Not Your Usual Sunday Mass

Two weeks ago I concelebrated Sunday Mass with the Holy Father, eight hundred bishops and eight thousand priests. It was not your usual Sunday Mass.  That Mass was at the culmination of the pilgrimage of millions of people, invited to Madrid by Pope Benedict. The reason for the pilgrimage is stated by St Paul as we heard today in the letter to the Romans: “love is the one thing that cannot hurt your neighbour.” This is where World Youth Day starts.  I would like to ask Soleil White to come up and give us her reflections on where this leads.

The experience that most touch me on the pilgrimage was doing the Stations of the Cross in Fatima. While walking the Stations of the Cross we stopped at the Fourth Station (Peter’s Denial), as we walked away a cool breeze swarmed by and I felt at peace and that God was really with me. At that point in my life I really came to believing that God was always with me and that he brought me on this journey to find my faith. Later on that evening I explained my experience to Sabrina from the NATSICC group. She placed her arm around me and gave me a smile and said it was okay to openly believe in God and that we were all there to celebrate our faith with young people from all over the world – Soleil White

It was with experiences such as this that we came to the vigil with the Holy Father at Cuatro Vientos, when the storm hit, everyone shared umbrellas, coats and groundsheets. We tried to stay dry but just got soaked right through. The WYD cross fell over in a gust and hit a bishop, and the Holy Father remained in his chair, ignoring advice for him to move to shelter, in front of us like Peter the Rock. The whole event resulted in bringing the crowd closer together in true solidarity around our Pope. And, in addition, the rain settled the dust and cooled things down, and after the storm had passed, the wind dried the soaked us so that it made for a bearable night. Before he left, the Holy Father, who also got soaked, said:

Dear Young Friends, We have lived together an adventure. Strengthened by your faith in Christ, you have resisted the rain. Before leaving I wish you all good night. Have a good rest. I thank you for the sacrifice that you are making and I have no doubt that you will offer it generously to the Lord. We shall see one another tomorrow, God willing, in the celebration of the Eucharist. I am expecting all of you. I thank you for the fine example that you have given. As happened tonight, you can always, with Christ, endure the trials of life. Do not forget this. I thank you all.

The WYD program was intended to remind us that we are not accidents on this earth, but willed out of the love of God and destined to help each other reach the dizzy heights God has made possible for each one of us. On Sunday morning the Holy Father continued:

Yes, dear friends, God loves us. This is the great truth of our life; it is what makes everything else meaningful. We are not the product of blind chance or absurdity; instead our life originates as part of a loving plan of God. …If you abide in the love of Christ, rooted in the faith, you will encounter, even amid setbacks and suffering, the source of true happiness and joy. Faith does not run counter to your highest ideals; on the contrary, it elevates and perfects those ideals. Dear young people, do not be satisfied with anything less than Truth and Love, do not be content with anything less than Christ.

So WYD was a chance to encourage, strengthen and challenge one another. In many ways our Sunday Mass here in Broome is the same. Here we come to put aside the cares of this world and remember that there is something bigger than us of which we are a part. At the time of WYD, Vargas Llosa, a famous Spanish writer and agnostic, wrote that World Youth Day was: a gigantic festival and there are two possible readings of this event: one which sees World Youth Day as more a superficial than a religious festival, and the other which interprets it as proof that the Church of Christ maintains its strength and vitality. I was there both for the event and the testimonies of young people who participated.  I know that there was nothing superficial about WYD, jusdt as there is nothgin superficial about our presence here today.

Pope Benedict always reminds his listeners that his role is to present eternal truths in a way that encourages us think and then act in a positive way. St John Chrysostom provides a perfect conclusion to our reflection on WYD and today’s liturgy, and the necessary action that will result from it:  

             

You will be doing everything for the glory of God if, when you leave this place, you make yourselves responsible for saving a brother or sister, not just by accusing and rebuking him or her, but also by advising and encouraging, and by pointing out the harm done by worldly amusements, and the profit and help that come from our instruction.

In other words, “Whoever tries to save those that are negligent, and to snatch them from the jaws of the devil, is imitating Christ as far as a human being can.” What other work could equal this? Of all good deeds this is the greatest; of all virtue this is the summit.

