The Australian flag at the entrance to Ballina District Hospital (NSW) has flapped itself to pieces.

One and a half stars of the Southern Cross are gone.

The local branch of the RSL (Returned and Services League) has complained and wants something done about it.

Not a big deal?

It might be, if you had fought in a war to defend the flag and what it stands for.

* * *

A bigger deal, media-wise, was Australian athletes at the Winter Olympics draping a huge “boxing kangaroo” flag across a multi-storey Vancouver building.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) told them to remove it.

They didn’t.

Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, mocked the IOC, saying, “We want to see a lot of the Boxing Kangaroo, particularly now that we’ve had this ridiculous ruling.”

* * *

Is this flag affair just a matter of taste, or is there a serious issue involved?

What does a boxing kangaroo represent?

It signifies that we will do anything — except the obviously right thing — to defy everybody and draw attention to ourselves, threatening a punch-up or similar if not given our own way.

If we must be defiant, why not do something better than the conventional thing, rather than something stupider?

* * *

In Russia, in 2002, the government ordered regions to design their own local flags.

The city of Penza (600km east of Moscow, population 500,000) defied convention by designing a flag carrying an image of Jesus.

Yury Leptev, speaking for Penza’s Social Politics Committee, explained that there is a legend that in the 1500s Ivan the Terrible presented an icon of Christ to the people of Penza.

Leptev said they had held an unofficial referendum about the flag, and support for the chosen image was “strong”.

Some non-Christian leaders criticised it, saying it “blurred the lines separating Church and State”.  (St Petersburg Times)

To which one might reply, “No need for lines separating Church and State –  as long as it’s the right Church.”

What seems to make Christianity unique among religions is its claim that Jesus Christ was God incarnate (“in the flesh”).

Not just a good man, but literally divine.

This annoys atheists, agnostics etc.

It annoys also many others who just want to get on with their lives, un- bothered by religion.

Christ’s divinity is also disturbing for his believers.

It tells them that God wants us to hand our lives over to supernatural forces — to give up conforming with the materialistic, distraction-seeking mentalities that our neighbours and friends expect of us.

* * *

Today is the Second Sunday of Lent.

Today’s gospel reading is exquisitely discomforting to those who don’t want Jesus to be divine or to make demands of them.

It describes a mysterious, awesome and unsettling event:

After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James, and John his brother, and brought them up into a high mountain apart: And he was transfigured before them.

His face did shine as the sun: his garments became white as snow.

And behold there appeared to them Moses and Elias, talking with him.

(They spoke of his decease that he should accomplish in Jerusalem.)

And Peter said to Jesus: ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make three tabernacles, one for thee, one for Moses, and one for Elias.’

As he was yet speaking, behold a bright cloud overshadowed them. And a voice out of the cloud, saying: ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: hear ye him.’

The disciples hearing it, fell upon their faces, and were very much afraid.

Jesus came and touched them, saying, ‘Arise, and fear not.’

And they, lifting up their eyes, saw no one but only Jesus.

As they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, saying: ‘Tell the vision to no man, till the Son of man be risen from the dead.’

* * *

The disciples learned a lot from this event:

 * that Jesus is/was truly God

 * that to please God we must be willing to suffer

 * that to live pleasing to God we must depend on him giving us the strength

 * that Jesus alone speaks with God’s full authority

.

In 1983, on the seventh Wednesday before Easter, bushfires roared through many districts of Victoria and South Australia, leaving 85 people dead and over 3000 homes and other buildings reduced to ashes.

That event is remembered as the “Ash Wednesday Fires”.

* * *

The 46^th day before Easter was, of course, known as “Ash Wednesday” long before that.

A “day of ashes” to mark the beginning of Lent, the six-week pre-Easter season of prayers and fasting, has been celebrated by Catholics for over 1400 years.

It was mentioned in the Order of the Mass called the “Gregorian Sacramentary” (named after Pope Gregory I, pope from 590 to 604AD) which was the forerunner of the Traditional Catholic Mass used by all Catholics until the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s – and still used by traditional Catholics.

* * *

The name “Ash Wednesday” comes from the practice of placing ashes on the foreheads of believers as a sign of repentance. While doing it, the priest recites the words: “Remember, O man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return”.

Using ashes in ceremonies associated with sorrow for sins goes even further back into Old Testament times (in the books of Jeremiah, Psalms, Jonas, Judith, Job and others).

* * *

Ashes signify that we want God to give us a humble heart, so that we may weep for our sins and stop doing them – and to receive God’s strength to never give up, but to persevere in pleasing Him.

With such thoughts in your mind, go to church today and, as the ashes are put on your head, ask humbly for God’s mercy and grace.

Young Australians are exposed to unremitting attempts to destroy their consciences.

Television, internet, magazines, fashion, music — all desensitising them to alcohol, drugs, violence, extramarital sex, underage sexualisation and encouragements to be greedy.

School subjects are distorted to be more of the same, presenting a worldview where every facet of life is a power struggle.

Notions of virtue — of right and wrong — are sacrificed in the cause of making children consumers, mentally conformed to a feminist-dominated society.

It starts before the child can stand up — parked in front of the television at home, dropped off at a child-care centre — day after day learning that the world is a place in which mummies work.

