The Ugly Truth

We talk about the pursuit of Truth, of Veritas. When will we admit that Truth rarely comes dressed for dinner parties? It does not arrive ribbon-tied, polished, or polite. Think instead of Jesus on the cross: disfigured, broken, utterly human. Not a sight we would post on our Instagram feed or even on Facebook. And yet this is the greatest Truth of all.

The truth about a person is just as raw. To love is to love, not to curate, edit, or demand. Mel Robbins says it plainly enough: it’s not our job to change someone else. Every person carries ways of being that resonate with us and ways that jar against our sensibilities. Maybe the holier practice is not in reshaping others but in learning to sit with the jarring. Because running off to complain and demanding someone change? That doesn’t transform them, it simply breeds falseness. And falseness is a thin disguise that always wears through.

Jesus warned: take the plank out of your own eye first. Not a metaphor reserved for ‘those other people.’ He meant me. He meant you. We all drag around planks of our own: blind to their weight, yet others can see them clearly. Are we prepared to let Truth confront us? To be humbled by what it reveals? It hurts. But humility grows there, and humility – real humility – is aspirational, a trait worth pursuing with every fibre of our being.

Truth matters and is grounded in fact. Vanity does not and it crumbles under the weight of the cross. Truth endures, scars and all. Truth emerges from our brokenness. Truth is reflected in what we do SO much more than what we say. So ACT for Truth. And leave your fragile hang-ups at home.

As a friend once said, with more wisdom than I can muster:

It is a sad fact that the populous today try to make themselves look good by making other people look bad. They do not achieve anything themselves just mince around in their entitled angry little bubble. Trying to knock down everyone who achieves more than them, which is pretty much ‘everyone’. There is no sense of honour or majesty in those people, they wander around with superior self-importance while their soul shuffles around like a diseased rat.

Truth.

A prayer

Loving God,

We walk through life knowing the world holds illness, loss and struggle. Yet when those shadows touch our own circle, we feel the tremor of our own mortality and the fear of meaning slipping away. Suffering is not just pain but the unravelling of our story. Be with us as we stand beside one another in these unraveled places. May our presence, honesty and love be threads of hope that begin weaving meaning back together.

Amen.

We all want heaven. What are we doing about it?

Aquinas says our true end is happiness in God and that charity gives shape to every other virtue. If that’s true, then everyday life becomes deeply theological: how we answer emails, correct a misunderstanding, or hold a boundary is either training our hearts for heaven or dragging them away. Personal formation is not an add-on; it is the craft of becoming the kind of people who could bear the weight of glory. We often think about carrying a cross but how often do we think of the call to carry that sort of glory?

We taste heaven whenever truth is spoken (preferably kindly) but at least with clarity, forgiveness interrupts a spiral, or the most vulnerable are placed at the centre. We set our compass toward the Beatitudes and let them measure our success: Are the poor blessed here or is it those who are already in possession of so much? Do the peacemakers get room to work? God meets us in the real, not the ideal. God meets us in the mess, in the broken moments, in the alternate views (after all Jesus was pretty alternate in his time to the chief priests and many others). How dangerous is the world if all have to conform to one view, it is the different lenses in life that help us see things we would not see otherwise making us wiser, richer, stronger, kinder.

Three small fidelities for the week:

Begin with presence. Before your first activity, conversation, even your first coffee (scary thought I know), sit for a moment with God.

See with preference. In every decision ask, Who benefits? Who is left out? Tilt the table toward the person in your life who is most challenged and challenging.

Bless aloud. Name the good you see in a colleague’s patience, a child’s effort, a loved one’s courage. Heaven grows where gratitude is spoken.

‘Everybody wants to go to heaven’ is not a slogan about later; it is a charge for now. We contemplate and then hand on the fruits. Veritas becomes mercy in motion. In a Jubilee Year of hope as we continue our pilgrimage of life, we apprentice one another in love. And that, is what we are doing about it.

