrate once again on building the Kingdom. I read yesterday that ‘this will be the end of the Catholic Church.” We all know that will not happen, but we will be humbled, and despite the untruths that will undoubtedly be told along with the truthful evidence, God is in this process of purification.

Always know that we are building the kingdom. Let us not take our eyes off Jesus Christ, our universal king, who us leading us to this reign of God.

Homily, OLQP 25^th November 2012 Christus Rex

Living Stones

The feast we celebrate today is ostensibly about a building constructed on the Lateran Hill in Rome in 324, the Cathedral Church of Rome. So is this a tangible sign of what many see is the growing irrelevance of the church to modern Australian society; or maybe something else?

The mandate of the WA Bishops to the CEO mentions nothing about buildings, yet we seem to spend so much time stressing about their maintenance and construction. This year has seen the flurry of openings of completed BER projects, and most of you have spent a good deal of time stressing over the completion of new buildings, or extensions and alterations to existing ones.

We celebrate this feast not because of a beautiful Church in Rome, in fact a building known as ‘the mother of all churches’, but what it point s us toward. Today’s Collect prays:

God, who from living and chosen stones prepare an eternal dwelling for your majesty, increase in your church the spirit  of grace you have bestowed, so that by new growth your faithful people may build the new Jerusalem.

The beautiful places that we dedicate for worship in are intended to raise our minds and hearts to God, to point to something bigger and greater than ourselves. We are called to use all our gifts to be the ‘living and chosen stones’ that build the new Jerusalem.

Our Kimberley schools are magnificent places, made even better through the BER. We have great pride in their appearance and upkeep so that they are worthy places to hold and nurture the ‘living stones’ that are entrusted to us, our students. These living stones are not restricted to those we teach, but extend to include all those involved in the mission of the church.

During my recent convalescence in Sydney I noticed a fundraising appeal from St Mary’s Cathedral. It urged donors to buy a stone, numbered and located, in the towers of the Cathedral. Some of those stones are huge, others tiny; some are structurally crucial whereas others give flesh to the Cathedral bones.

All Christians are important, but due to the responsibility of the roles given to Kimberley priests and principals, we are all crucial to the flourishing of the Kimberley Church. We are the bones, we are the crucial stones. The school at Mulan or Ringer Soak may not seem to be as important to many as St Mary’s Broome, just as many see that our modest cathedral pales beside St John in Lateran, but we are all bones in the edifice of the Church, and she is weaker without each part which composes the whole.

We end the year as we began it and as we have lived it: through prayer. Prayer is the way we have been able to achieve the heights of our school year, it is the way we have been able to make sense of the disasters of the year. Prayer is the way we have been able to see beyond the maintenance and administration to the object of our passion, the passing on of faith and hope through appropriate and challenging education.

May God guide those of you who will soon depart the Kimberley. May he who led you’re here continue to guide you in grace. May he guide and strengthen those of us who will return to continue the mission in the red north.

May we never forget that we are all living stones, chosen to build the kingdom.

Homily 9th November 2012 for the Kimberley Principals. Feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St John in Lateran