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.

Our Common Song

One of the great ironies of being human is that the very thing that makes us so visibly different — our biology — is also what ultimately renders us equal.
When we think about human diversity, we often start with what we can see: skin colour, height, hair texture, the shape of our eyes, the tilt of our smile. Biology marks us with signs of particularity. It centres us in families, nations, histories. Our bodies tell stories before we even speak. And these differences matter; they are good. They speak of a Creator who delights in variety, who does not work in monochrome but in living colour.

But what we often miss is that biology is not just the canvas of our differences; it is also the clay of our sameness. Beneath the surface distinctions, every human being is composed of the same essential elements. Blood, breath, bone, skin — these are universal. The same organs pump, the same cells divide, the same vulnerability to sickness and injury touches us all. No amount of status, ability, or aesthetic beauty can shield a person from the frailty written into the body itself.

The theological tradition has always wrestled with this dual reality. In Genesis, humanity is created in the image and likeness of God (imago Dei) — each person carrying a unique reflection of the divine. Yet, at the same time, we are fashioned from the dust of the earth, the same dust shared by every living thing. We are both particular and universal, distinct and common.

You see this most clearly in moments of crisis. In a hospital emergency room, no one asks whether a patient is rich or poor, what race they belong to, how strong or intelligent they are. What matters is blood type. What matters is oxygen saturation. What matters is whether a heart can be restarted. The same blood that sustains the elite sustains the refugee. The same fragility that afflicts the vulnerable afflicts the powerful. Biology collapses the illusions we so often build around ourselves. It reminds us that at our core, we are inescapably equal — equal not because we are the same, but because we are similarly finite.

And in this shared finitude, a deeper theological truth emerges: grace is offered to us not in spite of our humanity, but through it. Christ did not become an idea; he became a body. He entered into the full risk of human biology — able to bleed, to thirst, to die. In doing so, he did not erase the diversity of human experience, but revealed that all human bodies, in their beauty and their brokenness, are capable of carrying the divine.

This is why Catholic theology insists on the dignity of every human life, regardless of appearance, ability, health, or strength. It is not because we pretend there are no differences. It is because we recognize that even with all our visible variety, every human being bears the same vulnerable biology, and in that biology, the same sacred imprint. It is precisely in our fragility that God meets us.

Biology teaches us a humility that our social structures often deny. It reminds us that no matter what differences we construct, we are — at the deepest level — creatures in need of one another. Blood for blood. Breath for breath. Dust to dust. Grace for grace.

To be human, then, is to be both a particular song and part of a shared symphony. Our visible differences are real and good. But our biology, in its beautiful fragility, reminds us that we are fundamentally bound together. Not by choice, not by achievement, but by the sheer, gift-like reality of being human.

Resurrected in love.

They dropped their nets.
They walked away from their tax ledgers, their boats, their families.
They followed a man who hadn’t written a book, held a position, or accumulated power.
They followed him because he looked into their eyes and saw them.
Really saw them.

It’s easy to romanticize the Apostles — the Twelve, and the women and others who followed Jesus from Galilee to Golgotha. But pause for a moment. Imagine what it cost.
They didn’t know how the story would end.
They didn’t follow Jesus with a resurrection guarantee in hand.
They followed with hearts open and trembling.

Grief on Holy Saturday

What I can’t stop thinking about is the space between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
That long, cruel Saturday.
That space of disorientation.

This man they loved — not admired, not worked for, but loved — had been taken. Publicly tortured. Shamed. And they had scattered.

Can we name what they must have felt?

Shame.
Doubt.
Fear.
Heartbreak.

It is one thing to lose a friend. It is another to lose the person you built your life around — the one who had redefined your very identity. When Jesus died, the disciples didn’t just lose him. They lost their why. Their future unraveled.

And yet.

The Resurrection Changed Everything

When Mary Magdalene ran to them with words they could barely comprehend — “I have seen the Lord!” — the world tilted on its axis again.
Jesus stood among them, bearing the wounds. He spoke peace into their fear. And they believed again.