Lifted UP

There is something profoundly human about the Feast of the Assumption. It is a moment that does not draw us away from our humanity, even though at first glance it may seem otherworldly as Mary is taken body and soul into heaven (a concept that challenges the finite human cognition), rather it plunges us into the depths of the gift of life.

Mary is not assumed because she was an angel, flawless and untouched by the struggles of ordinary life. She was a woman of her people: cooking, cleaning, grieving, laughing, enduring whispers of gossip and carrying in her body the daily weariness of work and motherhood. She lived in obscurity, in the small and often unseen corners of Galilee. And yet, it is this woman, the one who said yes in an unremarkable town, whom the Church proclaims is lifted fully into God’s eternal embrace.

For those of us who carry loss, fatigue, or longing, the Assumption offers hope. It reminds us that no part of our lives is wasted in God’s eyes. The ordinary and hidden choices, the yes whispered quietly in faith, the grief we shoulder with love. These are gathered up, honoured, and ultimately transformed.

Mary’s Assumption tells us something more radical still: heaven is not far away. It is not a remote reward at the end of life, but a reality already pressing in on us, already present wherever love takes hold. When Mary is lifted into heaven she becomes for us a signpost, a declaration that our humanity is not destined for decay but for glory.

The Assumption is not only about Mary’s glory. In a way it is also about ours. Mary’s life is a promise of what God intends for all creation: redemption that does not abandon the body but transfigures it. In a culture that often separates the spiritual from the material, the Assumption insists that what we do with our bodies – our gestures of tenderness, the meals we share, the injustices we confront, the hands we extend – matters to God. Our salvation is not an escape from the physical, but a fulfilment of it.

So perhaps today we might ask: what in my own life longs to be lifted up? What might God be drawing into the light, promising not to erase but to transfigure? Like Mary, may we find the courage to say yes to that promise.

The Weight of What Is Gone: A Theology of Loss

There are days when absence barks louder than presence.

Loss is not a chapter we choose, yet it writes itself into the margins of our lives. It is in silence as you enter a space, follow routine, or go to say good morning or good night. We do not invite grief, but she enters anyway, barefoot and solemn, bringing with her a strange kind of wisdom that burns before it blesses.

The theology of loss is not tidy. It is not a doctrine to be memorised or a creed to be recited. It is more like a psalm: part lament, part longing, part protest, wholly holy. It echoes Job’s cry from the ash heap and Mary’s silence beneath the Cross. It finds its centre in a God who does not remain distant from sorrow, but bleeds.

There is no resurrection without Good Friday. No empty tomb without a stone first sealing the dark. And what darkness there can be!

To lose is to become aware that we are not our own.  That all we love, all we are, is gift. And perhaps this is why it hurts so much. For in loss we are reminded that we are creatures of dust and breath, of love and finitude. We ache because we have loved. And we continue to love even when what we love is gone. It is the Holy Saturday of moments, when hope feels buried and God seems silent.

The theology of loss calls us not to deny pain, but to dwell in it honestly, trusting that Christ walks even here. In the shadowed valley, in the empty bed, in the unused lead, and the tail that no longer wags. The Incarnation tells us that God became flesh not just to preach and to heal, but to weep. To lose. To be broken. As people we are made to love and so we are made to grieve.

Loss is a teacher none of us want, yet it reveals a sacred truth: the world is not ours to control. But it is ours to love. And when we love, we risk. The deeper the love, the deeper the grief. But also: the deeper the grace.

So we sit with loss not as those without hope, but as those who carry wounds that are being slowly transformed, not erased, but transfigured. Scars remain, but they shine.

And we will see that loss, though cruel and real, is not the final word.

Love is.

Jubilee Hospitality

In this Jubilee year hospitality is about encounter not entertainment. At the table of our encounter we offer belonging, not simply food. It is the offer of a seat at the table that matters most.

