SHOWING THE WAY TO GOD
By Michael McVeigh, Head of Publishing at Jesuit Communications
There was joy and celebration at St Mary’s North Sydney on 8 August, as Matthew Pinson SJ was ordained to the priesthood surrounded by family, friends and other well-wishers.
Thanking those who gathered for the Mass, Matthew spoke about the importance of the community around him in sustaining and encouraging him on his vocational journey.
‘Many of you here in the church have played a very special and personal role in my life of faith, starting of course with my parents Louise and David’, he said. ‘But even if today is the first time you’ve set eyes on me, I want you to be assured how much the faith of the people of God is an important witness strengthening me in my journey as a Jesuit, and now as a priest.’
Matthew Pinson SJ. All photos by Daryl Charles Photography.
The soil where vocations are grown
In his homily, Archbishop Patrick O’Regan remembered the place where he first met Matthew and his family, St Raphael’s Parish in Cowra in the mid-1980s. He reflected on a community ‘where faith was handed on quietly, without fuss, in the way the best things usually are’.
‘I think nobody, looking at that little boy under the wide country skies of Cowra, could have said with certainty where God would lead him. But God knew. And today we see what God was doing all those years ago in Cowra and ever since – in his family, and in the ordinary rhythm of parish life’, he said.
‘Vocations are never manufactured, they are grown. Slowly, in soil like that.’
Inspired by Mary MacKillop
The ordination took place on the Feast of St Mary MacKillop. Archbishop O’Regan said her journey exemplified the trust required of those entering the priesthood. He said like the Widow of Zarephath in the First Reading, the promise of the priesthood is that ‘the jar will not be spent’.
‘Every priest will tell you the same thing. The supply is not ours, and that is precisely why it does not run out’, he said. ‘Mary MacKillop knew this in her bones. Together with Julian Tenison Woods, she founded the Sisters of St Joseph with absolutely nothing except a desire to serve children in the bush, and towns not unlike Cowra.’
‘She was misunderstood. Excommunicated for a time. Humiliated. And through all of it, she kept on saying in one form or another what she wrote to her sisters: “Have courage, no matter what crosses come your way.” Her extraordinary trust in providence was not for her a pious ornament. It was tested, as every vocation must. And it held.’
A tradition of scholars and priests
Archbishop O’Regan said Matthew brings to the priesthood a ‘mind trained on the galaxies and the deep structure of the universe’, and continues a long tradition of Jesuit scholars and priests ‘for whom the study of the heavens has always been a form of prayer’. He noted that Ignatius himself sought consolation in looking up at the sky and stars.
‘The scriptures remind us that the heavens declare the glory of God. Matthew, you have read that in its original language – in equations and starlight. And one who has measured how vast creation is, and how finely tuned, is well placed to preach the Gospel we have just heard. If God governs the galaxies, and clothes the grass of the field, He can surely be trusted with tomorrow.’
Like the journey so far, that tomorrow will be in the hands of God.
‘When Mary MacKillop was a young woman, she could not imagine where her “yes” would take her. When Matthew was a small boy at St Raphael’s, none of us could have imagined this day necessarily. And that is how God works – quietly, patiently, faithfully, from a country parish, by way of the stars, to this altar.’
All photos by Daryl Charles Photography.
