3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B)

Mersey Leven Catholic Parish

Parish Priest: Fr Mike Delaney mob: 0417 279 437; 

email: mike.delaney@catholicpriest.org.au

Assistant Priest: 

Fr Alexander Obiorah Mob: 0447 478 297; alexchuksobi@yahoo.co.uk

Postal Address: PO Box 362, Devonport 7310

Parish Office: 90 Stewart Street, Devonport 7310 

Office Hours:  Tuesday, Wednesday,Thursday 10am-3pm

Office Phone: 6424 2783 Fax: 6423 5160 

Email: mlcathparish-dsl@keypoint.com.au 

FaceBook: Mersey Leven Catholic Parish

Weekly Newsletter: mlcathparish.blogspot.com.au

Weekly Homily Podcast: podomatic.com/mikedelaney

Parish Mass Times: mlcpmasstimes.blogspot.com.au

Parish Magazine:  mlcathparishnewsletter.blogspot.com.au

Secretary: Annie Davies/Anne Fisher  Pastoral Council Chair:  Mary Davies

Archdiocesan Website: www.hobart.catholic.org.au for news, information and details of other Parishes.

Weekday Masses 26th - 3oth January, 2015

Monday:       9:30am Devonport & Ulverstone

Tuesday:      9:30am Penguin

Wednesday: 9:30am Latrobe

Thursday:    12noon Devonport

Friday:         9:30am Ulverstone

Next Weekend 31st January & 1st February, 2015

Saturday Vigil:  6:00pm Penguin & Devonport      

Sunday Mass:    8:30am Port Sorell 9am Ulverstone,

                        10:30am Devonport, 11am Sheffield

                        5pm Latrobe 

Eucharistic Adoration:

Devonport:  Every Friday 10am - 12noon, concluding with Stations of the Cross and Angelus

Devonport:  Benediction with Adoration - first Friday of each month.

Prayer Groups:

Charismatic Renewal -  Devonport (Emmaus House) Thursdays - 7:30pm Recommencing 5th February 2015

Christian Meditation  -  Devonport, Emmaus House - Wednesdays 7pm.  Recommencing 4th February 2015

Your prayers are asked for the sick:  Helen Williams, Eva Zvatora, Shanon Breaden, Shirley White, Tom Knaap, Kath Smith, Adrian Brennan, Candida Tenaglia, Peg Leary, Yvonne Harvey, &.....

                    Let us pray for those who have died recently: Allan Conroy, Barry Lyons, Jamie Fahey, Jim Saltmarsh, Max Anderson, Virginia Miller, Joan Blumenberg, Kevin Barry, Vonda Parker, Peggy D'Alton, Eamonn D'Alton and Amparo Abas

Let us pray for those whose anniversary occurs about this time:

Lorraine Horsman, Thomas Naylor, John Ryan, Thomas Kelly, Elizabeth Mazey, Sheila Poole, Trevor Delaney, Ruby Grubb, Jason Pullen and Coral Hankey.

May they rest in peace

Readings This Week; 3rd Sunday of the Year (B)

First Reading: Jonah 3:1-5, 10

RESPONSORIAL PSALM   (R.) Teach me your ways, O Lord.  

Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 7:29-31

GOSPEL ACCLAMATION

Alleluia, alleluia! The kingdom of God is near:

believe the Good News! Alleluia!

Gospel:   Mark 1:14-20

PREGO REFLECTION ON THE GOSPEL

I read this text quietly from the heart. I allow words or phrases to touch me. I let myself be drawn by what moves me. It is the living Word, the Good News that Christ himself gives.

As I read, I might be impressed by the response of the disciples to the call of Jesus from the shore. It is whole-hearted.

What is it about Christ that compels the four to leave everything and follow him? I pause to ponder on the attractiveness of Christ that allows them to be drawn so fully into the mystery of relationship.

Perhaps I am struck by the pace of the text. Jesus says the time has come and calls on the people to repent and believe. He calls the disciples and they follow immediately. I ponder on the ready trust they show in Jesus and on the trust he shows in them.

I might like to reflect upon the same Christ calling my name from the shore of my own life. How does his voice sound?

Does it ring clear or does it have to compete with other voices demanding my attention, investment, and commitment?

How does it console me with the sense that this is where I might find the light of life?

I end my prayer by pondering this message of good news. I talk to Christ in my own words asking that it sink down into the deepest part of my heart and soul; that I might really believe and trust.

Readings Next Week; 4th Sunday of the Year (B)

First Reading: Deuteronomy 18:15-20

Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 7:32-35   

Gospel:   Mark :1:21-28

AUSTRALIA DAY

There will be Mass on Monday  at both Our Lady of Lourdes and Sacred Heart at 9.30am to celebrate our National Day. All welcome - please wear green/gold or both.

OUR LADY OF LOURDES FEAST DAY

As mentioned last weekend there will be a blessing of all volunteers who support the Devonport Community at Masses on 7th/8th Feb (followed by a cuppa in the foyer).  On the actual day (11th) there will be Mass at midday followed by a counter meal at Molly Malone's for everyone who is interested.

