Reflection of the Week - 30th May 2023
Prayer and action can never be seen as contradictory or mutually exclusive. Prayer without action grows into powerless pietism, and action without prayer degenerates into questionable manipulation.
New Times - Faith
Reflection of the Week - 23rd May 2023
The Christian belief in the Trinity says that God is absolute relatedness. God is our word for the ultimate ecosystem that holds all things in positive relationship (see Colossians 1:17).
Reflection of the Week - 16th May 2023
For a long time I didn't really understand the necessity of prayer. Why pray if what God wants to happen will happen? Why pray if it doesn't impact the actual world and people we actually live with?
Reflection of the Week - 9th May 2023
Our passage continues Jesus’ offer of comfort to his disciples. He is in the middle of breaking the unwelcome news that they will soon be without him.
Reflection of the Week - 2nd May 2023
To be calm and quiet by yourself is not the same as sleeping. In fact, it means being fully awake and following with close attention every move going on inside of you.
Reflection of the Week - 24th April 2023
Author Judy Cannato believes we experience Christ’s resurrection through ongoing growth and transformation.
Reflection of the Week - 18th April 2023
Our heart is at the centre of our being human. There our deepest thoughts, intuitions, emotions, and decisions find their source. But it’s also there that we are often most alienated from ourselves.
Reflection of the Week - 11th April 2023
It will bother you off and on, like a rock in your shoe, or it will startle you, like the first crash of thunder in a summer storm, or it will lodge itself beneath your skin like a splinter, or it will show up again—the uninvited guest whose heavy footsteps you’d recognise anywhere, appearing at your front door with a suitcase in hand at the worst. Possible. Time.
Reflection of the Week - 4th April 2023
I imagine the crowds sounded a bit like the chattering of morning birdsong - awaiting the arrival of the charismatic wandering preacher, in the midst a city already celebrating the joy and sorrow of Passover.
Reflection of the Week - 28th March 2023
A classic gathered community of relatives and friends, grieving together, illuminates the humanity that binds us all. Grieving and sorrowing also disturbs our perspective – brokenness and blame, belief and benevolence.
Reflection of the Week - 21st March 2023
Let me try to sum it up and describe it in this way. Beginner’s mind is a readiness to always be in awe, to always be excited. We see it in children and in people who don’t filter everything through the brain. Beginner’s mind is one’s mind before the hurts of life have made us cautious and self-protective.
Reflection of the Week - 14th March 2023
Jesus said, ‘I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-dresser. Every branch in me that bears no fruit he cuts away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, to make it bear even more.’ (John 15:1–2)
Reflection of the Week - 7th March 2023
The opposite of resentment is gratitude (from the Latin gratia = favour). Gratitude is more than an occasional ‘thanks be to God.’ Gratitude is the attitude that enables us to let go of anger, receive the hidden gifts of those we want to serve, and make these gifts visible to the community as a source of celebration. Gratitude is at the heart of celebration and ministry.
Reflection of the Week - 28th February 2023
Lent offers an opportunity to look at our personal life – heart and soul, mind and body - to honestly review how we are living, why we are doing what we are doing, how we are managing, or honestly, how we are not managing.
Reflection of the Week - 21st February 2023
Even the two greatest commandments, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and love your neighbour as yourself, are on paper, fairly simple. But obviously, when put into practice it’s a lot harder than it seems.
Reflection of the Week - 14th February 2023
As we contemplate the Beatitudes in Matthew’s gospel this month, the wisdom of Henri Nouwen can help us understand the compassion of Jesus.
Reflection of the Week - 7th February 2023
Scripture as validated by experience, and experience as validated by Tradition, are good scales for one’s spiritual worldview.
Reflection of the Week - 31st January 2023
New Year’s resolutions are offered with the best intentions, though so often have the worst follow through. We may aim too high, or expect to implement things that have previously passed us by in our busyness.
Reflection of the Week - 24th January 2023
In their speculations about who Jesus was, his contemporaries agreed that, whatever else, he was a prophet (Mark 8:27–28; Luke 7:16).
Reflection of the Week - 20th December 2022
All claims to the contrary, Jesus did not preach from a place of rigid binaries and judgments but from a place of continual becoming. He befriended outcasts and lived on the margins of society while staying in relationship with wealthy and powerful people, some of whom became patrons and disciples.