Here I have put together a selection of homilies. The Word of God is ‘alive and active’ says the Letter to the Hebrews. That is not to say that it lives a hidden organic life we can trace through a microscope, as if it were a virus; but that it is inspired, a bearer of God’s eternal Spirit. Therefore it resounds to this day with quite as much force as when it was first spoken. It ever has something new to say. The preacher’s first task is to listen intently to this Word at once ancient and new, then to make his own, necessarily limited words its vehicles. I have not been able to provide translations of texts in other languages; but if you rummage around a little you will find a fair amount of material in English.
Our foot no longer strikes against the rock; the freeing chain of love has been restored; God's thread is once again perfect and runs, faster than the pen of any scribe, to complete redemption's wondrous tapestry; the round dance continues.
Continue reading The sight of Moses at a hundred-and-twenty being told he cannot enter the promised land towards which his life-long endeavour has been directed may seem to us unfair.
Continue reading The image of Francis and Clare is thickly overlaid with hippified sentiment. If we’re not careful, they can appear as cartoon figures bounding along through the poppy fields singing happy songs on their way to perform some act of kindness to animals.
Continue reading How vital for those who have glimpsed the light to hold it up as a torch in others’ darkness, to infuse our time’s hopeless torpor with hope! God ‘desires all men to be saved’ - why should we be less ambitious?
Continue reading The young Englishman said to the prioress, 'Oh Mother, just a small thing: there doesn’t seem to be an ashtray in my room'.
Continue reading Father Bede Jarrett, in his life of Dominic, stresses the kindness and joyousness that, in this humane, amiable saint, coexisted with immense austerity.
Continue reading It is sometimes said that we need, these days, a ‘re-sacralisation’ of the liturgy and Christian practice. This is not false, I believe, but we need to be careful: let us not consider ‘sacralisation’ an end in itself - the pursuit of idealised ‘sacredness’ easily leads to idolatry, for man is inclined to envisage it as a reflection of himself.
Continue reading Moses, we read, was ‘the meekest man on the face of the earth’. This meekness was acquired through battle.
Continue reading A man, a woman just isn’t a battery hen. Endowed with consciousness, we reflect on life, we realise how fragile it is, ‘like changing grass’.
Continue reading Constraints are lifted; at the same time, limitations are imposed. Freedom calls for both.
Continue reading Olav was many-faceted, made up of tensions, not humanly idealisable. It is no coincidence that art often shows him treading underfoot a dragon carrying his own features: he knew the Old Adam well; but was all the more fascinated by the New.
Continue reading St Olav's path was singular, but we must all walk one like it away from avarice, greed, and the thirst for status towards a given, trustful, Christlike life.
Continue reading If the Lord withdraws a consolation on which we have counted, if we no longer find sensible relief in a given prayer or practice, it is not necessarily a sign that we have been abandoned or are passing through a stage of inward dryness. It may instead be a positive prompt to keep moving, not to get stuck in set expectations.
Continue reading Martha and Mary are a reference far beyond Christian and Biblical circles, seen as opposite character types, Enneagram-codes in conflict. This is too reductive, though.
Continue reading I thought of St Sunniva when Peter Thiel mentioned a freezing party he had attended in the early noughties, presenting offers to deep-freeze people until such a time when science, hypothetically, would have found an ambrosia that might ensure them endless existence.
Continue reading The Church recognises in Mary the new Eve who realises that lovely name: at last, after millennial waiting, the human being is reborn in Christ as truly a living being, not just someone apt to survive for a while in this world, but capable of eternal life.
Continue reading At Lauds this morning the Church let us pray, 'Lord, destroy sin in the world!' Now, that's what I call a prayer.
Continue reading May the Spirit grant us ability to distinguish between what is true and what is fake.
Continue reading Går vi, som Guds folk, fremad mot hans lys for å forvandles, eller søker vi tilflukt i skyggefulle gjemmer, for der å bli ved det vante? Dét er spørsmålet vår enhet, vår hensiktsmessighet, og derved vår bestand som Guds folk, hans hellige folk, avhenger av.
Continue reading If Christ lives in us he himself will, by his presence, accomplish his work of blessing, exhortation, and healing. Reality, meeting him, will constitutionally leap for joy.
Continue reading To 'recall' the words of Jesus is about more than learning a few pious phrases by rote. It is about acquiring a true perception of reality, about seeking stable criteria that let us understand, discern, and choose well in order, thus, to contribute to a society founded on rock, not on shifting sands or in the middle of a sinking, fetid swamp.
Continue reading To love as God loves is to nurture the existence and thriving of others while having no truck with death, resisting anger, bitterness, spite, all those mortiferous passions that put out grace’s flame and make us ungracious, causing us to subsist in a kind of living death, for it is quite possible to have a regular pulse and a normal digestion yet to be soul-dead.
Continue reading Often we may feel like the Biblical owl among ruins, hooting watchers in the night perched on the rubble of yesterday’s sureties. We must face an uncomfortable fact amply evidenced in Sacred Scripture - God cares less than we for monuments of reassurance.
Continue reading At times we may find that life is like a vast resonant room in which threatening and comforting voices outshout, or outwhisper, one another. We must choose, then, which to follow, we must know how to tell the voices apart.
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