Liturgy

Community Liturgy

Thanks to the students of Year 7 who prepared the Community Liturgy this morning.

Next Friday’s liturgy will be prepared by Year 8. Year 8 students and their families are warmly encouraged to attend – as are all students, families and friends in our College community.

Community Liturgy summary

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

Parish Connections

Preparations for the seasons of Advent and Christmas have begun in most parishes. This year the four-week church season of Advent actually begins on 1 December.

Some of our local parishes warmly invite families to enter into this season with some special celebrations. Please refer to details below.

GOOD NEWS for 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 21:5-19

The reflection for this Sunday’s Gospel 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.

… We all have different reactions to shock and grief. Everyone asks, ‘Why is this happening to us?’ when tragedy strikes on any scale.

For as long as I can remember there have been people predicting the end of the world. Whenever there is a tidal wave, cyclone, hurricane, earthquake or other natural disasters, someone declares that ‘the end is nigh’. Just recall the Year 2000. Never mind that the dating of our calendar is out and so that the 2000th year occurred in 1996. The truth rarely gets in the road of the doomsday story. Sadly for us they usually invoke today’s Gospel to support their case. The good news for us is that we are still waiting for the end of time. The good news for doomsday prophets is that one day they’re going to be right!

We know from a variety of documents around the time of Jesus that the people of Palestine thought the world was soon coming to an end. Given they were being persecuted under an occupying Roman army and that their nation was in tatters, they seemed to have a better cause for this view than we do. In today’s Gospel Jesus speaks to a demoralised people who thought, and maybe hoped, that it would all be over soon. In such a context people are liable to follow the loudest voice to what appears like the safest place and so Jesus offers us the hope of God’s fidelity whatever suffering we may endure. We are challenged to counter despair, not place our trust in things or institutions which we can see but to not be afraid and stand up for faith and hope.

When bad things happen to good people, when they happen to us, we have choices. We can give into desolation, depression and despair. Some of us make a life-long career out of it. This is understandable and tragic. Or we can choose to hope. Christian hope is not about ‘pie in the sky when we die’. It is not about ‘putting on a happy face, come what may’. St Augustine tells us hope is based on the justice God wants in this world, and will see done in the next. Interestingly, one of the signs Jesus speaks about in today’s Gospel is famine. We have known for thirty years that if we all lived justly and shared from our abundance, we could have seen an end to starvation. We choose otherwise and sometimes blame God.

St Thomas Aquinas teaches us that hope, along with faith and love, is one of the prongs in the anchor of Christian belief. No matter how stormy are the waters, how much we are tossed and buffeted by life’s winds, this anchor keeps us rooted in God until calmer seas return. Hope is about holding on, come what may.

Today’s Gospel is not interested in a timetable for disaster. It’s about encouraging us to drop the anchor of hope overboard when the times get tough. May our celebrations of the Eucharist help us to keep choosing to hope until the end of time.