That is what PopeBenedict aimed for in Madrid. That gift of God, given through the Holy Father and two million young people, is offered to this parish and every Parish in the world today.  May we accept this extraordinary gift of the Holy Spirit.

Homily, OLQP Broome 4th September 2011, 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A   

Feed Them Yourselves!

When I was the assistant to Fr McKelson, he kept telling me that soon he would become a pensioner, so I told him that when he did we will throw a party to spend his first cheque! Well his 65^th birthday and party came, and to celebrate, the Bidyadanga mob went out and caught 65 salmon, which were carefully filleted and refrigerated the day before. The time of the party arrived and the fires were burning when I was told that the fridges had failed and all the fish had gone rotten. Meanwhile there were two hundred people gathering for a meal. A team of people went into overdrive and, using everything in the kitchen and convent, cooked for the waiting people. I can assure you that there was a miracle there that day, but I do not know it was a miraculous multiplication of food. However, we are part of a greater miracle, described by the readings we have reflected on today, and we are all called to be part of the response.

God calls us to come together.  Come to he water you who are thirsty. We are invited and encouraged to acknowledge our need for God, and to work together to create a better world. It does not matter whether we consider ourselves to be talented, capable or worthy. God accepts our efforts as part of the whole and invites us equally to share in the benefits of being in relationship with him.

This invitation is freely given by God and not earned by us in any way.  In that way we can never be separated from our God, who created sustains and loves us. We are, of course, able to ignore or hide from God, and to commit sin, which prevents us from seeing the work of God in our lives and world.  This can happen, but St Paul is reminds the Romans and us, two thousand years later, that neither death nor life nor angel nor demon nor any other power nor life nor death nor anything else in all creation can separate from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. The point is quite laboured isn’t it? However the point is made that God is there and is not going anywhere else! We have nothing to worry about, we are never alone.

Jesus comment to his disciples is the key to the story of feeding the five thousand. Miracles do happen, and they are from God, but those who recognise miracles cannot be passive recipients or spectators. I often have people ask me: Where is God? Why doesn’t he send a miracle to help people in need?   Our answer of the Christian is that of Our Lord: Feed them yourselves, pray and prepare, use every gift and talent you have, and when that is exhausted, God will provide. The Lord works through his people as well as through his world.

At Lourdes in France I have seen people praying and hoping for a miracle, not passive sitting, but fervently hoping praying and preparing for whatever gift their relationship with God allows them to receive. I have witnessed miracles at Lourdes and in other places, and they are all, without exception, the fruit of people co-operating with the love of God, people coming to the water, people offering the little faith, hope, love and money they have and allowing God to multiply it over and over.

God works best when things seem hopeless and people seem lost. This is not because God wants to big note himself, but these are the times that God’s people recall that God is in the middle with his suffering people, and that he is not going anywhere. We know that  God is with us we can change the world.

Homily OLQP Broome 30th July 2011

The Riches of Relationship

During the past week I have been in Sydney at a meeting called by the Australian Catholic Bishops. The Bishops asked for a representative from each diocese to come together talk about a radical concept. The concept is JESUS.  They are proposing a Year of Grace, which is defined as starting afresh from Christ. It is an opportunity to encounter Jesus I everything we do as Church, in every part of our lives. ‘What is so radical about that’ I hear you say, isn’t that what we try to do every day? Well, if my life is any indicator, yes and no.  Today’s liturgy gives us a wonderful chance to really ask ourselves that question and seek the answer.

What do I want out of life? Big question, and one that only be answered after a significant amount of reflection, and dare I say it, prayer.  We all have our priorities, and often what we would like to see as our priorities are, in fact not what is acted out in our lives.  We all have the experience of saying something that we did not intend to, and when it comes we are sure that it was from God and not from us. I think that is what happened to Solomon in his dream dialogue with God that we read about in the first book of Kings.  He did not ask for riches, wealth, and power, to win wars, to be handsome or get a stack of really good wives. Instead he asked for ‘a heart to understand how to discern between good and evil’. I don’t think that Solomon saw that one coming, but when it did, he took it and ran. It is right and true, and he was given that gift that made him the wisest and best king of Israel.  He encountered God, and having done that, everything else fell into place.

