As we celebrate International Women's Day in 2023 and its theme ‘DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality’ it is important that we recognise not only the contribution of women but also the inordinate and unreasonable burden that women and girls the world over have borne in the face of blatant or hidden abuses of power.  While power imbalance can manifest itself in physical form – it often is through information and knowledge or a lack of it that inequality and inequity can flourish.

Third Sunday of Lent

Suggested formula for recognition of Indigenous people and their land

Today we stand in footsteps millennia old.

May we acknowledge the traditional owners

whose cultures and customs have nurtured,

and continue to nurture,

this land since men and women awoke from the great dream.

We honour the presence of these ancestors

who reside in the imagination of this land

and whose irrepressible spirituality

flows through all creation.

Jonathan Hill

Second Sunday of Lent

‘To see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.’ [William Blake]

Today’s gospel story invites us to look again and see things in a new way - to see Jesus, ourselves and sisters and brothers as God’s beloved and to see Creation as God’s gift. Lent is our opportunity to liberate the imagination. We are offered the gift of renewed sight. We can see God within ourselves, each other and in Creation and recognise their sacredness and dignity.