First Holy Communion Photographs

Celebrated during Mass on 26th June 2011 - The Feast of Corpus Christi

The dignity of the body

My sermon for last Sunday, 5th Sunday in Lent, Year A:

A common pagan religious belief in Old Testament times and in Jesus' time was that human beings are made up of a body and a soul, and that when we die our soul separates from our body and carries on existing in some kind of eternal, purely spiritual realm.

"Consider that you might be mistaken"

My sermon for the fourth Sunday in Lent, Year A:

The lines from the First Book of Samuel in the first reading today make up one of many Scripture passages that highlight the difference between God's way of thinking and ours, and, maybe more precisely, the difference between the qualities of character that God seeks out in a person when he wants him or her to carry out some aspect of his work, and the qualities that we tend to find admirable or striking.

Living Water

My sermon for last Sunday, the Third Sunday of Lent, Year A:

One of the commonest metaphors in the Bible is the metaphor of hunger and thirst. Spiritually we have a need for God parallel to our physical need for food and water.

Jesus employed that metaphor when he said that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God, and he uses the same kind of image here when he says that whoever drinks ordinary water will get thirsty again, whereas the water that he gives will turn into a spring, welling up to eternal life.

Our spiritual journey

My sermon for last Sunday, 2nd Sunday in Lent, Year A:

You could say that the readings today are about three journeys: Abraham's, Christ's, and ours.

The first reading describes an ancient and mysterious event: God's call to Abraham to uproot himself, to leave his old country and his old way of life behind and to set off for a new country and a new life under God's direction.

Reception into the Full Communion of the Catholic Church

Yesterday at the 4.30pm Mass Alex Rae was received into the Church and confirmed. After Mass we had a party in the house to celebrate. We managed to get a lot of photographs of the occasion and even some videos of parts of the Mass. Here are some of them.

The World, the Flesh and the Devil

The Devil presenting St Augustine with the Book of Vices

My sermon for the First Sunday of Lent, Year A:

The readings today, appropriately enough for the beginning of the penitential season of Lent, revolve around the weakness of our human nature, our inclination towards sin and self-seeking, and our susceptibility to temptation. They invite us to reflect on the wisdom, the realism and the compassion of Christian spirituality on these subjects, especially on what we might call the psychology of temptation.

Lent: our annual spiritual refresher course

My sermon for Ash Wednesday:

Every celebration of Mass begins with the Penitential Rite, as we call it. We prepare to meet Christ and receive Christ in the Eucharist by pausing for a moment, right at the start of Mass, and turning our attention to our faults, our weaknesses, the areas of our life where we fall short of the standard of Christian holiness. We apologise to God and we ask him to give us strength in our future struggles.

Lent is a whole season of the Church Year dedicated to this aspect of Christian spiritual life.

"De-chavving" the car park

The bushes around the car park had gradually grown very tall and, following a suggestion at the last parish council meeting, I arranged to have them cut down a bit, making the car park and the church entrance far more visible from the street.

"Worldly prudence"

Mr Worldly Wiseman from Bunyan's  
The Pilgrim's Progress

An addendum to Sunday's sermon, courtesy of F.P. Harton in his book The Elements of the Spiritual Life. The book was first published in 1932 and Harton, an Anglican clergyman and sometime Dean of Wells Cathedral, obviously belonged to the High Church party of the Church of England. My second-hand copy is a 1957 reprint, but the book is apparently available in a modern edition.

A house built on rock

My sermon for the 9th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A:

The gospel reading today brings to a close a long and important section of Saint Matthew's Gospel: Jesus' Sermon on the Mount.

This great exposition of Jesus' moral teaching covers chapters five, six and seven of Matthew's Gospel and there are some disadvantages in dividing it into several short segments, as in the gospel readings for Mass over the last five or six Sundays. It's a good idea to read all three chapters together, to get a picture of the whole charter of Christian moral life, or the way of God's Kingdom.

Consider the lilies....

