The Season of Creation – the annual Christian celebration of listening and responding together to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor – is drawing to a close and once again, it has been an important reminder of how faith communities can respond together to the climate crisis.

The Season of Creation began on September 1, the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, and ends on October 4, the Feast of St Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology.

In 2018, I attended the episcopal ordination of Bishop Ewald Sedu, in Maumere. Maumere is a very Catholic town, on the very Catholic island of Flores, in very Christian eastern Indonesia.

To borrow a story from a good friend of mine, Fr Bel San Luis, SVD, there was a man who wanted to have a lot of money so badly that he promised the devil to do his work in exchange for a copy of the newspaper a day ahead before it was published so that he could get the winning Lotto number in advance.

A contractor needed one more man to chop down trees for export. One day, two men appeared willing to do the job but only one could be employed so what the contractor did was to put the two men to a test, they were to chop down as many trees as they could in an eight-hour shift and the man who chopped down more trees got the job.

When I was still a seminarian, I was in Surigao City, a city northeast of Mindanao Island in the Philippines and one day as I was walking around a corner a car nearly sideswiped me.

This Sunday’s Gospel reading is one of those passages of Scripture that is very hard to understand. Jesus seems to be contradicting himself. 

Since the celebration of Easter, the Church has invited us to reflect on the origins of the Christian community.

Love is a word that we always hear. Every time we hear the word ‘love’ our eyes light up and somehow our heart beats just a little bit faster. However, the word love is one of the most misunderstood and one of the most abused words, in my opinion.

Dear Friends,

Happy Easter! Christ is risen, he is risen indeed. Alleluia.

After our last two Easters where the communal celebration of this pinnacle of our faith life was severely limited due to COVID-19, what a joy it was to gather in numbers again to welcome the Risen Lord.

To borrow a story from my friend, Fr Bel San Luis, there was a man who was visiting a seminary. He saw a poster with a phrase in big letters, “Christ is the answer”. Puzzled he wrote at the bottom of the poster, “What is the question?”