In a world addicted to efficiency and exhausted by division, hospitality is an act of resistance. We need to remember we are human beings, not human doings. To slow down, to see, to share. These are countercultural acts. To welcome those who cannot repay you. To invite someone who believes differently. To set the table even when your life feels messy. To bring out your best plates. To pause and celebrate on a weekday that is not your birthday or an anniversary.

To practice Jubilee hospitality is to live as if we truly believe that every human being bears the image of God — even those we are tempted to ignore. It means that the refugee is not a problem to be solved but a guest to be honoured. That the lonely elder is not a statistic but a bearer of wisdom. That the enemy is not outside the bounds of grace.

In the Jubilee, walls fall and doors open. Not just the ones made of bricks, but the ones we build inside ourselves. Hospitality is how we hold space until justice catches up.

Sacred in a shifting world

There’s a strange discomfort that comes with the word tradition these days. It can feel like an anchor, a shackle or a heavy weight at times., depending on who’s holding it. In secular discourse, tradition is often seen as the antithesis of progress – something dusty, rigid, inherited without interrogation. Sometimes, in my Church, it’s weaponised as a shield against uncertainty or as a reason to refuse evolution. I suggest that tradition, rightly understood, is neither nostalgia nor control. It is a living memory. A sacred inheritance. A tether to meaning in a time that so often seems dislocated and disoriented.

Fidelity does not mean stasis. We are called to deepen, to unfold the truth that has been handed down, not merely to parrot it back. If tradition is to mean anything in a Church that still dares to call itself Catholic (universal) then it must remain both rooted and responsive. Aquinas reminds us that veritas (truth) is the conformity of the intellect to reality. But reality shifts. Cultures evolve. Voices once silenced – women, the poor, the marginalised – now rise with a clarity and urgency that simply can no longer be ignored. To pretend that divine truth can only be understood in a single register is not orthodoxy. It is idolatry of the familiar. We are not called to abandon tradition, far from it, but we are called to ask: What do we honour? And what have we enshrined that was never holy to begin with?

Let’s be honest. Some traditions have protected the sacred. Others have protected power. The two are not the same and to name this is not betrayal, it is fidelity to the Gospel. Jesus himself was not a curator of comfort. He was deeply formed in the Jewish tradition, yet radically open to the Spirit’s work beyond it. He healed on the Sabbath. He touched the unclean. He restored dignity before he enforced rules.

In today’s secularised world where individualism is exalted and truth is often reduced to personal opinion, tradition offers something essential: a way of anchoring identity in a reality more enduring than algorithms or passing trends. Yet tradition cannot speak to the modern heart unless it learns to breathe anew. Karl Rahner once warned that “the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not be at all”, a line that feels less like prophecy and more like necessity in our disenchanted age. The task of tradition now is not to retreat into self-preservation, but to open itself to wonder, to mysticism, to silence, to the slow, unfolding work of the Spirit who, as John’s Gospel promises, “will lead you into all truth.” But that kind of openness requires courage. Especially from women. Especially from those on the margins. When we speak of evolving tradition, we are often accused of threatening the foundations.  If the foundations are divine, they will not crumble. And if they do crumble perhaps they were not divine to begin with.

We must learn to distinguish between what is sacred and what is merely familiar. The Incarnation itself (God made flesh) was a scandalous act of tradition’s evolution. The infinite clothed itself in time. The eternal entered history. Tradition is not about preserving the exact form of the jar. It’s about protecting the water within.

So let us honour tradition. Let us light the candles, sing the psalms, receive the sacraments with awe. But let us also make room. Let us not confuse faithfulness with fear. Let us risk reimagining, not because we want to leave the Church behind, but because we believe in her enough to want her whole.

We need tradition. But we also need fire.
We need memory. But we also need prophecy.
And we need the Church – not just as it was, but as it could be.

Because tradition, at its best, is not the silence of the past.
It is the echo of God still speaking.

