Month: May 2025

Abandonment to Divine Providence

(Acts.1:1-11; Heb.9:24-28, 10:19-23; Lk.24:46-53)

Shortly before he died, my father asked me to read three paragraphs from Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s classic book Abandonment to Divine Providence.

De Caussade (1675-1751) was a French Jesuit priest and writer. Briefly, this is what I read: ‘If you’re looking for God, know that he’s already with you. And if you want to be a saint, then do what the saints did: surrender yourself to God. Let him inspire you.’

He continues: ‘Many people think that God is no longer active in our world, and the best you can do is remember what he said and did long ago. However, they don’t realise that God is still busy inspiring saints today. So, don’t bother copying the lives and writings of others; simply abandon yourself to God.

‘God is constantly working to sanctify and redeem our world, and we can still open ourselves up to him, just as the saints did. And just as they let God transform their hearts and lives, so we can do the same. If we give ourselves to God, he will never stop pouring his graces into us.’

De Caussade concludes: ‘This is the road our ancient fathers took, and this is the way I will go, so that I can speak as they spoke and live as they lived.’ [i]

Over the years, many good people have understood the wisdom of these words. One such person was the French Trappist monk Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard (1858–1935). In the late 1800s, he was elected abbot of the ancient Abbey of Our Lady of Seven Fountains (Sept-Fons), which was then in bad shape.

The community was spiritually weak, and the monastery itself was crumbling.

At first, Chautard tried to recruit new monks and fix the buildings, but then he realised that human effort alone wasn’t enough. He knew that before any physical work could bear fruit, the monks had to deepen their interior life with God.

Some of the monks and donors had been urging him to modernise quickly, but Chautard insisted on trusting in God’s providence. He began emphasising prayer, contemplation and keeping to the monastic rule.

And he taught his monks to regard every duty, including prayer, manual labour, and silence, as a way of surrendering to God’s will.

Spiritual depth, he knew, must come before material success.

In time, the abbey flourished. Through God’s grace, more men joined, the monastery was restored and the Cistercian tradition was revitalised.

Chautard recorded this story in his famous book, The Soul of the Apostolate.[ii]

Like de Caussade, he understood that for any ministry to flourish, it must be underpinned by a strong interior life, where we surrender ourselves to God and his providence in every present moment. This is what my father wanted me to know.

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Ascension, the moment when Jesus farewells his disciples and returns to heaven because his earthly mission is over. He has taught his disciples what they need to know, and now it’s their turn to continue his work.

Jesus knows they will struggle on their own, so he promises to send his Holy Spirit to help them (Jn.14:16). That’s what happens at Pentecost, and we know the Apostles go on to do remarkable things.

Today, Jean-Pierre De Caussade reminds us that Jesus is still sending down his Holy Spirit – through the sacraments and every time we open ourselves up to God and pray.

With God, we are never alone. When we abandon ourselves to God’s divine providence, when we truly trust him, he will fill us with his graces. He will help us.

The Australian Cistercian monk, Michael Casey, says that abandonment isn’t the same as giving up. Genuine abandonment means humbly accepting that I don’t always know what’s good for me, and it means being willing to express our pain to God in prayer.

For abandonment is not stoic indifference. It’s active, not passive. It drives us to use our hardship as a springboard to leap into God’s ambit.

Casey says that we will often find that things are better between us and God if we learn to let go and to confidently place our lives in his hands. [iii]

So, if you want to be holy, become a saint or simply become more fruitful, then it’s time to develop your interior life.

Learn to trust God. He will fill you with his graces.

---

[i] Jean-Pierre De Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence, Cosimo Classics, New York, 2007:27-28

[ii] https://www.mountsaintbernard.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Dom-Chautard-The-Soul-of-the-Apostolate.pdf

[iii] Michael Casey, Balaam’s Donkey, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN., 2018, 2-3.

The Peace Crane

 (Acts 15:1-2, 22-29; Rev.21:10-14, 22-23; Jn.14:23-29)

The world has many symbols for peace. They include the olive branch and white dove, the white poppy, the broken rifle, the classic V sign – and the origami Peace Crane.

