The Second Sunday of Easter marks the last day of the Easter Octave, and is also a designated Sunday, that has been set apart to celebrate the Graces and the Mercy of God our Father. As the Closing Prayer of the Chaplet of Divine Mercy states, “Eternal God, in whom mercy is endless and the treasury of compassion inexhaustible, look [...]
In my prayer, this year, I heard and saw the cry of a teenage girl saying, “I waited for someone to show me mercy”, her face revealed the pleading of her heart and her following words showing the crushing of her hope: “I used to be religious, I used to be…” What difference can we make in the life of [...]
Christ is risen! He has risen indeed! Alleluia! In today’s Gospel, Mary of Magdala went to the tomb on the first Easter morning, saw that the stone had been moved away, and that the tomb was empty. Alarmed, she ran back to Peter and the other disciple to inform them about the empty tomb. Her action of telling Peter [...]
While the timeline of the actual sequence of Holy Week is debatable, many of today’s liturgies can be traced to the practices that were already in place in the early Church. Biblical Scholars are familiar with the writings of Egeria, sometimes known as Etheria (McClure & Feltoe, 1919), a 4th century nun who visited important pilgrimage sites of the Holy [...]
The Lord comes to my help, so that I am untouched by the insults. Have you ever wondered how Jesus went through the Passion so meekly, without retaliating or blaming anyone? What made Jesus go through such a painful, ignominious death? Was Jesus obligated to go through all this? Jesus identified with our reality of a world filled with difficulties [...]
In the week following the Fifth Sunday of Lent, as the Church approaches Holy Week, a shift occurs. According to The Roman Missal (3rd Edition, 2011), “the practice of covering crosses and images throughout the church from this Sunday may be observed. Crosses remain covered until the end of the Celebration of the Lord’s Passion on Good Friday, but images [...]
A 2023 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) survey collated the data of the annual average hours worked in different countries. At the top of the charts was Mexico clocking in at an average of 2,128 hours per year, per worker, and at the lowest was Germany at 1,349 hours a year, per worker. This was the data that [...]
The readings on this 5th Sunday of Lent tells us that God can bring us from death to new life. The First Reading tells us of God's desire to restore life in us. The Second Reading tells us that if Christ dwells in us, we will have new life as He does. As we draw near to the end of [...]
The artistic renditions of Jesus crucified on the cross, are often sanitised and aestheticised - Beautifully cleaned up with strategically painted-on blood streaks at the knees or side where Jesus was pierced through with a lance, a crown of thorns neatly woven together in a braid, and more intentionally placed droplets of blood flowing down Jesus’ forehead. Jesus, Crucified Roman [...]
The prophet Samuel was sent to the house of Jesse of Bethlehem, to anoint one of his sons as king. While there, he sees Eliab, who was tall and handsome. He thought that he was the Lord's choice. Blinded by our own sense of what is good and bad, we often choose what we think is right, to realise that [...]