Looking for the dead

We begin at the tomb—don’t we always? Early in the morning, like Mary Magdalene, or hiding behind closed doors like Thomas. We want proof. A body. Something cold and sealed and heavy with certainty. We want to lay hands on what’s no longer alive because, frankly, it’s easier to believe in death than in resurrection.

The apostles were not immune to this. Resurrection wasn’t their assumption; it was an interruption. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him” (John 20:2). Their grief was not just about loss—it was about disorientation. This was not the story they had planned. And so they searched for the last known location of Jesus, as though the living God could be GPS-tracked by grief. As though the author of life would be courteous enough to remain buried.

We too are searching for dead things. Not just bodies, but certainty. Closure. Finality. We cling to what is fixed because resurrection—new life, transformation, hope—is unpredictable. It demands faith, not evidence. It’s a risk. Easier to stay in the dark with the smell of burial linens than to step into light that shatters everything we thought we knew.

We prefer a God we can embalm with doctrines, not one who breathes through locked doors. A Christ we can admire as martyr, not one who dares to call us out of the tomb, too. Often we define by the past, instead of by potential. We spiritualize despair and call it realism.

But here’s the twist: it is precisely when we are searching for a corpse that Christ is standing behind us, very much alive, asking, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5)

The quest for the dead body is our way of controlling the narrative. Of holding on to pain because it makes sense. The resurrection is not sensible. It is confounding. And so our eyes remain closed—not by divine mystery, but by our own refusal to open them to joy.

And yet—Christ waits.

In a Catholic theological framework, absence is never merely a void—it becomes a provocative site of presence, of invitation, of encounter. The empty tomb on Easter morning is not a symbol of abandonment but the first whisper of resurrection. Similarly, in the classroom, the absence of a student, a voice, a perspective, should not be reduced to silence or non-participation. Instead, it calls the educator into a deeper awareness of Imago Dei—to ask not what is missing, but who is being missed. Absence, when seen through a lens of faith, becomes sacramental: a sign pointing beyond itself to the relational nature of learning, and the moral imperative to reach out. In this way, absence becomes not a space of lack, but a summons to presence—a call to see with the eyes of compassion, and to respond not with data but with dignity.

Jesus is present. He breaks bread. He calls our name. He comes through closed doors, wounds still visible, and says Peace.

There is nothing wrong with needing to verify. But maybe we’ve forgotten that faith is not about finding the right tomb but hearing the voice that says “Do not cling to me. I am going ahead of you.” We need to stop defining ourselves by what is missing.

So if you’re standing at a sealed place, waiting for the past to confirm your present, remember: the body you’re looking for isn’t there.

He is not among the dead. He never was.

He is risen. And He is always going ahead of us. Even when we’d rather He stayed put.

The things that settle

I’ve been thinking a lot about dust lately. After all, I see it regularly.

Not metaphorical dust—just actual, ordinary, slow-settling dust. The kind that gathers on shelves you stop noticing. The kind that creeps in where no one goes. I used to brush it away every weekend, as if it were some sort of failure to keep things still and perfect. But these days I let it stay a little longer. I’m starting to think dust knows what it’s doing.

There’s something unsettling about dust—not because it’s messy, but because it’s quiet. It doesn’t arrive all at once. It waits. It accumulates in unnoticed places, and if you’re not paying attention, it makes itself at home. It’s not dangerous, exactly. But it shifts how a thing feels. What was once sharp and bright becomes… dulled. Veiled. Less urgent.

There’s a particular shelf in my house that holds a few things I rarely use—an old frame, a book I keep meaning to read again, a small bowl I once thought was beautiful. At some point, they stopped being objects and became something else: fixtures. Unquestioned. A little bit out of reach.

And that’s what I’ve been thinking about. How easy it is for something to rise—an idea, a title, a sense of self—and become untouchable. Not deliberately. Just quietly. Over time.

Thomas Aquinas said that order is the foundation of peace, and that humility is truth. But neither of those feel particularly fashionable in places where ascent is assumed to mean achievement. We’re good at climbing. Less good at remembering why we started.

