During this Christmas Season, I am sure we have been touched by the rich expanse of our human story that this Season offers in utter simplicity.

The account in Luke’s gospel of Mary going to visit her cousin Elizabeth tells us that Our Lady “arose and went with haste” to share the joy she carried in her heart and in her womb, reflected Pope Francis in last Sunday’s Angelus address.

“She arose and went. In the last stretch of the journey of Advent, let us be guided by these two verbs. To arise and to go in haste: these are the two movements that Mary made and that she invites us also to make as Christmas approaches.”

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.

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.

Bula from Fiji, where I am at home, visiting my family, especially my mother who is struggling health-wise. What a gift it is to have our travel borders beginning to open up again.

The pandemic lockdown period gave us missionaries and many others, a taste of what it must have been like for our first missionaries, including St Joseph Freinademetz, who left their home and family knowing they would most likely never return.

We now live in a world that is becoming more complicated. Just look at the internet. I listen to parishioners who are complaining of their difficulty in keeping up with technology.

Recently I was reading the book “Seeking Spirituality” by Ronald Rolheiser, reflects Fr James Aricheera SVD. I found this book to be a good guide for those who are seeking spirituality. According to him, three main things hinder one from interiority and spiritual experiences. They are “Narcissism, pragmatism and unbridled restlessness”.

To get a general understanding of them he writes, “Defined simply, narcissism means excessive self-preoccupation; pragmatism means excessive focus on work, achievement, and the practical concerns for life; and restlessness means an excessive greed for experience, an over-eating, not in terms of food but in terms trying to drink in too much of life”. When I reflected further on this, I realised that many of us have those things in us, but we are not aware of it.

What a weird world it would be if we took today’s Gospel at face value! Jesus spoke about cutting-off body parts and plucking-out one’s eyes. Did he really mean that his followers should do this?