Solomon not only found the answer to life, but was able to sustain the pace. The psalm tells us about that: ‘Lord I love your commands”. That does not mean that they are all easy, or sometimes we do not find them difficult. It means that if we are in relationship with God, we accept him into our lives and allow him to mould and guide us, not just to follow the teachings of God when they happen to agree with our mood or situation.

The one we need to be relationship with, of course, is the one the Bishops have pointed us to: Christ. He is the one that all of our actions need to be measured against. In all our actions and the activities of our day we need to be able to ask: where is Jesus in all of this?

Each of us will have a different way of finding this treasure, and just like the search for the pearl can sometimes be treacherous, so the search for the pearl of great price can be dangerous, and the mighty can indeed fall prey to sin and temptation. We need to stay close to the church, be guided by ample prayer and teaching, and always move forward.

The journeys of each of us here are different, but they are carried on within the same matrix of faith. There is no new way, the path is forever the same, but with the gift of our humanity and uniqueness, always new. We hold a treasure, held in things new and old, a relationship with the Son of God, and through him, with each other. May God protect us and keep us moving together as one people.

Homily OLQP  Broome 24th July 2011

Kularri Region Reconciliation Award 2011 Acceptance Speech

I am honoured to be here tonight and receive this NAIDOC reconciliation award. 

I accept it representing many who have come before me and those who will come after. 

Over one hundred years ago, priests came to live and walk beside local people, sharing faith and hope, the good and the bad times. Fr Nicholas Emo was treated with contempt when he fed and protected vulnerable people in 1895. Opponents burnt his shack and chapel before he won them over by kindness.  

Some reported Fr Worms in the 1930s because he believed that apathy was the result of ‘cutting the sacred cord’ that bound people to their culture and land. He taught Fr McKelson, who taught me, to walk gently on this land, because it belongs to other people and we are here by invitation.

Fr McKelson, Wandjira Jack Mulardy and Nyakerin John Dodo taught me to love language, for it is a window to the liyan, the rayi, or as the desert mob calls it, the kururrn of the people. They taught me that Aboriginal people and culture are strengthened by Christianity, and that Aboriginal people are very blessed with connection to land culture and people. Later the Kukatja taught me about life, language and faith in a desert context. Today I am indeed very blessed to walk in Yawuru country.

The Homelessness Outreach of which we have heard continues the work of Emo, Worms, McKelson and McMahon. We have each used the talents available to us to work in a different way, each appropriate to the time. It bears the mark of each of them, and the faith of the Catholic people of the Kimberley for the last 100 years.

Liyan mapu wa-nangka-ma juyu Kukuni, Upani, Rayipuni, kalpu kapuni 

(May God bless you from heaven, Father, Son and Holy Spirit) (Yawuru)

GimiGimi Shed, Broome, 9th July 2011.

Care and caution with the Weeds and the Wheat.

When I was young one of our schoolyard crazes was this unusual design called yin and yang. This traditional Taoist design enthralled us all. For a long time we drew talked of and philosophised about the good and evil that were intertwined. In the end we would all come to the conclusion, through our Christian lens, that in every good there is some evil and in every evil there is some good.

The reason that made sense to us young Catholic men was that it resonated with our deep faith. It resonated with the parable of the wheat and darnel. We know that the world is not perfect, and that in the midst of good there are things that are not right, just as in the midst of great evil there are bright moments.

To maintain our balance, we need to be aware of the movements on our lives and society. In most things the solution is not a simple one, as it is, for instance, in the case of abortion or euthanasia. These are simple open and shut issues for people, like us Catholics, who respect life.  In the issues we confront each day, most of us tend towards pontificating and declaring our position to be correct. This is natural, but not necessarily correct. Just because I hold a position to be correct, even if I am supported by a multitude of people, it does not make that position correct. The truth is most often to be found somewhere between the extremes of opinion.

The parable of the wheat and darnel, however, takes us further than the yin and yang concept. The parable takes us to the plane of making judgements. The wheat and weeds are left together until the end because there is no way of harmlessly separating them before harvest. We are called to live out our own vocation, honestly and with integrity whilst respecting the ways of others who do not agree with us. This requires patience that is best delivered through an active prayer life.