The story of the peace crane begins with a little girl, Sadako Sasaki, who was born in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1943. [i]

She was only two years old in 1945 when an atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. It destroyed their home and killed her grandmother and most of her neighbours. But Sadako seemed unhurt and she grew into a happy girl.

Ten years later, when she was 12, she collapsed at school. Sadako was taken to hospital and diagnosed with leukemia.

A friend visited her there, bringing some colourful origami paper. She told Sadako the legendary story of the Japanese crane which lives for a long time. If you fold 1,000 origami paper cranes, she said, your wish will come true.

Sadako really wanted to go home, so she began folding 1,000 paper cranes. As she made each one, she prayed she would get better and said, ‘I will write peace on your wings, and you will fly all over the world.’ Her younger brother hung these birds from the ceiling of her room.

In her book, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, the author Eleanor Coerr says that Sadako only made 644 cranes before she died, and her family and friends made the rest for her.

But in real life, Sadako actually folded over 1400 paper cranes. Although she didn’t get better, she kept making them, not for herself, but for her family. She died saying, ‘I want to be cured, I want to go home, I want to be with my family.’ [ii]

After her death in 1955, Sadako’s classmates raised funds to build a memorial for her and all other children hurt in war. In 1958, the Children’s Peace Monument was opened in Hiroshima’s Peace Park, with a statue of Sadako holding a golden peace crane. It has a plaque which reads: ‘This is our cry. This is our prayer: peace on Earth.’ [iii]

Every year on August 6, the anniversary of the atomic bomb, paper cranes from all over are placed at her memorial – over 10 million each year.

Sadako Sasaki’s colourful paper cranes have become a powerful symbol for peace, which we all need so badly in our world today. But what is peace?

Most people think it’s the absence of noise, trouble and hard work. They think it’s feeling calm and relaxed, and free from stress and danger. But that’s not true peace. That’s worldly peace.

Worldly peace is typically fragile, temporary and conditional, because it depends on what’s happening around you, and that’s hard to control.

True peace, however, comes from God.

In John’s Gospel today, Jesus is talking with his disciples just after the Last Supper. He knows he will die soon; he knows his disciples are frightened. So, he says to them, ‘Don’t be troubled or afraid… my peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you. A peace the world cannot give, this is my gift to you.’

The kind of peace Jesus is talking about is very different to what we normally expect. Firstly, it doesn’t come from any human effort, for it only comes from God. Secondly, it’s internal, rather than external, so it doesn’t depend on what’s happening around us.

Jesus’ peace is a free, spiritual gift. It’s like the calm at the bottom of the ocean. Storms may be raging above, but there’s a wonderful calm deep below the surface.

It means being at peace with God, with ourselves and with our neighbour.

So how can we get some of this peace? 

The only way is by having a close, loving relationship with God, and that means getting to know him and learning to love him.

Peter Kreeft says the goal of love is always intimacy, and God becomes more and more intimate with us as he reveals himself in three stages: first, the Father reveals himself in the Old Testament; then, the Son, in the New Testament; and then, the Holy Spirit, in the Church.

First God is above us, and then he is with us, and then he is in us.

First he is outside us, then he is beside us, and finally he is in us. [iv]

Symbols like Sadako’s peace crane are wonderful for reminding us of what is possible in this world.

But it’s only when you genuinely invite God into your heart and life that his peace will come flooding into your soul.

---

[i] To make your own Origami Peace Crane, go to: https://www.origami-fun.com/origami-crane.html

[ii] https://sadakosasaki.com/

[iii] https://theelders.org/news/masahiro-sasaki-surviving-atomic-bombing-hiroshima-his-sister-sadako-and-his-mission-advance

[iv] Peter Kreeft, Food for the Soul, Cycle C, Word on Fire, Park Ridge, IL. 2021:314.

