17th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

Jimmy and Joe were the best of friends.

They first met when they started school together and now, after four years, were still happy in each other’s company.

Most lunchtime they would sit together and eat their sandwiches before heading off to join the other boys in the playground.

One lunchtime as Jimmy say down next to Joe, he noticed that Joe looked a little glum.

“What is the matter?” Jimmy asked.

“I left my lunch at home!” said Joe.

“That is ok, you can have one of mine,” said Jimmy, as he took his sandwiches out of the paper bag and laid them on the seat between them.

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16th Sunday Ordinary Time Year B

“Come away to a quiet place” (Mk. 6: 31 )

For many, our lives are often like an over-packed suitcase.

It seems like we are always busy, always over-pressured, always one phone call, one text message, one email, one visit, and one task behind.

We are forever anxious about what we have still left undone, about whom we have disappointed, about unmet expectations.

At times we can feel as if we are on a treadmill from which we would want to step off.

And within all that busyness, pressure, noise, and tiredness there is, in us, an urge, a desire for solitude.

We long for some quiet, restful place where all the pressure and noise will stop, and we can sit and simply rest.

That is a healthy yearning.

It is our soul speaking.

Like our body, our soul too keeps trying to tell us what it needs. The soul needs solitude.

But solitude is not easy to find. Why?

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15th Sundary Ordinary Time Year B

The small town of Lytton, British Columbia, Canada was in World News broadcasts this last week.

The town, with a population of no more than 250, recorded Canada’s highest ever temperature, and then within 24 hours of this recording the town was engulfed in a wildfire and destroyed.

The town’s residents had no more than a fifteen-minute warning to leave their homes.

With such little notice, what would you take from your home?

The response of each of us will no doubt be very personal, and, more than likely very different.

Spend a moment and consider what you would take, and what you would leave behind?

I, personally, had a somewhat similar situation as a result of the 7.1 earthquake which hit the city of Christchurch on the 4th September, 2010.

The home I was living in was a 100-year-old two-story brick structure, and after the assessment was deemed unsafe to be lived in.

As a consequence, I, and those I lived with were told to leave the residence.

What does one pack, and what does one leave behind?

What are essential to who I am as a person?

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14th Sunday Ordinary Time Year B

Shortly after his conversion, St. Augustine of Hippo, penned these words:

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unlovliness I plunged into the lovely things that you created. You were with me, but I was not with you.”

(Confessions.  Confessions is an autobiographical work consisting of 13 books written in Latin between AD 397 and 400)

We do not pray to make God present to us. God is already present, always present everywhere.

We pray to make ourselves present to God.

English author Sheila Cassidy colourfully puts it,

“God is no more present in church than in a drinking bar, but we generally are more present to God in church than we are in a drinking bar. The problem of presence is not with God, but with us. “

The secret to prayer is not to try to make God present, but to make ourselves present to God.

The secret to finding beauty and love in life is basically the same.

Like God, they are already present.

The trick is to make ourselves present to them.

Rarely are we enough inside of our own skins, present enough to the moment, and sensitive enough to the richness that is already present in our lives.

Our experience comes brimming with riches, but too often we are not enough inside of it.

Like the young Augustine, we are away from ourselves, strangers to our own experience, seeking outside of ourselves something that is already inside of us.

The trick is to come home.

God and the moment do not have to be searched out and found.

They are already here.

We need to be here.

The image is of what is known as the Hubble Cross or the Cross of Hubble, taken by the NASA Hubble Space Telescope.

The image is some 30 million light-years from the planet earth.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaXcMPffhNU