At a recent formation session interstate, I hired a car (the smallest and cheapest I could find, as per custom), and when I got to the counter, a lovely young man noted my lack of luggage and that I was travelling alone and asked if I’d like a free upgrade. His genuine pleasure in escorting me to the small sportscar pictured above (“not very many people can hire it as they travel with luggage”) was one of those random moments of grace you encounter, in any given day. So I spent my free time after work exploring the Perth region with the sunroof down. I never wanted a scportscar and am now spoilt to enjoy anything less, but who cares? I can live in abundance and scarcity (Phil 4:12). Graced moments in the everyday.

The weekend that followed was also an experience of abundance: a group of highly committed people leading a Catholic health care organisation, whose depth of humanity and intelligent quest for truth and integrity left me in what St Ignatius would call “consolation” for the rest of the month. Surprised by grace.

Therefore that thought – living in and out of abundance rather than scarcity – revisits me these days. I have often thought, preached, and taught that God’s call (also) comes through the needs we perceive: where someone sees a gap, a need, and intuits what could improve it, I believe it can be the Spirit of God enabling the insight of a person who has the creative capacity to provide an adequate response (permitted, of course, by their openness and generosity). However, there is so much need, and when you are used to responding, that is what you always try to do, and what becomes expected of you, at times. But no one can respond to all the need they see, so how to know when and where to invest one’s life, strength, and gifts?

Lately, this thought is slowly surfacing: the call to listen more to the ideas born of abundance: what do I love? Where does my energy recharge? Where is there overflow, rather than demand? I know the balance between need and talent is not black and white, but it is a thread I want to pull.

I live my life between three “loves” or “passions”

1. Theology: my love for finding real answers to life and faith’s important questions.

2. Ministry: the call to bridge others not only to God but also to being equipped to lead and serve this world in intelligent ways.

3. Music “…was my first love” (and perhaps, if Augustine is right about the best singing happening in heaven by the risen bodies, it will be my last?): the desire to express the depth of human life through song.

Each of these spaces are life-giving and draining. However, two moments of abundance over the past year stay with me:

I. 10 years of my life in one performance:

I have already shared something of a performance of the Mass of the Ascension composed and launched this year at St Stephen’s Cathedral of Brisbane. It was a graced moment, but when I finished, one of my more perceptive friends came up to me and said: “that was 10 years of your life’s work, right there.” He was referring, I later understood, to my commitment to and practice of doing theology through music, and the coming alive of such music composed over years,through the words and music of  the Cathedral and students from Catholic schools across Brisbane: an overflowing of insight! I am today reminded that I can be exhausted from any number of things, but put me before a microphone alongside good musicians and another joy and strength kicks in. Abundance of grace.

II. Grace from beyond your worldview

A Catholic ecclesiology (and worldview) asks us to live and work in the world as a collaborative space: not us-against-them but coming together, albeit in difference. Since I was 18 years also, my experience of Jesus has held me in this Church, but this year, the grace received from those inhabiting its edges or looking in from the outside has been so above and beyond my expectations that I am drawn, like a magnet, to be attentive to the edges, the others, those who see us as we are and welcome us in. Sometimes it is those beyond your world who help you understand yourself. Our Catholic world writ-large (health, education, service, social justice, etc. …) needs to teach us how this can happen. I piloted a formation program this year for those involved in leading these spaces that has taken my breath away in how open, thirsty and receptive these people were to all things I love about theology.

I need to learn and grow into it. It draws my gaze and fills my cup.

Happy New Year’s Eve/New Year!