Love in Any Language

(Acts 14:21-27; Rev.21:1-5; Jn.13:31-33a, 34-35)

In his novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Peter Hoeg says that the Inuit people of Greenland have a hundred words for snow. [i]

They have words for light, wind-blown snow; drifted snow; powdery snow, crusted snow, wet snow, slushy snow and many more.

A hundred words is an exaggeration, I’m told; however, they do have dozens. Why so many? It’s because these hardy people have long relied on clear communication for their survival. The subtleties of ice and snow can mean the difference between life and death.

If such clarity is so important in Greenland, then why do we have so few words for Love in English? Surely love and human relationships with all their complexities are just as important in our society.

In English, we do have a few words for some aspects of love, like affection, fondness and tenderness, but we usually use only one word – Love – to express almost everything, like ‘I love my wife, ‘I love my dog,’ ‘I love food,’ ‘I love my father,’ and ‘I love music.’ They all mean very different things.

When there’s no word for something, it becomes quite easy to ignore it. And when our vocabulary is limited, it can be hard to clearly communicate, or even recognise, our own feelings and intentions.

Slogans like ‘Love is love’ are largely meaningless without clarification. It’s like saying that ‘food is food,’ when we know that there are important differences between various foods.

Sanskrit has 96 words for love, including Anurakti (passionate love), Anuraga (intense love for God), and Sneha (maternal love). The Sami people of Scandinavia have over 200 such words. And Greek famously has four key words: eros, philia, storgé and agape, which we sometimes borrow in English.[ii]

Eros is passionate, romantic love (Song 1:2-4). Philia is friendship or brotherly love (Heb.13:1). Storgé (Stor-jay) is family love (Rom.12:9-10). And Agape is the most profound kind of love. It’s the selfless and unconditional love that Jesus demonstrates when he feeds the hungry and heals the sick, and especially when he sacrifices himself on the Cross.

This is the love Jesus speaks of in today’s Gospel, when he tells us to love one another. It’s what St John means when he says that God is love (1Jn.4:8).

In the early 1920s, Jesus regularly appeared to a Spanish mystic, Sr Josefa Menéndez, in France. With the authorisation of Pope Pius XII, Jesus’ messages have since been published in her book, The Way of Divine Love. [iii]

On 28 November 1922, Jesus told Josefa what he means by Love:

‘I am all love!’ he said. ‘My heart is an abyss of Love.

‘It is Love that created man and all that exists in the world to serve him. It is Love that impelled the Father to give his Son for the salvation of man lost through sin.

‘It was Love that made a very pure virgin, almost a child, renounce the charms of her life in the Temple, consent to become the Mother of God, and accept all the sufferings that divine motherhood was to impose on her.

‘It was Love that compelled me to be born in the harsh, cold winter, poor and deprived of everything.

‘It was Love who hid me for thirty years in the poorest and most total obscurity and the most humble work.

It was Love that made me choose solitude and silence, to live an obscure existence and voluntarily submit to the orders of my Mother and my adoptive father. For Love could see a future vision of many souls who would follow me and take delight in conforming their lives to mine.

‘It was Love that made me embrace all the miseries of human nature. For the Love of my heart saw even further. It knew how many souls in great danger, helped by the actions and sacrifices of many others, would find life again.

‘It was Love that made me suffer the most shameful mockeries and the most horrible torments… to shed all my Blood and to die on the cross to save man and redeem the human race.

‘And Love also saw in the future, all the souls who would unite their sufferings and actions, even the most ordinary ones, to my sufferings and blood, to give me a great number of souls!’

Just as every snowflake is different, so there’s a world of difference between one kind of love and another. God’s extraordinary self-sacrificial love simply cannot be equated with anyone’s love for ice-cream.

So, when you say you love someone, what does that mean?

And if you say that you love God, what do you really mean?

---

[i] Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Picador Modern Classics, New York, 2011

[ii] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves. HarperCollins Religious, London, 2012.

[iii] Sr Josefa Menendez, The Way of Divine Love, Must Have Books, 2023.