KNIGHTS OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS

The first gathering for 2015 will be held this Sunday (25th) in the meeting room at Ulverstone - 6pm for a shared tea.

50th ANNIVERSARY OF CORPUS CHRISTI CHURCH

Corpus Christi Church, Bellerive, was blessed by Archbishop Young on 1st February 1965. Parishioners will be celebrating the occasion on Sunday 1st February at the 10.30 am Mass followed by a BBQ.  All welcome.

MARRIAGE

If you are celebrating 25, 40, 50 or 60 years of marriage or you were married in the last 12 months, you are warmly invited to attend a MARRIAGE MASS & RENEWAL OF VOWS, to be celebrated by Archbishop Julian.

Masses to thank God for the gift of marriage and to honour married couples will be held at St Mary’s Cathedral, Hobart on Sunday February 8 at 10.30 am and at the Church of the Apostles, Launceston, on Sunday February 15, at 10.30 am.

Newlywed couples and couples celebrating milestone anniversaries are invited to RSVP to the Office of Life, Marriage and Family on 6208 6036 or brigid.mckenna@aohtas.org.au

WEEKLY RAMBLINGS

Last weekend someone suggested something after one of the Masses and I said that I would include it in my weekly ramblings and I've completely forgotten what I was asked to do - if you read this then please feel free to remind me.

The Parish Office opens this coming week so we will be back to a full newsletter next weekend which will include some news about parishioners who have moved as well as information for the start of the new year and our Parish Sacramental Programs.

Last year (in October) there was an Extraordinary Synod on the Family. The General Synod on the Family will meet in October this year and we have been invited by Archbishop Julian to complete a survey that will assist in forming a response to the  Synod. More information is available on the Archdiocese of Hobart website or go straight to the survey at: www.surveymonkey.com/s/AOHSynod2015. The online survey will be open until midnight 10 February 2015.

If anyone wishes to participate in this survey there is a document that you will need to read prior to commencing - I have reduced it to a 12 page document (still with everything in it) and copies can be obtained from the Parish Office so please see me after Masses or ring the Office after Tuesday.

Thanks to all those who keep the Parish going week by week, especially during this holiday break - your assistance is greatly appreciated.

Please take care over this weekend as people travel on our roads especially those returning from their holiday break.

Evangelii Gaudium

“In all places and circumstances, Christians, with the help of their pastors, are called to hear the cry of the poor.”

Par 191 from Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis, Nov. 24, 2013

Feast Day of the Week –St Angela Merici, virgin (January 27)

In a week when the Church marks the feast days of the priest St John Bosco (January 31) and also Sts Timothy and Titus (in Australia, we mark their feast day on January 27 while in New Zealand it is celebrated the day before), it would be easy to let the feast of St Angela Merici pass unnoticed. However, the founder of the Ursuline Sisters deserves to be acknowledged for her legacy of providing education to young Italian girls in the early 16^th century.

“When she was 56, Angela Merici said "No" to the Pope. She was aware that Clement VII was offering her a great honor and a great opportunity to serve when he asked her to take charge of a religious order of nursing sisters. But Angela knew that nursing was not what God had called her to do with her life.

She had just returned from a trip to the Holy Land. On the way there she had fallen ill and become blind. Nevertheless, she insisted on continuing her pilgrimage and toured the holy sites with the devotion of her heart rather than her eyes. On the way back, she had recovered her sight. But this must have been a reminder to her not to shut her eyes to the needs she saw around her, not to shut her heart to God's call. All around her hometown she saw poor girls with no education and no hope. In the 15^th and 16^th century that Angela lived in, education for women was for the rich or for nuns.”

This extract, from an article about St Angela at Catholic Online, is worth reading in full. If you have the space, perhaps share the story with your congregations. 

Words of Wisdom – Prayer to St Francis of Assisi

On November 29, 2013, Pope Francis announced that this year (2015) would be dedicated to consecrated life, specifically its mission and identity. For the next few editions of Bulletin Notes, we will share some prayers from those who have helped shape communities of people living a consecrated life. This week, it is a prayer to St Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan Order

“O God, who, through the merits of blessed Francis didst give increase to Thy Church, by enriching her with new offspring; grant us, that following his example we may despise earthly goods and ever rejoice in partaking of thy heavenly gifts. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, thy Son, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

From Prayer Book for the Year of Consecrated Life, by Donal Anthony Foley (CTS Publications)

LOOKING FOR THE ONE GOD INSIDE OUR DENOMINATIONAL AND FAITH DIVISIONS

The original article can be found at http://ronrolheiser.com/looking-for-the-one-god-inside-our-denominational-and-faith-divisions/#.VMMrXf6UfAY Christian de Cherge, the Trappist Abbott who was martyred in Algeria in 1996, was fond of sharing this story: He had a very close Muslim friend, Mohammed, and the two of them used to pray together, even as they remained aware of their differences, as Muslim and Christian.  Aware too that certain schools of thought, both Muslim and Christian, warn against this type of prayer, fearing that the various faiths are not praying to the same God, the two of them didn’t call their sessions together prayer. Rather they imagined themselves as “digging a well together”. One day Christian asked Mohammed: “When we get to the bottom of our well, what will we find? Muslim water or Christian water?” Mohammed, half-amused but still deadly serious, replied: “Come on now, we’ve spent all this time walking together, and you’re still asking me this question. You know well that at the bottom of that well, what we’ll find is God’s water.”

