• It Is Through The Face That We Encounter God
• A Message of Hope
• Waiting
• An Octopus at Easter.
• Invite relationships
• Transformation
• This Moment
• A Good Story
• Can I Be A Healer?
• The virtue of doubt
• Mary Mackillop, Woman Of Faith
• Fridge Doors And The Rest Of The World
• Entertaining Angels
• More connected than ever, more disconnected than ever
• Feast of Teresa of Avila, 15th October
• The Witness of Maternity Leave
• Something New
• Farewell
• Australian Catholic University is a Public University Open to All
• What if God Was One of Us?
• Zest for life
• Attendance
• Christmas Angel Tree
• A Present For Me
• On being famous
• Reason To Celebrate
• World Youth Day
• May the evening's twilight find me gentle still
• Goodness: God’s Gift To Us
• A time for every purpose under heaven
• The Mad Dash
• The Positive Spirit is Fully Alive
• Its time to change
• Living an Abundant Life

We are now in the second week of Advent. In my parish at this time of the year there appears in the Church a Christmas Angel Tree bearing cardboard cut outs of angels on each of which are written the first name, age and sex of a child. It is an initiative of members of the parish who belong to Prison Fellowship. They invite parishioners to take an angel and buy a present (no more than $25) for the child noted on the angel they have taken. The present will be given to a prisoner at Silverwater jail to send to her/his child.

The angels quickly disappear off the tree and the feed-back from the prisoners through the Fellowship people is heart warming, resonating especially with the second reading of the Sunday: ‘And indeed everything that was written long ago in the scriptures was meant to teach us something about hope from the examples scripture gives of how people who did not give up were helped by God.’ (Romans 15:4).

It is also a reminder of an amazingly constant factor in the history of humanity: no matter how much a society appears to be threatened by destruction of one sort or another there are always signs of the Spirit at work especially at the grassroots level.

Sophie McGrath
(Golding Centre for Women’s History, Theology and Spirituality
 Strathfield Campus)