Mum Shirl

(Acts 13:14,43-52; Rev.7:9,14-17; Jn.10:27-30)

Ever since Jesus first revealed himself as the Good Shepherd, countless people have tried to follow him by guiding, protecting and nurturing other vulnerable souls.

Some of these good shepherds are widely known, like Mother Teresa and St Francis Assisi, who gave up everything to care for the poor, the sick and the outcast. And Florence Nightingale, who helped wounded soldiers and transformed the nursing profession.

Other shepherds are less well-known, but no less good. Like ‘Mum Shirl’, who devoted her life to caring for poor, lost and homeless indigenous Australians.

Mum Shirl was born Coleen Shirley Perry in Cowra, NSW, in 1924, into a large and very poor family. Because her parents were cattle drovers, she was raised by her grandfather, who taught her to ‘first love yourself, then spread it around’.

Shirley suffered from severe epilepsy, for which she could not get medication. This disrupted her schooling, so her grandfather taught her instead. She could not read or write, but did learn to speak sixteen Aboriginal languages.

She helped to raise her nine brothers and sisters, however the authorities disapproved of their situation and sent them all into state care. In one of her first battles against injustice, Shirley successfully fought for their return.

At sixteen, Shirley met and married a professional Boxer, Darcy Smith. Her first child died in childbirth during an epileptic fit, and she went on to have a second baby. However, fearing her own epilepsy, she placed this child into care.

In the mid-1930s, Mum Shirl’s family moved to Sydney, and one of her brothers was sent to prison. She often visited him and when he was released she continued to visit his friends, encouraging them, supporting them in court, and helping to find their families.

It was here that she got her name, ‘Mum Shirl.’ Whenever she was asked to explain her connection with the prisoners, she always replied, ‘I’m his mum.’ The prison authorities valued her tireless work and gave her access to any prisoner she wanted. The courts also placed countless children in her care.

She lived on a pension, because her epilepsy made a steady job impossible. However, she opened her Sydney home to anyone seeking shelter, including alcoholics and the homeless.

She also managed to rent houses for single mothers, and she helped to establish many important services, including the Aboriginal Legal Service, the Aboriginal Medical Service, the Aboriginal Children’s Service, the Aboriginal Housing Company and a detoxification centre.

From the moment of her birth, Mum Shirl’s life was one of tragedy and hardship. She suffered poverty, poor health and pain, but she never gave up.

What sustained her was her deep faith in Jesus Christ, and the love of those who encouraged and supported her, like her grandfather. She said that her gratitude to those who supported her through her epileptic seizures gave her a deep compassion for others.

By the early 1990s, she had helped to raise over sixty children, and she had improved the lives of countless homeless and disadvantaged Australians.

The Church was always important to Mum Shirl. She received her faith from her grandfather and from her mother, who some called the ‘Mad Roaming Catholic.’ And one of her favourite saints was St Martin de Porres, who devoted his life to serving the downtrodden in Peru.

She played an active role in parish life, and served as an advisor to the Archbishop of Sydney. And in 1998, just before she died aged 73, she was declared ‘one of Australia’s living treasures’ by the National Trust.

Today, on Good Shepherd Sunday, Jesus tells us that he’s the Good Shepherd who does three things for his sheep: he knows them well, he protects them from harm, and he leads them to eternal life.[i]

This describes Mum Shirl’s life. She knew her people well, she did whatever she could for them, and she gave them hope.

Mum Shirl lived by Jesus’ words: ‘I was hungry and you fed me; thirsty and you gave me a drink; naked and you clothed me; sick and you cared for me’ (Mt.25:35-40).

And she listened very carefully when Jesus said, ‘I have come to give liberty to captives and sight to the blind…’ (Lk.4:16-21).

She was a very Good Shepherd, doing whatever she could.[ii]

In what way are you a Good Shepherd to others?

---

[i] The parable of the Good Shepherd is the only parable in John’s Gospel.

[ii] Coleen Shirley Smith (with Bobbi Sykes) Mum Shirl: An Autobiography, Heinemann Publishers, Richmond Victoria, 1981.

