There can be no “good” time for something like the coronavirus to come upon us, but at least in Lent, a penitential season, we have a spiritual perspective which might help us to face it with some sense of meaning and purpose. At the beginning of Lent we...
The three ways in which Jesus is tempted embrace the three fundamental types of sin from which all others come. The first is the worship of the body. Jesus is tempted to use his freedom to heed the flesh, in this case by satisfying his hunger, rather than...
The darkness and death on Golgotha were not just events restricted to that time and place. Everything in the earthly sojourn of Jesus has relevance for every time and place given that he experienced these things not only as man but also as God. And so the darkness...
If you were French, the word “Lent” would mean “slow.” So, the season of Lent would somehow mean a season of slowing down or even a “go slow.” Slowing down in what sense, though? Might it mean cutting back on prayer, going slow on going to Mass? Not likely!...
Those of us over forty probably all have a set of scales in the bathroom. It’s no fun, bleary-eyed first thing in the morning, to approach the scales with trepidation that yet another few pounds have mysteriously appeared! We are quick to let friends know when we lose a...
On these recent Ordinary Sundays of the Church’s year, our second reading is taken from the first letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians. Corinth was an ancient Greek city with 90,000 inhabitants in 400 BC. The Romans demolished it in 146 BC and built a new city...
My father had an “odd couple” of favourites. One was John Wayne, the other Mario Lanza. He would always insist on saying Mario Lanzo, with an “o”, especially when my mother would point out it was Mario Lanza, with an “a”! Towards the end of his life,...
The mood in our aeroplane was subdued as we began the descent to cold and cloudy Glasgow Airport on our return from sunny Gran Canaria. Once we had touched down, the recorded message was played with the usual strained cheeriness, telling us not to put on our mobile phones,...
We all like people who are prepared to get their hands dirty and not just sit in their armchair and talk about what everyone else should be doing. You could describe the coming of God in our human nature, body and soul, as God getting his hands dirty with...
To contemplate the Crib on the feast of the Epiphany is to contemplate the joining of opposites. The star points us to the skies, both to the universe and to heaven itself; the stable points us to the earth. The shepherds are the poor, the magi the rich; the...
