Learning to write in the tropics

Over the past few years, I have heard from many sides that the root of the problem is clericalism and the hierarchy. I have also heard that the solution is to allow women and married men to be ordained. This has given me food for thought. I have begun to wonder if another underlying issue is being ignored and in doing so we are avoiding seeing or acknowledging the real root of the problem: our collective forgetting about the nature of the vocation we are all called to and what that could mean for all the members of the mystical body of Christ. To illustrate an all too common narrative is useful: a young man or woman is seen to pray regularly, maybe even go to daily mass.  She or he seems to be very interested in working for the church in some capacity,  possibly as a volunteer or maybe even in a paid position. Everyone around that sees this asks them or assumes that this man or woman who prays intensely and helps out with  'x' prayer or formation group must be intending t...

 After 12 years I found myself doing something I had somehow thought I had found a way to avoid: I was headed to the JR in Oxford to get a medicine hard to find at 7pm on a regular weekday. Work took me to Spain last week and somehow, somewhere, from someone I caught a virus, which may or may not be a respiratory virus that is going around. I was thoroughly tested for covid and possible bacterial infection, x-rayed, etc, and the drs concluded: a virus that had exacerbated a long-dormant asthma. In western society, getting help from someone has come to be seen as being a burden or bothering others. We have lost the capacity to realise that in being limited there will always be moments when we need help; some more pressing than others. As I rode in my friend's car with my housemate next to her I was struck by how God had brought me to this place and placed these two women in my life. Since moving to Oxford different circumstances have meant that I have found myself in the position of...