When I was studying nursing, we learnt two kinds of isolation for patients. The first kind of isolation is when a patient is set apart because they are so vulnerable to getting bugs from other people that they might get a lot sicker.

Jesus and his close followers are on their way to Jerusalem, and as he goes he instructs them. It is not a question of conversion, for that has already taken place. It is a more a question of growth in understanding of what Jesus is about and commitment to that.

I joined the Catholic Church when I was 15 years old. As a baby, I had been baptised in the Anglican Church, and my mother was a very devout Anglican all her life, as had been her parents.

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.

The Gospel reading for this Sunday invites us to be ready and dressed for action. We remember the Gospel from last Sunday, where the rich man, seeing the bumper harvest he had, thinks of building bigger barns and store all the wealth to himself and doesn’t even give a second thought of sharing it with the other.

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.

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.

Suffering and tragedy are things that we don’t want to reflect on or think too much about because of the pain that it brings into our lives. If we look at the world today, there are so many natural and human made disasters.

For some reason, it seems to be a part of human nature to delight in catching someone out! Putting another down is so common. By putting someone down, we raise ourselves up, and make ourselves seem better and brighter than the other.

“After hearing Jesus (as he taught in the synagogue at Capernaum), many of his followers said, ‘This is intolerable language! How could anyone accept it?”. (John 6:60)