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TRINITY SUNDAY 2015

This weekend we celebrate Trinity Sunday which is all about the triune god Father, son and Holy Spirit. When my Father was alive he  often had a small tin of oil in the tool  box he used which was called three in one oil  when I was thinking about a definition of the Holy Trinity  it  came to mind however the trinity is  about  three divine persons in one not a tin of oil !!!  In the Holy Trinity the Father is equal to the Son and the Son is equal to the Spirit three in one and one in three we hear this in the breastplate of St. Patrick. St Patrick, with a brilliance that we Irish are justly celebrate found in the three leaf shamrock rising from the one stem an image of the Trinity which is still used today. The feast of the Trinity goes back to 12th century England and St Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. Historians say the great Thomas celebrated a Liturgy in honor of the Trinity in his cathedral. So was born the observance. In the 14th century, the feast came to be observed by the universal Church.

 One week after the end of the Easter season, in which we gave thanks for the saving death and resurrection of Jesus, and the celebration of the gift of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost Sunday, this feast of the Holy Trinity invites us to contemplate the mystery of God to the extent that our minds are able. Paul in the Letter to the Romans reminds us that the Spirit of God makes us God’s children, destined to share in the life of God, as Christ does.

Through the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts we become aware of the love and strength of the living God available to us both now and in the life to come. The gospel reading for this Sunday speaks of power: the power of presence and the power of the name. Ancient people placed great weight in presence; the way someone dressed and acted spoke of social power. Ancient people also chose names carefully; they believed a person’s name defined their strength of character. Both outward presence and inward character are part of the disciples’ experience.When the followers saw the resurrected Lord and heard his command to evangelize the entire world, they saw for themselves the Trinity in action. When we live as followers of Christ, we invite others to join us not because they see nice people living good lives. No, they, too, see the Trinity in action as God works through us.

Each Trinity Sunday, we only scratch the surface of this great mystery of our faith. In gratitude and faith, let us begin and end every prayer with greater faith and reverence “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

3RD SUNDAY OF LENT

 This weekend we celebrate the third Sunday of Lent and our readings take us from the Ten Commandments in the first reading to Jesus putting the tax collectors out of the temple in the gospel. What does this say to you and me about our journey during this time of Lent? For each person the scripture for this weekend will mean something different.

In the first reading we are presented with the ten commandments  they  challenges us to establish a right order with God (the first three commandments) and then with our fellow human beings (the last seven commandments) and ourselves. The words of the second reading tell us that God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.  Our sins are signs of the weakness that we must overcome.“Christ is the power of God”; his weakness is more powerful than our strength and with God on our side who can be against us?

This Sunday’s gospel puts Jesus’ knowledge of our human nature so clearly: He really knew what was going on in the hearts of those around him. He knew what they thought as he knows what we think and what is going on in our hearts. He saw what they did to the Temple. The Temple was a place of worship. It was a place of celebrating the spiritual presence of God in the world. And  they changed the Temple into a marketplace.For many in our modern world the day of the Lord Sunday has been replaced with so many secular things taking the place of God and religion. Jesus knew that we would hide the celebration of the Resurrection behind the Easter Bunny. He knew that people would see the signs that he worked, the miracles he performed, but would refuse to see the messages behind the signs and the miracles. Instead they would see him as a wonder worker, a superman, a good show. Of course our faith is not about a good show instead it is about our relationship with God and with one another. Jesus shows us  what real love is. He went on to die on the cross for us.  Our dying with Christ during Lent is an identification with the power of Christ crucified. Our calling, then, is to be strong, not weak. The commandments represent not just a set of rules but an ideal of a social order for which we are to give our lives, as Christ did on the cross.

