Last week I mentioned that we have five people in this parish seeking the sacraments this Easter, and we prayed at the 11am Mass for the four of them who are already baptised: Julie, Joel, Reece and Joanne. This Sunday and the next three Sundays, we pray for our fifth person, who is currently unbaptised, Anthony. So we haven’t lost anyone. It wasn’t anything either you or I said to them. When you have someone in your parish who is preparing for baptism at the Easter Vigil, no

This year we have five people in this parish who are preparing to receive the sacraments at Easter, and we went together last Sunday to St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham for something called the Rite of Election. This is a service, not a Mass, with the Archbishop and other bishops of the diocese, in which people who are preparing to become Catholics at Easter get to meet one of the bishops and are then officially recognised as the “Elect”, hence the Rite of Election. But this

In a novel I read some time ago, set during the Second World War, one of the characters, a communist, is about to be executed. He has failed his communist masters and is about to pay the price. But as an atheist, he doesn’t mind. His life has been very difficult in all sorts of ways, and probably has pangs of conscience, or he should do, about some of the things in his past. He thinks that, at death, all will come to an end, just like switching off a lightbulb. How wrong he w

Today, we begin Lent. One of the themes of Lent is that we fast. Not as in exceeding the speed limit, but rather it’s about cutting back, self-discipline, eating plainer food and eating less of it. We might, instead, prefer the word “feast”. It’s just the same as fast, but with an extra letter – the letter “e”. But the letter “e” is the beginning of the word “Easter”. We can feast at Easter, but for now, and especially today, we fast. Besides, feasting is much more enj

Are you the sort of person that doesn’t like to throw things out? Do you prefer to hang onto things, just in case they come in useful later on? Or do you prefer to get rid of items that don’t have a use at the moment, and just buy what you need later on? When I was getting ready to come to Thame I had deliberately accumulated quite a few boxes, empty jam jars and so on, and quite a few of them came in useful when I was packing things, and the rest I either put for recycling o

Next month, so just in a week or so’s time, we begin our deanery vocations month. It’s quite well timed with today’s readings – in the Gospel, Christ calls the apostles Simon, Andrew, John and James to follow Him – the adventure of a lifetime. In this deanery, we have one person actually from this deanery training for the priesthood in Rome, Luke Theobald, and his reflections have been put on the back of the bulletin over previous vocations months. We also have a priest in tr

Just under a fortnight ago, we were celebrating the Epiphany. As I’m sure we all know, the wise men brought the Christ-child three gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh. And as the hymn We Three Kings points out, gold honours Christ as king, frankincense points to His divinity, and myrrh to His future burial. “Glorious now behold him arise, King and God and sacrifice.” Today we’ve fast-forwarded a bit, to the scene of St John the Baptist pointing out Christ at the River Jordan.

One of the classic hymns for today’s celebration is We Three Kings of Orient Are. It’s quite a clever hymn, because it’s simple enough to learn it from primary school, yet it packs in theological teaching going back centuries, about the meaning of the three gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not going to sing the hymn or give you a theological lecture on the Christological and soteriological meaning of the three gifts. Instead, a sho

God becoming one of us is truly amazing! After celebrating Christmas Day and the feast of the Holy Family, this Sunday we can begin to unpack a bit more what God becoming flesh really means for us. But it is truly a mystery – something of which the human mind cannot fully plumb the depths. We can understand something of it, but our limited human intelligence can never know the fullness of the infinite God. The Prologue to St John’s Gospel, as the reading we just heard is some

Now that the Christmas season has begun, we celebrate today the feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. This year, in the readings for Year A, we are faced with the scene of St Joseph being warned in a dream to escape with his family to Egypt. They have to leave now, right in the middle of the night. Lesson number one: being faithful to the Lord means both great joys and also inconvenience and suffering. The first and second reading talk about family life, respect

Each Christmas, there are different traditions, songs and readings we are used to hearing which bring a sense of comfort, and also, each year, they come up with something new, such as the latest adventure of Kevin the Carrot. Sometimes I find that with some of the older carols and translations of the Bible, the words sound a bit like Yorkshire-speak. For example, in the King James Version of the Bible, when the angel appears to the shepherds, it says they were “sore afraid”

This Sunday, as well as being the Fourth Sunday of Advent, is also a Day of Prayer for Expectant Mothers. You can understand why, given that the Gospel today is about St Joseph discovering that Our Lady is pregnant. In the psalm today it sets before us the example of those who are clean of hands and pure of heart, whose soul is not set on vain things. We can surely say that this is true of Our Lady. She is the example for us, as the sinless One who was worthy to be Mother