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.
Faith in the resurrection lets us see who Jesus is; it illumines the mystery of the Holy Trinity. It enriches our insight that the Three are one.
Continue reading The washing of the feet conveys more than just a precept to be good to the underprivileged; in it, we encounter the mystery of the cross.
Continue reading To be tempted, Christ shows us, is something quite banal, part and parcel of the life of faith in a world that has turned its back on God. What we must guard against is tempting God in our turn.
Continue reading What we celebrate in Holy Week is more than grand historical drama. It is the distillation of the human condition - during these days we are handed the key to unlock the riddle of existence, including our own existence.
Continue reading Why does God not choose more secure, warrantable procedures? Based on his case history, the Lord would not stand a chance confronted with the terms of a modern insurance agency.
Continue reading Truly, we are dealing with something that is greater than all we have so far experienced, greater than all we can cleverly work out, greater even than the most drastic signs of the times. Amen.
Continue reading The diabolical is not a unified principle, it generates strife without intentional order. Evil has no personality - fragmented, it fragments, simply feeding on what is good.
Continue reading The highest form of freedom is not to have choices to make. What's that supposed to mean?
Continue reading In much current discourse about the Church, isn't the presupposed image of Christ almost exclusively this-worldly?
Continue reading On the ocean of humanity's tears sails Christ our God. His ark is the wood of the Cross, the Spirit of truth is the wind in his sails - he bids us sail along, not circularly, round and round, but straight to the harbour.
Continue reading The counsel to ‘clothe the naked’ makes me think of HC Andersen’s tale about the Emperor’s new clothes, a parable that speaks to our image-conscious, vanity-prone times. Even in the Church there is a risk that hypes replace substance.
Continue reading Anyone who regularly prays the rosary will be struck, I think, by a strange, beautiful symmetry running across the four series of mysteries.
Continue reading Don’t we risk falling into a kind of double-speak whereby we gather in church now and again to recite reassuring but ultimately meaningless lovey-dovey formulas before we step back into the ‘real’ world where love has no place and man is to man a wolf?
Continue reading St Eystein is inseparable from the legacy of St Olav. He knew in his body the reality of Olav's powerful intercession as one of that host of witnesses who eternally sing praise before the throne Ezekiel saw, recommending the needs of the Pilgrim Church on earth to God's mercy.
Continue reading In recent times we have heard voices crying, 'I am for Pope Francis', 'and I am for Pope Benedict', while others shout, 'and I am for Pope Pius X'. What a lot of nonsense.
Continue reading Who among us has not experienced that one whom we have known for years suddenly reveals a new side of himself or herself and we are forced to admit: 'I thought I knew him (or her), but I now see I did not'.
Continue reading When I speak of poetry I do not primarily think of pretty verses about flowers, keeping a regular rhythm and end-rhymes. I envisage the poem as an inspired statement of what, otherwise, remains ineffable.
Continue reading To be a mother or father is not limited to the generative act; she is a mother, and he is a father, who allows generated life to be realised in its irreducible otherness.
Continue reading John the Evangelist soars in the firmament, seemingly motionless, yet rising ever higher. He sees hidden and beautiful patterns that can’t be perceived from below.
Continue reading We need not be ashamed of childish fears. It is as a child that God comes to us, to comfort us and free us, and so to make us bearers of freedom and comfort.
Continue reading I am not trying to preach some kind of ideological rant. I am just reminding you that the world of Ahaz and Isaiah is not so very different from ours, which seems to have gone off the rails.
Continue reading The eternal truth of God is made manifest in time, by all means, but to adjust it to a secularised society's expectations is irresponsible to the point of absurdity. The contemporary world must be read, rather, in the light of revealed eternity.
Continue reading In looking, as it were, up and down at the same time, we approach the mystery of Christ, who was incarnate to ‘unite all thing in himself’; who, for being fully God, was fully a man, spreading abroad on this concrete, perspiring earth a fragrance of divinity.
Continue reading Our present condition, even in its moments of ecstasy, is but a noviciate preparing us for a life of eternal abundance.
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