Liturgy

Community Liturgy

Thank you to students in Year 11 who prepared the Community Liturgy this morning.

Next week, students in Year 9 will prepare the Liturgy, and their families are especially welcome.

Community Liturgy summary

Where: College Chapel
Time: 8:00am – 8:30am
When: every Friday in term time

Sacrament Program

CONGRATULATIONS

Wren McGlew who is making her first Reconciliation in the parish of St Kieran’s this evening.

Matteo Desiati and Kye Bishop who celebrated their First Reconciliation in the parish of St Mary Star of the Sea.

Several students, together with their families, will be celebrating the sacraments in their parishes this term. As a regional school, we are enriched by students and families participating in a number of parishes. Let us keep all these students and their families in our hearts and in our prayer at this special time.

If you have any other questions about the Sacrament Program:

Contact your Parish Priest or Sacrament Coordinator.
Contact Mary-Anne Lumley, Parish Liaison Mary-Anne.Lumley@cewa.edu.au or 9383 0513.
College website
Information for all parishes may be found on the archdiocesan website http://www.perthcatholic.org.au/Parishes_and_Mass_Times.htm?cms%2Erm=List

Parish news

GOOD NEWS for the Easter Season

(While Easter Sunday was four weeks ago, the season of Easter continues until Pentecost, 9 June).

The reflection for this Sunday’s Gospel (John 14:23-29) is a homily by Jesuit priest, Fr Richard Leonard. Fr Richard Leonard SJ is the Director of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting, is a member of the Australian Catholic Media Council and is author of Preaching to the Converted, Paulist Press, New York, 2006.

Have you noticed how many books, films, television and radio programs harken back to yesteryear? ‘Retrospectives’ are huge in the art world. Have you noticed when musicians play more romantic classical music in the first half and contemporary music in the second half that people leave at half time? It seems the public likes the art of the 19th Century more than that of today. Nostalgia is big business and we cannot get enough of it.

Nostalgia literarily means ‘a yearning for home’. And if our artistic tastes reveal anything about who we are at present, maybe the home we yearn for is where things are clearer, roles are more defined, accepted harmony is developed and discord and dissonance is avoided – at least in public.

In today's Gospel, Jesus says that as a result of our love for him and fidelity to his word, the Father will come and make a home with us. The image of God as homemaker is, sadly, not very developed in Christian spirituality, maybe because too many undomesticated men have had too much of the say for far too long! But this is an image that holds a lot for how and where we meet God.

The best homes are places where we relax because we are ourselves, we are known and we know the others with whom we live. It's a common experience, for example, that when we have been out from our homes, as soon as we enter our front door we want to go to the loo. There is something intimate and familiar about our home that enables us to relax on many levels as we turn the key. Home is an earthy place where we don't get away with much and our vulnerability can be on display. Christian homes are particularly hospitable places, where Christ dwells in them to the degree that dignity, love and forgiveness are present.

A home, however, is more than a house in which people live. Homes need work and attention. A friend of mine says memories rarely just happen, they need to be created. That's the sort of attention to a family's life that turns a house into a home.

And this is the world in which God enters our lives. God wants us to be relaxed and vulnerable in God’s presence. We don't need to put on a show or say what we think God wants to hear, that's a theatre where we preform, not a home where we know each other. Easter faith is about being comfortable and intimate, about being who we are, rather than the persona we would prefer God to see.

As with most of our homes, being at home with God has its ups and downs, days when we think we cannot bear to stay one more moment, other days where we could never imagine being anywhere else and then most days where we are neither up nor down and we just get on with the routine of our lives. God the homemaker remains faithful through it all, offering the gift of Easter peace, sending us out to proclaim Christ's Kingdom, welcoming us home eager to learn how everything went and reassuring us always that while God is at home with us our hearts should never be troubled and we are not to be afraid.

For Christians, nostalgia is not about living in the past, it is about yearning for the sort of home where our heart truly is.