32nd Sunday of Ordinary time – Year A

by Thabo Mkhonta

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WITH OUR BAPTISM LAMPS SWITCHED ON, WE AWAIT THE COMING BRIDEGROOM

The Church year is coming to an end, and that is why the readings are starting to be eschatological, and about the end. The end a person may think about is the universal one (cosmological eschatology), but there is also an individual eschatology –the individual end, which is death. We are all heading for that end –and we all know it and have to face it.

I know that since treading on this gruesome subject, which is saturnine to many, because we don’t want to face that reality of death. But, in today’s readings it is all about being vigilant and ready for we all don’t know when would the lights go out. Even the prayer: ‘Hail Mary…now and at the hour of our death reminds us to be ready. The key is to be ready that when it comes you are prepared as a person who is faithful to his baptism. The fact of death is alluded by St Paul in the 2nd Reading as the ground of hope, that is why he is even using the euphemism “asleep” instead of “died”. He is encouraging us not to grieve like people who have no hope, of life after death. So, we shouldn’t be sullen as if everything ends in the graveyard; Him who overcame the grave is coming! Continue reading “32nd Sunday of Ordinary time – Year A”

Our Lady of Hope (Lavumisa)

by Fr Massa IMC

On Sunday  October 11 after Holy Mass for the Christian community of Lavumisa, Mrs. Grace Mdluli and Ellen Maphalala asked me to wait a minute because the children had a surprise for me. A group of 14 /15 of them came forward and gracefully and joyfully danced the “Jerusalema.”

Mrs.G Mdluli briefly told me that these children from the 13  of May had come together on the 13 of each month to  pray the rosary together.

On the 13 of October I joined them for the prayer of the rosary. It was a moving experience !The bigger ones took it in turn to lead the rosary and most of them were holding the rosary in their hands . I thanked them and invited them to join the children of the world on the 18 , Mission Sunday ,to pray together a decade of the rosary for the end of Covid-19 and they did so .

Continue reading “Our Lady of Hope (Lavumisa)”

Being dressed for action

by Bishop Jose Luis IMC

On 20 October 2020, the clergy of the diocese came together at Our Lady of the Assumption for the first time in this year marked by COVID19. Below, the first part of my homily.

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The readings we have just heard have not been especially chosen for this celebration but are the readings of the day and, therefore, part of the continuous reading of the letter of Paul to the Ephesians and the Gospel of Luke.

I kept them because I felt they have a message for us today as we come together for the very first time during this 2020 COVID19 year.

I would like to present three images I see in them: Continue reading “Being dressed for action”

30th Sunday of Ordinary time – Year A

by Fr Francis Huwn msfs

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Ex 22: 20-26; Ps 18:2-4, 47. 51; 1 Thes 1:5-10;
Mt 22:34-40

Distract them so that they will not fall in love with God”

A priest found a gravestone in a cemetery with the inscription: ‘Here lies So-and-So, who died at the age of 90 but didn’t live more than three years.’ When he asked the meaning of it, they told him it belonged to a man who converted to the love of God when he was 87. So, he wanted to leave written in stone that only those years he spent loving God were the years he was ‘alive’. For he only considered worth mentioning the years he had spent in love with God.
Continue reading “30th Sunday of Ordinary time – Year A”