But not just in a quiet, comforted way.
They believed with fire.
With boldness.
With a love that said: If this is real, then everything else fades away.

Peter, who had denied him.
Thomas, who had doubted.
Mary, who had wept at the tomb.
They all rose up — broken, healed, alive — and began the Church.

These weren’t men and women of institutional power. They didn’t build churches with budgets and constitutions. They carried the Gospel in their skin, on their breath, through their scars.

The Church began in upper rooms and whispered prayers and dangerous proclamations.
It began not with strength, but with resurrected love.

Resilience Rooted in Love

What inspires me most is their resilience.
Not the hard, stoic kind — but the resurrected kind.

The kind that knows death
but doesn’t flinch.

The kind that saw Jesus ascend into heaven
and walked back into a suspicious, violent world with a Spirit-filled heart and no backup plan.

They knew fear.
They knew trauma.
And still — they loved. They taught. They led. They forgave.
They lived the memory of Jesus with such integrity that entire cities were transformed.

Following in Their Footsteps

We, too, are disciples.
We live in the space between grief and resurrection.
We walk through disappointment, betrayal, and loss — and still, the call remains: Follow me.

The early Church wasn’t built by perfect people.
It was built by those who had fallen apart and found themselves remade by grace.

What a beautiful foundation.
What a trembling, Spirit-drenched beginning.

And what a challenge to us.

We are the inheritors of their courage.
Not to replicate their lives — but to live our own with the same costly, astonishing, resurrected love.

We will be judged one day

In the Creed (the Apostle’s Creed) we state our Catholic beliefs. A creed is essentially a statement of beliefs. At Mass on the weekend, for some reason, I was struck by the line:

From there he shall come to judge the living and the dead.

Do we really live as if one day we will be judged by Jesus? How easy it is to let small, thoughtless actions chip away at the dignity of others. How often do careless words fall from our lips, landing harshly instead of gently? How many choices do we make each day that serve only ourselves, neglecting the common good?

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus reminds us that the measure we use for others will be the measure used for us. Yet, when we read the Gospels, we don’t see Jesus as “judgy.” He is compassionate, patient, and merciful—but His kindness is not passive. He invites, even insists on, transformation. He calls us to turn away from sin and towards a life of love.

There is space to be gentle with ourselves, to acknowledge our human frailty. But that gentleness should never stop us from striving for real change. Our call is to commit daily to the ongoing, sometimes difficult, work of becoming truly good.

Peace and Harmony

As we approach Harmony Day, my thoughts have been consumed by the concept of peace. The ongoing war in Ukraine should worry us all.

When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace. (Jimi Hendrix)

In Australia the theme for Harmony Day is ‘Everyone Belongs’ and that is one of the beautiful things about this great nation – that we are so culturally dynamic, an interwoven fabric of differing threads holding society together.

Peace, however, is the foundation upon which harmony is built. Without peace—both within ourselves and in our communities—discord and division take hold, making true unity impossible. Harmony flourishes when people listen, understand, and respect one another, and this can only happen in an environment free from conflict, fear, and hostility. This is what we strive for in our homes, our schools, our wider community and ultimately in our world. Sadly when casting my gaze to the global stage I hear of conflict, of fear, and of great hostility.

At its core, peace is not merely the absence of violence but the presence of justice, compassion, and mutual care. Fostering peace means embracing dialogue over exclusion, love over contempt, and service over ego.

In a world divided by differences, peace calls us to see the common threads in our humanity, to recognize the dignity of every person and work toward harmony. When we cultivate peace in our hearts, we become instruments of harmony, spreading its light to those around us. Ultimately, peace is not just an ideal—it is a responsibility that sustains the fabric of a just and flourishing (and unified) world.

Food is a universal language of community and connection. In celebration of Harmony Day 2025, why not share a taster of cultural cuisines that reflect a fragment of the rich heritage of your community. Whether that be a solo gastronomic adventure or a meal at a vibrant table, take a moment to try something different and look – even for a brief moment – through a different lens.

