05/07/2025

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jesus said, “go your way”

Thanks to our baptism, we each have a ‘way’, a vocation. The Church recognises four  vocations in Christian life: marriage, single life, religious life and priesthood.

For the first 30 years of my life I was single. Then, aged 30, I was ordained as priest.

Within that priesthood, I have had a wide variety of roles. Underpinning each, was a desire – a hope – to help people get to know, and live their lives with the real God.

How about you and your friends – including, I hope, your family? Worth a ponder to see  how – and why - you live your life, when you are on your summer holiday and have time to think – and discuss important things with you closest and dearest.

Whenever I am called ’father’, I am reminded that my role is to nurture, instruct, and guide my communities – which includes you - in faith, love and hope, similar to a father's – and mother’s -  role in a family.

As parents worry about the food and drink they feed their family, I worry about the spiritual nourishment I hand out each Sunday.

Is what I am going to preach, going to help? Will it increase your knowledge, hope and peace?

As you know, the topics I choose, spring up out of each Sunday’s gospel. 

If there is something on which you would like me focus, just ask; perhaps putting the topic on our Sunday Coffee Klatsch – at which I frequently look, even though I rarely place anything.