There are important religious truths couched inside that story. First off, all religions worthy of the name believe that the first thing we need to affirm about God is that God is ineffable, that is, God is beyond all human imagination, conceptualization, and language. Everything we think and say about God, even within scripture and our defined dogmas, is more inadequate than adequate. It reveals some truth, but, this side of eternity, never the complete truth. No dogma and no religion ever provide an adequate expression of God. If this is true, and it is, then all religious truth is always partial and limited in its historical expression and cannot claim adequacy. All religions, all dogmas, and all expressions of theology, irrespective of denomination or religion, must humbly acknowledge their incompleteness. Only God is absolute, and an absolute knowledge of God lies at the bottom of the well, at the end of our religious journey.

That fact radically changes the way we need to conceive of ecumenism and interfaith dialogue. Since no one, us included, has the full truth, the way of ecumenism and interfaith dialogue should not be conceived, as has been so much the case up to the present, of one side winning the other side over: We, alone, have the truth and you must join us! Rather the way has to be conceived of precisely “digging a well together”, namely, as each of us, with an open heart, longing for those others who are not at our table, refusing all proselyting, becoming engaged through our own religious tradition in the search for deeper conversion. That search is precisely the search to get to the bottom of the well, knowing that, once there, we, as all other sincere, authentic religious searchers, will find both God’s water and unity with everyone else who is there.

The renowned ecumenist, Avery Dulles, called this the path of “progressive convergence”. Eventual unity among the various churches and various faiths will not come about by everyone in the world converting to one denomination or one religion. Rather it will come about, and can only come about, by each of us converting more deeply inside our own tradition. As each of us and each faith move more deeply into the mystery of God we will progressively draw closer and closer to each other. Christian de Cherge’s story illustrates this wonderfully.

And this path, when correctly taken, does not lead us into relativism and the naïve belief that all religions are equal. Nor does it mean that we do not enthusiastically and openly celebrate our own religious faith tradition, stand ready to defend it, and stand ready to welcome anyone into it. But it does mean that we must humbly accept that, while we have the truth, the truth is not ours alone. God is not a tribal deity and God’s salvific intent is universal. God desires the salvation of those in other denominations and in other religious traditions just surely as he desires our own. Hence, as Jesus teaches us, God has “other sheep”, loved individuals and loved communities who are not of our fold. God’s love and revelation embrace everyone.

The path to unity among Christians of different denominations and the path to unity among world religions is not then the path of proselytism within which any one tradition, Christianity included, claims absolute truth for itself and demands that union can be achieved only by everyone converting to its side. Rather it lies in “digging a well together”, that is, in each of us, within our own tradition, converting more deeply into the mystery of God and into all that asks of us. As we move deeper into the mystery of God we will find ourselves more and more one, as brothers and sisters in faith.


No religion is absolute, only God is absolute. Knowing that, should make us less smug in the practice of our own religion, more respectful of other denominations and religions, and more willing to let God’s vision trump our own.

Knowing and Not Knowing 

From an email from Fr Richard Rohr posted on 14th January 2015

Over-explanation separates us from astonishment -Eugene Ionesco

We need transformed people today, and not just people with answers. I do not want my too many words to separate you from astonishment or to provide you with a substitute for your own inner experience. We all need, forever, what Jesus described as "the beginner's mind" of a curious child. A beginner's mind or what some call "constantly renewed immediacy" is the best path for spiritual wisdom. Tobin Hart writes: "Instead of grasping for certainty, wisdom rides the question, lives the question.... When the quest for certainty and control is pushed to the background, the possibility of wonder returns. Wonder provides a gateway to wise insight" (Information to Transformation, p. 11).

Incorporating negative and self-critical thinking is essential to true prophetic understanding. At the same time, we must also trust that we are held irrevocably in the mystery of God's love, without fully understanding it. Alongside all our knowing, accompanying every bit of our knowing, must be the humble "knowing that we do not know." That's why the great tradition of prayer is balanced by both kataphatic knowing, through images and words, and apophatic knowing, through silence, images, and beyond words. Apophatic knowing is the empty space around the words, allowing God to fill in all the gaps in an "unspeakable" way. 

Strangely enough, this unknowing is a new kind of understanding. We have a word for it: faith, a kind of knowing that doesn't need to know and yet doesn't dismiss knowledge either; a kind of knowing that doesn't need to hold everything itself because, at a deeper level, it knows it is being held. As Paul puts it, "For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known" (1 Corinthians 13:12). 

I hope that throughout this year I can somehow speak, if possible, both to your head and to your heart, and leave you in that in-between space, where you are not too much in control--and God can steer your ship with you. 

Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture As Spirituality, pp. 7, 8, 19-20, 26;

and Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer, pp. 15-16