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Closure Of Site
Over the last few years I have written and maintained this website, using it as a place to document my thoughts and views, mainly on subjects relating to the practice of my faith. I have enjoyed doing this and it can be enlightening to go back and to read earlier posts some time after writing them, to see if those thoughts have changed or remained the same. The nature of the posts makes them fairly personal, I suppose, and because of this – and the broad subject matter – it places them within a particular niche. Now, the numbers of people reading the posts was never what it was all…
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A Synodal Prayer
I composed a prayer with synodal intentions which I thought I might reproduce here. This prayer is especially for the ‘local Churches’ in whichever diocese and whatever area or place we find ourselves within the broader Church. All of the quotations within the text of the prayer are taken directly from the Final Synthesis Report of the first session of the Synod of Bishops. I hope you might find it useful. Merciful Lord, thank You for the faith which acknowledges that this gift of the Synod is “a time of grace which encourages us” and which invites us to “a mode of being Church”. Give us the hope,…
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A Message Of Mercy
Christ is merciful – indeed, He is mercy itself. He sees the needs not only of each one of us as individual human beings, but also as a human family. He sees the faults and failings we have as people and as a society, the selfishness and sinfulness which is present amongst all of us, and the consequences of all the wrong decisions we make because of our human fallibility. And yet despite all this, He loves us – and His love is infinite. Because that love is given to us “whilst we were still sinners”, as St Paul describes it eloquently, we call it ‘mercy’ – mercy is a…
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Gifts Of Grace
One of the marks of a Catholic life are the reception of the Sacraments, from birth right through to death. We begin with baptism – the point at which our lives as Christians begin – and later move on to the sacraments of Reconciliation, first Holy Communion and ultimately Confirmation. Later still, we may receive either the Sacrament of Matrimony or that of Holy Orders. Here in our parish, one of those great Sacraments was celebrated last night – the Sacrament of Confirmation. This Sacrament of ‘Confirmation’ is the Church’s way of declaring that we have reached a certain maturity in our understanding and practice of the Catholic faith –…
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The Architecture of Sin and Grace
The world generally struggles with the concept of the existence of ‘sin’. We are, the world tells us, ‘generally good people’ who – for the most part, live ordinary lives and don’t really do terrible things. And that may indeed be the case – in which case this view is broadly correct; but regardless, it says little about the existence of sin in itself. For the Catholic and for the Christian there is no real doubt about it – sin exists. Further, it exists not only at the grand level but also at the very personal level. Regardless of the varying types and degrees and categories, still it is sin.…