* * *

A step towards sanity might be for more children to learn history.

Properly taught, history shows a child that the world was not always like this.

The world does not, therefore, have to continue being like this.

There was once a world where you didn’t have a mobile phone.

A  world where you respected your parents.

A  world where you could leave your house unlocked.

A world where it was normal to commit yourself life-long to a husband/wife before using them sexually.

* * *

In this world, there occurred the resurrection from the dead of one Jesus Christ — a real, historical, eyewitnessed, event.

The eyewitnesses included Peter, the fisherman-disciple, who ran to the graveyard that first Easter morning, finding, not Christ’s dead body, but an empty tomb.

Jesus then appeared to Peter and others — alive, talking, eating, still bearing crucifixion wounds.

Before the crucifixion, Peter had denied even knowing Jesus — a coward, wanting to save his skin.

Shortly after, Jesus ascended to heaven, leaving Peter (of all people) head of his Church.

They preached in Jerusalem and throughout the world.

Many were themselves killed by God’s enemies — the only way to silence him.

If Christ’s resurrection wasn’t true, just a yarn they had invented, would they have died rather than deny the message?

But the resurrection is true — the greatest thing ever to happen — in a different league from any other event.

* * *

Meanwhile, back in 21^st century-land, that kind of history is not discussed in the media or in polite schools.

.

On 19 December 2009, Pope Benedict XVI issued a decree accepting the validity of the second miracle needed to clear the way for Mary MacKillop to be canonised (declared a saint).

An amazing amount of media coverage followed — self-appointed experts pronouncing about why miracles can or cannot be believed in — and why doesn’t God prevent all sickness, pain etc., instead of just a few miracles now and then etc.

The focus on the miracle was overdone.

The most essential prerequisite to a person being accepted as a saint is not their miracles, but their holiness.

* * *

Right from her death in 1909, Mother Mary MacKillop’s holiness was recognised.

People touched her body with their rosary beads — others took home samples of soil from around her grave — signs of awareness that she was a saint.

Even before her death . . . .

Four days before she died, Cardinal Moran, head of the Australian Catholic Church, visited Mother Mary for the last time. On leaving the building, he said, “I consider that I have this day assisted at the deathbed of a saint.”

Yet 100 years later she isn’t officially a saint. Why so long?

The Church required unhurried investigation of everything known about Mary’s life, to ensure that she was truly a holy person — before considering any matters regarding miracles.

* * *

Some words Mother Mary wrote in a letter to Monsignor Kirby in 1873 sum up her life and thought: “To me the will of God is a dear book which I am never tired of reading, which has always some new charm for me. I cannot tell you what a beautiful thing the will of God seems to me.”

That’s what makes Mary MacKillop a saint – her desire, above all else, to accept God’s will, and live in obedience to his will.

That’s what God asks of everybody.

Being holy isn’t something God requires only of a few — priests, nuns or certain people that way inclined — no, God wants every person be holy.

That is God’s will for you, too, dear blog-reader — that you, also, should be holy, a saint.

Yes, you.

If you doubt whether that it is possible, then you are doubting God.

Or perhaps you are doubting whether you are willing to give up your favourite sin?

In Poland, Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek is in a bit of trouble.

He apparently said recently that, in Europe, the Jews “have a good press, because they have powerful financial resources – extremely powerful, with the unconditional support of the United States. And this promotes a kind of arrogance, which I consider to be unbearable.”

He also mentioned that the Jews created the term “Shoah”, or “Holocaust”, to define the extensive killings of Jews by German Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s – and to suggest that those sufferings were unique, with no precedent in history.

* * *

One journalist chose to misquote these latter remarks under a headline, “The Shoah, an invention of the Jews.”

Bishop Pieronek  restated his original words — that it was not the account of the historical killings, but the use of the term “Shoah”, that he calls an “invention”.

Anyway, the bishop is now threatened with “legal action for defamation”.

Various versions of this story are circulating, and it isn’t easy to get the facts.

* * *

Anyway the notion that Jewish killings by the Nazis were unique in history is not true.

Unfortunately such things have occurred since the human race began – and still do — massacres of entire populations and ethnic groups.

Christians should point this out.

It’s basic to Christian Faith that the one case of suffering that was unique was the suffering of Jesus Christ on the Cross – unique because Christ was, himself, unique.

* * *

Saint Catherine of Siena records, in her Dialogue, how Christ appeared to her, telling her that:

“Though my act of suffering was finite, the fruit of that suffering which you have received through me is infinite. This is because of the infinite divine nature joined with finite human nature. It was this human nature in which I was clothed that suffered in me . . . but because the two natures are fused with each other, the eternal Divinity took to itself the suffering I bore . . . for this reason what I did can be called infinite . . . had it not been infinite, the whole of mankind, past, present, and to come, would not have been restored.”

* * *

The central message of the Catholic Faith is that Jesus Christ — a Jewish man — was God Incarnate. Most Jews find themselves unwilling to believe this. Many others doubt it, too.

But the Church must continue to proclaim it, because it is God’s message of salvation to his human children, both Jewish and Gentile, whom he loves so much.