Hello Lent

As we enter the sacred season of Lent we are invited to embark on a journey of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, preparing our hearts for the joy of Easter. Lent is a time to reflect on our relationship with God, seek spiritual renewal, and make a positive difference in the lives of others as we prepare to celebrate the wonderful gift of Salvation afforded to us through the Easter event.

We begin this journey on Ash Wednesday, a day marked by the sign of the cross in ashes, reminding us of our humility, repentance, and call to conversion. Let us walk together in faith this Lent, striving to illuminate with acts of kindness, self-discipline, and a commitment to justice.

Lent can be hard. But isn’t it supposed to be? The whisper of ‘it’s ok God will forgive’ or ‘does it really matter’ when you are tempted to step aside from the very goals you yourself chose is not a voice we should listen to. We seek to make life easy all the time. Sometimes, we need to sit in the darkness so that we appreciate more fully the gentle glow of the dawn.

IWD 2025 Accelerate Action

I am not going to give a warm and positive spin on boys and men being respectful towards women, because that’s not always the case and that is the truth. Veritas. I am a female. I am a mother. I am an educator. These are all the qualifications I have to say what I’m going to say about the importance of International Women’s Day in society not just in school. Twice I have had the opportunity to engage in research about the importance of the female voice, so what I say stems not just from my own experience but from the voices of many women of varied ages. Let me stipulate first, I believe in the value of all-boys education, my son graduated from an all-boys school and I think he emerged all the better for it. I do not believe in the boys club that still exists in society. It allows and encourages all sorts of disrespectful and threatening behaviours, especially when undertaken in pairs or groups – pack behaviour. The week of International Women’s Day is an opportunity to shine a light on actions that limit that club from negatively impacting women. Often it is immature behaviour that a good man or good boy would never undertake on his own, so we need to remind ourselves, remind our boys and men that actually – it’s not funny. We have laws about violence, but I’m talking about the insidious masked behaviours that hurt and for which women have limited social recourse. The humiliating and belittling comments. They may seem inconsequential, but they matter. I speak from the premise that men are essentially good and do not mean to harm. But they do. It can be in those little things, those moments of disrespect that a mate may laugh off, and people will ignore, except the one humiliated. Women matter. Every woman matters. Not just the ones that cook your dinner, or feed your ego, the ones who stand up to you, the ones who disagree with you, who see the world through a different lens. Every woman on every continent. This week I’d love to see action that accelerates this change – so no woman is the victim of banter again.

Living the Beatitudes

A Reflection on This Week’s Gospel

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. (Luke 6:20)

The Beatitudes are not comfortable words. They never were. They flip our expectations upside down, shaking us out of the world’s logic and into God’s. Luke’s version is even more disruptive than Matthew’s, stripping away spiritualized interpretations and speaking bluntly: Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the hungry. Blessed are those who weep. Not “blessed will you be,” but blessed are you now.

These words are hard to hear because they challenge everything we’re told about success, happiness, and the good life. In a world that celebrates comfort, control, and achievement, Jesus calls us to look instead at those who have nothing—and to see them not as objects of pity but as bearers of divine blessing. The kingdom of God belongs to them.

And then come the woes. Woe to you who are rich, who are full, who are laughing now. It’s easy to gloss over this part, to soften it, to say, “Well, surely He doesn’t mean us.” But what if He does? What if Jesus is not condemning wealth or joy but warning us about where our hearts are attached? What if He’s inviting us to loosen our grip on security and privilege, to step closer to those who live without them—not out of charity, but out of solidarity?

Christians are called to live the Beatitudes, not just admire them. To cultivate a social environment where success is measured not by prestige, but by kindness, humility, and justice. To create spaces where human beings know they are valued not for what they achieve, but simply because they are beloved of God.

So, what does that look like this week? Maybe it’s choosing to sit with a friend or neighbour who feels isolated. Maybe it’s pausing in the rush of the day to truly see the colleague who is struggling. Maybe it’s noticing where our own comfort keeps us from stepping into another’s pain. The Beatitudes are not a checklist—they are a way of being in the world, a way of seeing, a way of loving.

Jesus calls the poor blessed. Do we?

Let’s be the kind of community that does.