Dear sisters and brothers,

Next Sunday, we will our Family Fun day. Don’t forget:
On Sunday, 28th August, there will only be one Mass in the parish that day at 10am (there will also be a 5pm Saturday evening Mass on 27th August).

I hope that this will be an occasion for our parish family to come together, celebrate our common bond in Eucharist, followed by an opportunity to enjoy one another’s company and friendship. More details are inside the parish newsletter. Come and have fun!

As the Olympics draw to a close, we are again left with powerful images of success and failure, winning and losing. I love sport; I love watching elite athletes doing things that I have never been able to do; it’s unpredictability and tension. Unfortunately, watching is about all I can do these days as my body is slow now due to many broken bones (7 at last count!) and flabby muscles. Nevertheless, sport at its best and fairest provides society with vivid images of excellence; a nobility to which it is worth aspiring. The Olympics have lost much of their lustre because of the shadow traits of human behaviour: greed, corruption, cheating and dishonesty. Even so, I still like to believe that the Olympics are more good than bad — but I could be wrong.

Over the past two weeks we have seen how the pressures to win can become all-consuming. Winning, rather than doing your best, appears to be the measure of success. In that environment, it must be incredibly difficult to resist the temptation to take some form of performance enhancing drugs. You would need a number of strong, supportive people around to help guide you, because if you are lining up in some event, and you suspect that your rivals are chemically enhanced, and you just keep getting beaten by them, just by a split second or that little extra advantage, the urge to join them must be very tempting. It is then that you would need people to remind you that winning isn’t everything.

We need supportive people to remind us that “winning” — coming first, being the best — isn’t everything either. When Jesus speaks about going by “the narrow path” today, perhaps that is what he means. We are all tempted to cut corners, take advantage or game the system in some way because we think that is what everyone else is doing. But Jesus insists on the narrow path precisely because not everyone takes it.

Fr. Anthony