The mood of our town at the moment gives us the opportunity to practice and show the way in this matter. During the week I was told of an argument that almost turned into a physical fight at a workplace because staff had differing opinions over the gas hub at Price’s Point. The question of the hub is an important one for our town, and one in which we Christians, whatever side of the fence we are on, can show leadership through our diligence, our dignity and our patience. The worst outcome in this debate is not whether the gas hub is built or not, but if hurt and division split families and relationships in our community. The best outcome is if we manage to keep families and relationships in our town together. This is a task for us as church.

When you stand in the middle of a young wheat field, it is hard to see what plants are wheat and what plants are darnel.  That is why in the parable the farmer waits until the end to separate them. God asks us to exercise caution, tolerance and care as we move forward calmly, and leave judgements to God.

Homily 16th July 2011 OLQP Broome

God's word on our Earth

A few years ago my brother and I walked across the north of England, just for a change. From the Lakes District to the high moors and then down to the Swaledale, deep in Yorkshire, where all those tales of “it shouldn’t happen to a vet’ occurred. After a village called Keld, just before we got to the dales, we walked through a moonscape. It was awful. No trees, no grass, just the debris left behind when the lead mines were closed in 1948. David and I tramped silently through this example of how not to treat our earth for two hours before descending again to the Garden of Eden at Reith. 

The effect of that mornings walk has never left me. 

God has given us this earth, and in Isaiah’s words, he has watered it, making it yield and giving growth to provide seed for the sower and bread for the eating. It the word cannot achieve its purpose without the collaboration of God’s most magnificent creation, which of course, is humankind. The responsibility we hold is enormous, as is the opportunity for destruction and preservation. 

The Kukatja have a wonderful word kaninyirninpa, meaning holding.  Just as we a mother holds her child in the womb, and god holds his people, we hold what is entrusted to us until it is time to pass it on to others. Christians do not own anything, even our own lives. We hold all that we have been given in trust for god and for future generations. Whoever financed, allowed and profited from those lead mines in Yorkshire did not live this, for if they had they would not have been able to wreak such permanent destruction on God’s wonderful creation, denying it to future generations.

St Paul reminds us that creation ‘has been groaning in one great act of giving birth’.  We are part of that birth, and we care called to hold this creation, to nurture this baby.   I our hands we hold the seed, and we can spread this seed on rocky ground, where it will not take deep root; among thorns, where it will be strangled, or in deep rich soil where it will be nurtured. The choice is ours.

 We all have a role to play in ensuring that God’s earth is protected and nurtured. None of our voices are raised in vain.  Listen anyone who has ears.

Homily 10th July 2011 OLQP Broome.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sunday

In this country we have been spared many of the atrocities that have befallen people in other parts of the world. We are indeed fortunate. Living in the Kimberley, this is brought home to us ever more strongly as we see around us the beauty of God’s creation. However, we cannot say that our country is, or ever has been, peace-filled. In this sense our country is still in process, it is still being formed. To be complete it needs an unwavering commitment from all of us to this end.

Twenty five years ago, in 1986, people from Broome went over the Tanami on Frank Lacey’s bus to meet the Holy Father in Alice Springs. He affirmed the extraordinary gifts that Aboriginal people and culture have brought to this Great South Land. However, he went further and told the gathering that “the Church in Australia will not be fully the church that Jesus wants her to be until you have made your contribution to her life and until that contribution has been joyfully accepted.”

This challenge is one to a partnership, and it is issued to all of us who strive to follow Christ, whether we are Aboriginal or not. Of course, the Holy Father was calling us to the greatest of gifts, that if peace. Peace is the free gift that can only come through the action of the Holy Spirit. The first reading urges us to seek this gift, and reminds us that true peace may only be obtained from one source, from the one who rides on the donkey, from Christ who came among us to serve. It can only be shared by those who are open to their spiritual selves, who acknowledge the presence and power of God in their lives.

The gift of peace enables us to build community with each other. It allows us to open our hearts to views that differ from our own and opinions that diverge from ours. It allows us to see that the future is built together. The words that Blessed John Paul spoke in Alice Springs should continue to resound in our ears, so that we are constantly reminded that our God comes among us and has shared his word among us all equally. With this knowledge, we are empowered to keep moving forward with strength and determination, but also with the knowledge that the gentle Christ is with us on our journey.

Homily OLQP Broome 3rd July 2011