Liturgy

Community Liturgy

It is always a joy to attend the Community Liturgy on Friday mornings, 8:00am-8:30am. Students prepare the readings and prayers; the Chapel Choir joyfully leads the singing; students, parents, staff and friends come together to celebrate the life, death and resurrection of Christ. Many parents take the opportunity to share a coffee and chat afterwards.

Next week’s Mass will be prepared by students in Year 8, you are welcome to attend whether or not you have a son or daughter in Year 8!

REGULAR COMMUNITY LITURGY

When: Fridays in Term Time
Time: 8:00-8:30am
Where: College Chapel

If you have any queries about Community Liturgy, please contact Mary-Anne Lumley:

Lumley.mary-anne@cewa.edu.au or 9383 0513.

GOOD NEWS for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Mark 10:17-30

The reflection is part of Fr Michael Tate’s homily for this Sunday's Gospel and is printed here, with kind permission. Fr Michael Tate is a Parish Priest in the Archdiocese of Hobart and is Catholic Chaplain to the University of Tasmania where he is an Honorary Professor of Law, lecturing in International Humanitarian Law.

The Loving Gaze

Let’s go straight to the protagonist in this story who at the end is called a man of great wealth. In that society this meant a landowner with extensive holdings. But this wealth had corrupted his whole personality and way of thinking. There was no deep-down hunger because whenever he craved anything, he knew he could buy it or use his status or power to bend others to his will.

The man boasts about all the commandments he has kept but Jesus is not satisfied with that minimum. Jesus is not a minimalist. Jesus tunes into the man’s wavelength and says: ‘There is one thing you lack.’

That would have got the rich man’s attention: the suggestion that he was missing something.

But to his shock he was to hear that what he was lacking was a big heart, a very big heart: ‘Go, sell everything you own and give everything to the poor.’ He had to get rid of his possessions and the security and status they bought because they were shrivelling up his heart.

Jesus is saying to you and to me: ‘Yes, you keep the commandments, more or less. At least you try. Okay. But that is really the bare minimum. The real question is: What do you have to do to expand your heart: to become big hearted enough to allow my heartbeat to become your heartbeat?’

We each know what is holding us back from being one heart with Jesus Christ. For some, to be a true follower will require giving up all possessions, as with St Francis of Assisi. For others, a real hurting redistribution of wealth is required. Our taxes do a fair bit of that, and then our voluntary response to need and injustice on top of that.

But at some stage in our lives, we have known, or know now, or will know what it is we are hanging on to: the one thing we cannot or will not give up. The one thing that is so much part of our personality we cannot imagine what it would be like to get up and get rid of it.

There is only one factor that can give us, give you, give me, the courage and trust that is needed.

Note in the Gospel story, and the only time in Mark, it says: ‘Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him.’ …

Those eyes, that gaze, is directed at you, and at me personally, totally, directly, but most of all lovingly. It is not the glare of the critical eye but the look full of the possibility of who you could be as a follower of Jesus Christ. That, and only that, can give us the courage…