Sometimes we climb so high, we forget the feel of the floor. We forget the people who stood below, holding the ladder. We forget that the view from above is often distorted. Cleaner, yes. But thinner. Like air that’s missing something essential.

I don’t think power always begins with corruption. I think it begins with forgetfulness. With the slow comfort of being above critique. With voices growing softer when we enter a room. With no one asking questions anymore—not even us.

The trouble is, we don’t notice when that happens. Because dust never announces itself.

I’ve started sitting lower in the chapel lately. I used to prefer the back row, (like a good Catholic) with the comforting perspective of watching everything unfold from a distance. But I missed the feel of the liturgy as movement, of being part of it. These days, I sit closer to the aisle. Close enough to see the shoes of the person in front of me, to hear the quiet shuffling, to notice who hesitates before stepping forward. To feel the swish of the thurible as the incense soars upwards.

There’s something sacred in remembering what it feels like to kneel on stone (even with bad knees).

There’s something holy about dust—not the kind we avoid, but the kind we return to.

And maybe it’s there, in the quiet accumulation of the ordinary, that we learn to tell the difference between what is elevated and what is merely aloft. Between what is polished, and what is true.

After all, she too was overshadowed—and still chose the low place (cf. Luke 1:35).

Strength of mind and will

It’s easy to mistake strength for survival. To think that getting through something — intact, upright, still functioning — is enough. And sometimes it is. Christian strength, the kind we don’t always talk about, is not just about endurance. It’s about being formed. It’s about will and mind working together to become more than what the world tells us we are.

I’ve been thinking lately about what it actually means to be strong — particularly strong in will and mind. Not loud, not domineering, not self-promoting. Just steady. Quietly resilient. Faithful, not because it’s easy, but because it’s right.

The Christian tradition has a long history of valuing fortitude — one of the cardinal virtues. Thomas Aquinas says fortitude is the virtue that ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good. It’s not glamorized, it doesn’t always look pretty or polished. There’s no award for it but it’s the backbone of Christian life. And it lives mostly in the unseen and the unheard and the unnoticed, perhaps even the unvalued.

We live in a culture that trains us to avoid challenge. To step away when things get hard. To numb discomfort, exit tension, find the shortcut. Scripture paints a different picture. “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” Paul says in Romans 12:2. That’s not just about positive thinking. It’s about will — choosing again and again to hold fast to truth, especially when it would be easier to drift.

Strength of will is choosing not to return fire with fire, to still your reaction, not to retaliate.
Strength of mind is refusing to let failure define your worth. I really wish more women would hear that statement.
Both are trained — not inherited. They’re cultivated slowly, often painfully, in the hard places of life, in the shadows and darker moments that we burden in secret.

I think we need to talk more about this kind of strength in Christian life. Not just the strength to believe, but the strength to keep believing when belief feels costly. Not just the will to follow Christ, but the will to keep following when the path is unclear, unpopular, or painful. The strength to hold the tension between grace and truth, conviction and compassion, suffering and hope.

Some people assume that faith is a kind of escape — a way to avoid the hard stuff. But I would say that if anything, faith calls us deeper into it. Christianity doesn’t bypass suffering; it gives it meaning. Christ doesn’t invite us to a life of ease — he invites us to carry a cross. Not because he is cruel, but because real love, real growth, real resurrection, always comes through struggle. And these are Easter days when we bask in the glow of the resurrection.

The good news is, we don’t do it alone. We are not called to be strong on our own terms. The strength we are given is not ours to conjure — it’s ours to receive. “My grace is sufficient for you,” Paul was told. “For my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Maybe that’s the paradox we have to live with: the strongest people aren’t the ones who never falter. They’re the ones who’ve learned to trust a strength beyond themselves.

So no, it’s not just about “getting through.”
It’s about who you become in the process.
And more importantly — who you let shape you.

Sit with that thought.