My sermon for last Sunday, 8th in Ordinary Time, Year A:

There's a story about one of the hermits living in the desert in the fourth or fifth century, who came back to his hermitage one day to find a couple of robbers making off with his few possessions. Instead of protesting or trying to stop them, he began to help them remove his few goods from the house. He seemed to look on the experience of being robbed as a test of his vow of poverty or an opportunity to show, even to himself, his level of non-attachment to material things.

Education Sunday

Yesterday was "Education Sunday" and Bishop Regan wrote this Pastoral Letter on the subject of Catholic Education:

"But I say this to you...": Christ's new standard

My sermon for 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A:
The religion of the Old Testament is criticised sometimes for being too legalistic, but I think that's a mistake and a misrepresentation.

The faith of the Chosen People didn't revolve around a set of harsh rules; their faith revolved around the character of God, especially his quality of loving-kindness or steadfast love (hesed in Hebrew, a word that's used hundreds of times in the Old Testament to describe the main quality of God's character).

Your light must shine among men

My sermon last Sunday, 5th in Ordinary Time, Year A:

The instruction that Jesus offers in these few lines of the gospel seems at first glance to contradict the teaching he gave on other occasions, along the lines that when we pray, or fast or give alms, we should do it in secret, and God, who alone sees what we do in secret, will reward us.

The Poor in Spirit

My sermon for last Sunday, 4th in Ordinary Time, Year A:

There's a type of person in the Bible who is held up as an ideal or a model of faith in God: the poor humble man, or the poor righteous man.

In many places the authors of the Old Testament draw an approving picture of the person whose material circumstances are insecure, who is under no illusions about his or her lowly social status and lack of influence, but who persists in devotion to God and in trying to live a good moral life, in keeping with God's Law.

Burns Supper

January always seems a bit of an anti-climax after December, but today is an excuse to celebrate! The same inventive Scots who gave you Hogmanay and the first hangover of the year gave us Burns night - Rabbie Burns (1759-1796) came from a family of small to middling Ayrshire farmers who, although far from wealthy, made sure he got a good education.

Unity in the Church

"It has been reported to me...that there is quarreling among you..."

My sermon for last Sunday, 3rd in Ordinary Time, Year A:

In the few short lines of today's second reading it seems that Saint Paul is anxious to restore the spirit of unity and harmony to the divided Corinthian church. Differences of opinion have in some way solidified into separate factions. Church members have grouped themselves around a number of individual leaders - including Paul himself.

Jesus Christ the one true way to God

Yesterday's sermon, for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time,Year A:

John the Baptist's words about Jesus - "there is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" - encapsulate a conviction which is central to the Christian faith. The human race is fallen, separated from God. The way we are now - prone to selfishness and evil in all sorts of ways - isn't the way God made us or intended us to be.

Trip to Wrexham

Last Saturday afternoon the altar servers, their parents and friends took a trip down to Wrexham  - first of all to see a Pax Christi exhibition in the cathedral.

Penance, Prayer & Service

My sermon for yesterday, the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. I can't pretend that the idea is my own; I nicked it from this book, by the Jesuit academic, Patrick Madigan.

The men and women who were baptised by John in the river Jordan were answering his appeal to repent their past sins and make a new start in their relationship with God, and that means that there's a bit of a puzzle in Jesus presenting himself for baptism, because he didn't need to leave behind a life of sin and re-dedicate himself to God.

The Collect for the First Sunday after the Epiphany

O LORD, we beseech thee mercifully
to receive the prayers of thy people
who call upon thee; and grant that they
may both perceive and know what things
they ought to do, and also may have grace
and power faithfully to fulfil the same;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Epiphany: "children come to the children's king"

A few edifying photographs taken at the end of the 4.30pm Mass on Sunday. A box of frankincense and myrrh miraculously appeared too, but no gold - it must have ended up in the Gold-for-Cash shop in Vale Street.

Epiphany

My sermon for last Sunday, the feast of the Epiphany:

There are passages of the Old Testament which look forward to a time when God's gift of salvation will be offered not just to the Chosen People but to the whole of humanity. The great theme of today's feast, the Epiphany of the Lord, is that with the birth of Jesus that time has arrived.