The Big Fisherman

(Acts 5:27-32,40-41; Rev.5:11-14; Jn.21:1-19)

Fish was popular in Biblical times, especially among those living near the Sea of Galilee. It was an important part of their diet, culture and economy. Indeed, the Gospels mention fish more often than meat.

One person who made a good living from fishing was St Peter. Church tradition tells us that he was a big man and a strong leader, and along with James and John, he ran a large fishing business (Lk.5:7,11; Mk.1:20; Jn.21:1-3).

Peter came from Bethsaida (which means ‘House of Fishing’). Bethsaida grew enormously during the reign of King Herod Philip. As the demand for fish grew, Peter’s business grew, too.

You might recall that in Luke’s Gospel, soon after Jesus began his public ministry, he approached Peter on the shore while he was cleaning his nets, and he invited him to become a disciple (Lk.5:1-11).

Interestingly, most of Jesus’ disciples fished. Today’s Gospel hints that seven of the twelve were fishermen: Peter, Andrew, James, John, Philip, Thomas and Nathaniel (Jn.21:2,3).

But why choose so many fishers? It’s because the skills you need for fishing are very similar to those you need to be a good apostle: both need to be disciplined, obedient and prepared to learn (Mk.1:18; Lk.5:5-6). Both need to work well with others (Mt.13:47). And both need to be strong, courageous and patient, especially when the work is tough, and the catch is poor.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is again on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. It’s after his resurrection, and his disciples are out fishing. They’ve worked all night and caught nothing, so Jesus calls out, telling them to cast their net on the starboard side. When they do so, they catch 153 big fish.

This is Jesus’ last miracle before his Ascension.

The disciples then excitedly return to shore, where Jesus prepares them a hearty breakfast of bread and fish on a charcoal fire.

Now, this meal is very Eucharistic. Why? It’s because the bread reflects Jesus himself, who we know is the Bread of Life. And together with the fish, it reminds us of Jesus’ many teachings and miracles which involve fish and bread, including his feeding of the multitudes (Mt.14:13-21; Mk.8:16-21).

But why does Jesus serve fish instead of wine? Well, this fish is the fruit of the disciples’ labours and it’s central to their identity and culture, so it binds them together in communion.

But Jesus also loves to make people think, and he recognises the deep symbolism of the fish. The letters of the Greek word for fish, Ichthus, summarise our Christian faith. I (iota) stands for Jesus, X (chi) for Christ, O (theou) for God, U (upsilon) for son, and S (sigma) for Saviour.

So, in Greek the letters read: ‘Iēsous Christos, Theou Uios Sōtēr’, which in English means ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour’.

And of course, in inviting these men to become his disciples, Jesus’ plan is to make them ‘fishers of men’ (Mt.4:19).

Later on, during the Roman persecution, the fish became a secret symbol of the Christian faith, and in the second century, the Latin theologian Tertullian described Christians as ‘little fishes’ led by the ‘Big Fish’, Jesus himself.

Both the bread and the fish in today’s Gospel therefore point to Jesus, who is the spiritual food we need for eternal life.

Now, while the disciples are on that pebbly beach eating their breakfast, Jesus is aware that Peter hasn’t forgiven himself for the mistakes he has made, like publicly denying him three times.

But Jesus knows that there’s much more to him than this, so he gives him a chance to undo the past and begin again. Jesus turns to him and three times asks, ‘Do you love me?’

Each time Peter replies, ‘Yes, Lord’.

The other disciples are looking on, and they hear Jesus say to Peter, if you really love me, then ‘feed my lambs’ and ‘take care of my sheep’.

They witness Jesus asking Peter to lead his Church, and as we know, he goes on to become the first Pope.

Peter was a big man who was headstrong and sometimes made mistakes, just as we do. However, he also had a big heart and a healthy dose of humility, and this allowed him to grow and mature.

With God’s grace he rose to Jesus’ challenge. He changed his career by becoming a fisher for men. He also became a shepherd, caring for Jesus’ flock of sheep.

Peter teaches us that failure is never final.

New life always awaits us if we truly believe in Jesus Christ.