St Alban & St Stephen Catholic Church

Weekly Reflection

11th Oct 2009
28th Sunday

Bargain Basement Wisdom

A wise man once wrote for his gravestone: ‘As I am now, you soon shall be, so be content to follow me.’ When he died a wiser one taped a note to it that read: ‘To follow you I’m not content, until I know which way you went!’

Wisdom is applying truth to the art of living. The truth comes free in the word of God but applying it comes at a price. Today’s Second Reading (Heb 4: 12-13) marks the price: having our soul and spirit, our joints and marrow separated by something sharper than any two-edged sword.

Not everyone wants to endure that. The rich man in today’s Gospel reading (Mark 10: 17) doesn’t want to, and he loses out. He abandons Jesus and departs poorer than when he came even though his wealth remains intact. Not only does he leave the poorer, he leaves grieving. Instinctively he knows that there’s more to his life than wealth.

Jesus’ word pierces him like a two-edged sword, but he’s unwilling to allow it to separate him from his wealth. He

Catholic Social Teaching For more than one hundred years, Catholic social teaching has tried to help people face the world's social, political and economic challenges with the power of the Gospel. Pope Benedict XVI announced June 29 that he had signed his first formal contribution to the list of papal encyclical letters on social themes and that it was titled "Caritas in Veritate" ("Love in Truth"). Instead of focusing on theological beliefs, the social encyclicals written by most modern-day popes have tried to shape the way Christians and all people of good will can better serve the common good. Each social encyclical was unique in that it sought to respond to the most pressing social realities at the time. For details on talks on the social teachings of the church, click here

Divinity and Doughnuts is for people in their twenty somethings and thirty somethings who wish to explore their faith in light of the world today

It’s an opportunity to meet together as a group, listen to stimulating speakers and discuss the issues over coffee and a doughnut.

Click here for details of our next season of talks ‘Matters of life and death, and a few select things in between’

Welcome Coffee Morning for New Parishioners
Parishioners who have joined our Parish in the last 12 months are invited to a coffee morning. This will be in the Parish Hall immediately after 9.30am Mass on Sunday, 18th October. Everyone is most welcome to come and mingle over lovely Danish pastries and tea/coffee and give a warm welcome to the new members of our Parish community.

loses out. He knows it, yet still won’t change. He wants wisdom; is offered it, but thinks the price is too high. He wants a bargain-basement type that just doesn’t exist.

Change wealth to anything else we long for in the secret of our heart – anything that blocks our way to God. That’s the spot God’s word needs to hit, to separate us from it so that we come to possess wisdom because we’ve allowed God to possess us.

Website Changes
You may have noticed that some of the pages on this website have been missing recently. Our apologies.. and in fact some of them still are. The reason being that we've changed our hosting company (the people who provide the "servers" where our web pages are actually stored. We're now using a company called HOST YOUR CHURCH. They are UK based and are a Christian family run business - and they're very affordable, saving us over £40 per year compared with our previous supplier. They've been extremely supportive and we want to say a big thank you to Derek and Michael Lovelock of HostYourChurch for all their support in making our transition as smooth as it was!!! There are a few pages still to transfer across, so please be patient and bear with us as we work to complete the transfer