Dear brothers and sisters, in the second and the third Sunday of Advent, the gospel talks about John the Baptist two times in row, calling us to prepare our heart, to make a straight way for the Lord.

As we have moved into the second Sunday of Advent, we are invited to spend some time examining ourselves and preparing our hearts for the upcoming celebrations of our Saviour’s birth.

Today I was reading the Gospel story from Luke (18:35) on the blind man who called out to Jesus and then to our amazement, Jesus asks him “what do you want me to do for you?” and the man answers, “Lord, please let me see?”. If you spend some time with this ‘parable’, and I really mean it is a parable and not simply a nice little story, you can see that it can push you to different levels of understanding, writes Fr Nick de Groot SVD.

Another way of talking about “spending some time with the parable” is contemplation. In the quiet and silence of your heart, the Word of God will bring you to a different place, to a wider and bigger understanding, a more inclusive and compassionate understanding of many things – self, others, God, and everything.

The SVD AUS Province marked All Soul’s Day this month by holding a special Remembrance Ritual for all confreres who lost loved ones during the pandemic and were not able to say goodbye in person.

In the ‘Pause to Remember’ ritual, Provincial Fr Asaeli Rass SVD invited some confreres from different countries to share their experience of loss during the period when people could not return home due to border closures.

Pope Francis has announced that former Provincial of the SVD Australia Province, Fr Tim Norton SVD, will become an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Brisbane.

Fr Tim, who has been in ministry in Italy, will early next year join Auxiliary Bishop Ken Howell in supporting Archbishop Mark Coleridge in serving the Catholics of Brisbane Archdiocese.

Young people in SVD parishes and migrant chaplaincies in Australia will be invited to join an exciting new initiative, ‘SVD Youth’, which launched in Queensland on Sunday.

The SVD Youth is an offshoot of the SVD AUS Province’s Vocations Ministry and aims to gather young people together for mission formation and to nourish and support them in their spiritual journey.

Five young Divine Word Missionaries have been ordained to the priesthood and, if international borders remain open, will soon leave for their missionary assignments in countries across the globe.

Duc Le from Vietnam, Edward Teye from Ghana, Hai Nguyen from Vietnam and Francois Andrianihantana and Marius Razafimandimby, both from Madagascar were ordained on Saturday, November 27, by Bishop Terence Curtin, Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne, at the Our Lady of La Vang Shrine in Keysborough, Victoria.

In Australia and New Zealand, we are  familiar with the presence of people on TV using sign language. When an important announcement is made, the speaker is accompanied by an interpreter who uses sign language to speak to the deaf audience.

For us who are living here in Australia, royalty is not far from our national consciousness. There’s hardly a week that we don’t have news about Queen Elizabeth and the royal family.

We are coming to the end of the Liturgical Year and the readings of this Sunday speak to us of the end of the world, the end of time, the final coming of Jesus to take all peoples and all creation to himself.