Second Sunday of Lent

Well here we are at the second Sunday of Lent. It is hard to believe but time is marching on. In the Gospel reading for this weekend we hear about Jesus going up the mountain taking Peter and James and John, with him and we hear the voice from the cloud identifying  Jesus as “my beloved Son.”  the God who speaks to the disciples on the mountain directs them to Jesus and instructs them and us, “Listen to him” and our journey during lent is a journey of listening to scripture and listening to one another as we tell our own stories of faith. Jesus invites us to an exciting journey as a matter of fact our lives if lived in faith should be an exciting journey from birth right until we get to the pearly gates when we die. “The kingdom of God is at hand, Repent, and believe the Good News is all about Lent and in a particular way it is our call to take up the spiritual fight beginning on Ash Wednesday.  We’re not invited to a trip to Disneyland or any other holiday place we might want to go to. Instead we are called to explore the great depths of God’s love for us as we try to move and live in God’s Spirit as we climb the mountain of the Lord which is represented by our faith led observance of Lent.

2015  happens to be the Year of Consecrated Life, it is a time in  which we honor and support those who give total commitment to following Jesus Christ. Many people have taken up the call to go on an exciting journey of faith as priests, brothers and nuns in so many diocese and religious orders throughout the world.

Lent provides inspiration for all Christians  to remember and celebrate the days of their Baptism and Confirmation. Every year we hope to rise again from the ashes of our sins and failures “to recreate ourselves anew.” Every year we take a journey, a pilgrimage through the penance, self-discipline, prayer, and  good works in Lent leading  to the refreshing Easter waters of renewal. For many their journey began last Sunday in the cathedral churches as they began the journey to their Baptism at Easter as Catechumens. The  Catechumens are led to the sacraments of initiation by means of the rite of election, the scrutinies and catechesis. The faithful, listening more intently to the word of God and devoting themselves to prayer accompany them on their journey and  through a spirit of repentance all of us are able to renew our baptismal promises at the Easter Masses. We remember once again the voice of god from the cloud, our heavenly father identifying  Jesus as “his beloved son.”  The god who speaks to the disciples  also speaks to us and directs all of us to Jesus. That same voice of God also  instructs us  to “listen to him” may we sit up and take note of what he is saying and not be afraid to do what he asks of us.

1ST SUNDAY OF LENT 2015

Well Lent has begun, after the ashes of Ash Wednesday comes the commitment of the next 6 weeks. Our gospel story for this weekend tells us about Jesus going out into the wilderness where he was tempted by the devil in the wilderness.  God asks us to undertake this time of renewal and that is why we have the penitential season of Lent. Why do we have Lent every year? Why penance? Why fasting? Why almsgiving? What does that have to do with us? If we take our faith seriously then Lent, penance, fasting and almsgiving have a great deal to do with all of us.

This reading from the Gospel of Mark also tells us that the time has come for us to repent and believe in the Good News. It is an ancient custom in the Church that the story of the temptation of Jesus in the desert should be read on the first Sunday of Lent. Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness. At the beginning of the forty days of Lent the Church always puts before us his time of solitude and it also puts before us a time for renewal. We ask ourselves what in our homes, at work, local, and parish communities needs to be changed for so many are out there in the wilderness of a godless faithless life.

During the season of Lent we stop to take stock of where we are in our lives and where we really need to be as people of faith who believe in God. These next few weeks will be a time of refreshment, a time of repentance and also a time of renewal that prepare us for Holy Week and Easter. So now as we begin Lent we are invited to commit our lives fully to God and God’s ways remembering that god’s ways are not our ways. Jesus preaches “Metanoia” – that is “Repentance” – which requires change of heart, mind and Spirit. Let us ask ourselves whether we are open to be really changed as gods people s so we will be able to enter more fully into the great ceremonies of our redemption during Holy Week and Easter.

ASH WEDNESDAY 2015

Here we are once again at the beginning of the holy season of Lent. It seems like yesterday when we began our observances of this Holy Season with the Ashes and the words repent and believe in the Gospel for Lent 2014.  But here we are on the ongoing circle of the year and have arrived at Ash Wednesday. In a packed programme over the next six weeks we will give up things and we will take up things. I like to think of Lent as a time when we take up things such as the daily Mass we have mass at 7.30am each weekday or perhaps we might travel the road of the Way of the Cross. It is also a time when we give up things in order to renew our spiritual lives. There are so many opportunities to give up and take up things to renew our spirit there are also chances to give alms to other people through Trocaire and other agencies. 

