I wish to share the striving, risk and chaos I have experienced in my life as well as the growth and fulfilment that has come my way. It is a way of “writing upon the wall of humanity”, sharing with innumerable people the task of searching for the meaning of all that is around and within us. I invite you to join with me in this enlightening and creative process.
March 6, 2020 A Statue of Jesus There is a statue of The Sacred Heart in our home, a classic Catholic image of the person of Jesus Christ. This was given to me as the Religion prize when I finished primary school in 1959 at St Brigid’s Sisters of Mercy Catholic School in Howlong, a small rural hamlet then, on the banks of the Murray River some 20 kms down the road from Albury in NSW. When our...
Written February 2020 while visiting family and friends in the Philippines. I had just heard that Bong was dead. He did not die simply, he was shot. At close range. In a supposedly secure house. An assassination. The military will not release his body until someone authoritatively identifies him as Bong Bellen of Bacacay in the Province of Albay with a two-million-peso bounty on his head. Bong...
In the time of Martial Law in the Philippines, the Governor of Metro Manila Imelda Marcos sought to “clean up” the metropolis, often through forced evictions of squatter areas. But there were other means also … The kids flew their kites– tattered, ragged, made of scraps –on our street after their fireOur street because theirs was no moreTheir fire for it swallowed all they...
February 9, 2020 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Wise Men, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Wise Men. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:“A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning,Rachel...
December 3, 1919 Australia currently is in the grip of a terrible drought. When we travelled to Victoria in October we drove firstly from Rockhampton to Dubbo, a town in central western NSW. That part of the trip was a 1,000 kms. Over the whole distance there was not one crop of anything in evidence. A barren landscape. There has been no planting for 12 months over this vast area. There has been...
September 30, 2019 We are creators, innovators, builders. We are teachers, philosophers, deep thinkers, researchers. We are scientists, farmers, machine operators, technicians, IT specialists. We are pastors, counsellors, administrators. We can do it. We have done it. We used do it. We wish we could still do it. We were good at it.Comes a time when we cannot do it. Not like we used to.Reduced in...
July 23, 2019 God created man in the image of himself,In the image of God he created him,Male and female he created them So it is written in the opening chapter of the ScripturesBut as we know, this is not the full truth. Down through the centuries, in all societies both ancient and new, there has been – and continues to be – a wider gender spread than male and female. If God created...
March 1, 2019 George Pell had powerful friends. The first was (Sir) James O’Collins the Bishop of Ballarat. He saw in Pell a future Church champion and was responsible for moving Pell from the Catholic Seminary in Werribee to the prestigious international Vatican seminary in Rome, the Pontifical Urban University. This gave Pell his first whiff of life in Rome and he thrived on it. In 1966 Pell...
In March 1983 Pope John Paul II stood on an airport tarmac in Managua Nicaragua, shock his finger at and publicly rebuked a white-haired man kneeling before him. This moment was covered live around the world. The man kneeling was Ernesto Cardenal, Catholic Priest, world-renowned poet and Minister for Culture in the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. He was kneeling in welcome of the Pope. The...