Life and loss at Gethsemane Community

A seismic event happened in December 2014. Gethsemane Community - an organization in Sydney who offer disability services and support - had been home to four long-term residents with mental illness and other disabilities. On 18 December, just before dinner, we heard an ambulance siren. Robert, one of the Community residents, was due home - but we didn't make the connection until we got a call from Neuro ICU at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Robert had fallen on the street, hit his head on concrete and suffered severe inter-cranial bleeding.

The same old crowd

The week leading to Easter begins with the account of Palm Sunday where Jesus is caught up in that rather triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The mood of the crowd, at first ecstatic with joy and hope, takes a turn. The Palm Sunday story has long fascinated me – it paints an aspect of human nature that has changed little over the millennia.

Faith & spirituality in review

I confess that I came to Freedom in the Spirit without great enthusiasm. In my prayer and preaching I find more life in the stories and images of the Gospels than in the discursive texts. Because St Paul’s letters are light on stories I leave them aside.

PWPN – The Most Beautiful Moment In The Game

My favourite memory of a Victorian football match is of a little rover, legs pumping and bouncing the ball, running down the field, wrong-footing one giant defender and going through another, finishing in the goal square and kicking the winning goal just as the siren sounds. And all of us suddenly on our feet in delight, shouting, ‘You little bewdy!’ (You can see it happened a long time ago.)

The Last Word

Each year we ‘re-member’—put together again—the Easter story, promising again to work with Jesus in his ongoing work of human liberation...

Faith & Spirituality in Review

Helen Doyle, The Church on the Hill: A centenary history of St Brigid’s Crossley, and its Irish-Australian community, Bridin Books, 2014

Community of Prayer - March, April, May

The Pope's prayer intentions, calendar of saints and reflections on the liturgical readings for each day of the month. Click here to visit the website

Forgiveness through God's grace

The Apostleship of Prayer is Pope Francis’ worldwide prayer network. It receives monthly prayer intentions from the Pope and urges Christians throughout the world to unite in prayer for those intentions. Thus we all become part of an international Community of Prayer

Centres of Ignatian Spirituality

The ointment and the vinegar

Countless times, since artists have tried to represent the passion and death of the Lord, they have found in the gospel text what we might call eloquent items.

A cloud of witnesses

Having first sent prayerbooks, Fr John Joseph Therry soon followed with a visit to the newly-founded colony of Sydney.

A golden and fragrant glow

Every year at this time, a case of clingstone peaches would arrive at the back door of my grandma’s house. She would set up a table and a couple of wooden kitchen chairs in the shade of the willow tree, furnished with bowls and paring knives, and rows of the tall cylindrical glass preserving jars that she used in her Fowler’s Vacola Preserving outfit, her pride and joy