A few days ago I spoke in this blog about many who are disheartened by what they see within the Church of recent times Young and Old sense what seems to be the tedium and a staleness about our religion and our practice of our faith. Lent is a time to change that within ourselves! Though we live in the world and are of the world we need to remember that all of us who have to deal with and live in the world should not become engrossed in it as the world and its life has taken many people including at times you and me  down the wrong road and that road  leads one  away from god and his ways. Lent then is a good time to start a renewal within ourselves and our Church and it is a time to banish the tedium and staleness within our lives of faith.  When we come to Palm Sunday we will be able to sing Hosanna with renewed heart and mind  and then during Holy Week and Easter we will truly be able to celebrate the great things that God has done for us and is doing in our lives.

Our Lady of Lourdes 11th February

Today is the feast day of Our Lady of Lourdes. Lourdes has been a great place of pilgrimage and healing for over 150 years. So many people have been healed physically and spiritually and even more have been given the strength to continue their lives despite great hardships. I have been to Lourdes many times at this stage too many to count and I like so many others have got strength from the healing waters of the spring and the way that life is lived there. At Lourdes we see the brotherhood of man working together in service of the sick and those in need. Lourdes is one of the most important “places of grace” where countless people  have put on the snow white garments of spiritual rebirth and renewal ! One of the reasons why I go on pilgrimage to Lourdes is to see things more clearly, to get the bigger picture of what is going on in my life. All of us come, with our own worries and intentions for our pilgrimage. We come to pray with and for the invalids who are with us, we come to pray for our families and friends, for our parishes  dioceses and our countries.

But we find ourselves here with other people on our own pilgrimage and with people on other pilgrimages and there are countless nationalities who are praying for their own intentions and worries, their invalids, their families, their countries. All of us are on a journey to a house, the house of God that has many rooms. There is room in it for every person of every place and time to be fully at home, fully transformed, fully healed. The wonder of God is not just that he can and will care for each one of us with a love so powerful that it will fully answer all our deepest hopes and longings – the wonder is that God’s love offers complete fulfillment to every human being who ever lived or whoever will live – to the peoples from every nation and from every period of history from the past to the present and way on into the future. This is really what Lourdes is about the Love of God in action. Bernadette saw the Lady dressed in white, whereas we don’t see her with our eyes but with our heart, which is aware in faith of her presence on our journey through life.

The apparitions have sustained countless souls, encouraging them on the path of conversion and personal sanctification. And their change of heart has helped improve the world because the whole world benefits from the conversion of even one heart.There are so many stories that I could tell about Lourdes and what it means to me stories both funny and sad but the one factor in my life that I am so grateful for is that all my friends and I have one thing in common that is all of us have been to Lourdes at least once or more!! So today as we celebrate and thank God for the gift that St. Bernadette and Lourdes are to the Church and the people of God my prayer is  that many graces will come to all who visit this place of healing during 2015.

5TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

This weekend we celebrate the 5^th Sunday of ordinary time on the 18^th of February we begin the annual celebration of Lent on Ash Wednesday.  It is so hard to believe that we are now into the second month of 2015 but time does not wait for anyone and that includes you and me. This weekend here in our diocese of Down and Connor we have the annual vocations weekend for those young men who are in the process of discernment for a vocation to the priesthood in our diocese. In my lifetime I have known many great and good priests and to my great regret I have also known a number of priests who turned out to be some of the rotten apples in the barrel! But despite all of this men and women young and not so young  are still coming forward to join the priesthood and the religious life . We have a vocation as lay men and women and that vocation is to pray to the Lord that he will send labourers into his harvest. So many have become disheartened by what they see within the Church of recent times and our youth get this in a particular way, they are certainly no dozers. They sense what seems to be the tedium and the staleness about our religion and our practice of our faith. We are often told “Mass is so boring,”. Well, surely you won’t find much entertainment there—especially if you compare it to the  fifty or more available TV and cable channels and the razzmatazz of pop culture.

 We should not expect novelty and slickness from a sacred communal practice of faith, which has as its  hallmarks of which great tradition, universality, and stability of form which is the Eucharist?  We also need to remember that our future as the Church is not with the Golden Oldies on their own nor is the future with the young on their own or indeed any individual grouping within the church. Instead the future lies with the young and old with all the groups within the Church working together as the body of Christ the Church.  All of us were young once and in our own time we were the future of the Church and now our sons and daughters, grand children nephews and nieces are now the future of the Church and in their turn their children will be its future and so the Church as Christ’s Body will continue. But the question for the here and now of our present time is how do we reconnect with all those who have left the Church Young Old and all the in-betweens. I was asked this question recently by a mother of a 16 year old who did not want to go to Mass at all she asked how do I get him to go to Mass when he really is not interested? we need to reconnect as Church with the people young and old where they are and not where we might want them to be.

In the Gospel Reading for this Sunday, Jesus comes to Peter’s house, he finds that Peter’s mother-in-law is sick, and he heals her. And then look what happens. The whole town hears of her healing and rushes all their sick to Peter’s house. The house is surrounded, and so is Jesus. Now, all of a sudden, Jesus seems to have become a one-man hospital the man who heals all their ills. He is so besieged that he can’t even pray in the house. He has to head out secretly into the countryside in the dark of morning. When his absence is detected, his disciples go looking for him. “Hey,” they say, when they find him, “Everybody is looking for you!” I honestly believe that today people of all ages are out there looking to find Jesus seeking to find the things of lasting value they are out there looking for Jesus and in their time and place they are finding him. Many have come to know that the things of God and the Spirit are built on solid foundations of the rock of faith instead of the things and values of the world that are built on sand and have no lasting value.

 To all of you whoever you are wherever you are reading this I ask you to pray for vocations to all the varied states of life and living religious and otherwise. We remember that the definition of the word vocation include so many fields of work that are outside the religious sphere. In a few days time we begin Lent with the Ashes of Ash Wednesday and as part of our prayer time during the six weeks that are lent we might spare a prayer for all those who are searching for God and for all of us who have found him that all of us will be steady on the search and faith filled when we find God as Christians.

4th SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

THIS LATIN WORD PAX TRANSLATES AS  PEACE

On Tuesday of this past week we celebrated the 70^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp at the end of the second World war in 1945. The brutality of the Nazis regime of Adolf Hitler is starkly illustrated in all of these places, brutality against the weakest of the weak and against the Jewish People. As we think of the Holocaust  and the witness of all those who lost their lives in the concentration camps that are now sacred places we must also stop and  think of how we relate to one another and to those of other faiths in our modern world Jew, Christian, Muslim Hindu or whatever faith tradition we may be from.

In this Sundays  Gospel we hear about the authority of the Lord to cast out demons and devils. The reading is taken from the Gospel of Mark. Jesus begins to teach in Capernaum. The people are spellbound because he spoke with authority, not like the scribes. A man comes to Jesus who is in the hand of an evil power and Jesus makes the devil come out of the man. The bystanders are amazed because Jesus has such authority.  What do we mean when we speak about the authority of the Lord? What do we mean when we talk about authority in general? What ways do we exercise authority in relation to those around us? What ways do we exercise the authority of the Lord as Christians? 

The word authority comes from the Latin word auctoritas. The basic meaning of this Latin word is creator, the word author also comes from this word. In general, authority is intimately connected with its source that source is the person who gives another the authority to do something so the authority that Jesus has comes from his Father.  We share in the authority of the Lord to the extent that we are united to the source of this authority. When we are confirmed we receive the power, the authority, to defeat evil in the world and to lead others to Jesus, the source of all truth. This authority is given to us by God. God can remove this authority and will remove this authority if we refuse to stay intimately united to him. God has entrusted us with his authority only to the extent that we allow him into our lives.  As we reflect on the 70^th anniversary of the liberation of the Death Camps at the end of the Second World War We pray that the horror of these events will never return. We also pray that all those who exercise authority will do so wisely and for the good of every member of the communities where they live so that everyone can live in peace.