Our People

Mirimare Was Blessing For Opening Of The Centre

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
17/3/2006

The opening and blessing of the Miramare Gardens Events and Conference Centre is certainly a great reason for the Severino family and their collaborators to rejoice – as St Paul counsels us always to do in the Lord.  What makes this all the more wonderful is that the Severino family wishes to share their joy in Christ with all of us and to seek God’s blessing on this endeavour.  This then is a family business, and we have been invited to join that family tonight not just for speeches and food and drink, but also for prayer that God may bless all that happens here abundantly.

This centre, then, will be a Christian one, even if those who come here to celebrate will come from all sorts of backgrounds. Christians were from the very earliest days famous for their hospitality. They opened the first hospices, poor houses, soup kitchens and feeding stations, in local churches and monasteries. Later they established great social institutions such as hospitals for the poor, orphanages, chivalric orders of hospitallers, St Vincent de Paul conferences, Caritas, Project Compassion and the rest. The very word hospitality – which in turn is at the basis of words such as hospital and hospice – is essentially a Christian invention and so is much of the content we associate with it. The duty to share one’s home and table with relatives and friends and those in particular need was and is of course known to many peoples of many religions and none. But it is a peculiar aspect of the Christian conception of God that we think he joins us in that hospitality in a very particular way.

Religion teaches the mystical, communitarian and symbolic dimensions of offering food, of eating and abstaining, of gluttony and of moderation. Food and drink are God’s good gifts to be shared in turn with others. The Gospels record many feeding stories involving Jesus and his mother, Peter’s mother-in-law, Jarius’ daughter, and Jesus’ friends Martha and Mary who squabble over who should be waiter. The Jesus of the Gospels was often at wedding feasts, pharisees’ dining tables, eating with tax collectors and sinners, ‘at home’ with his friends or out hosting picnics in the hills.

In fact the turning points of Jesus’ life are always marked by eating and drinking. His first great sign is turning water into wine; his first preaching to a gentile began with a request for a drink and ended with a promise of endless living water; his most recorded miracle is the multiplication of loaves and fishes; his last wonder before his ascension is the huge haul of fish. All these miracles were of end-time proportions, divine in their extravagance, a foretaste of the longed-for messianic banquet. As his ministry came to its climax, he took his closest friends aside for a last meal, investing the Passover Seder with new significance: his own Pasch memorialized and perpetuated in the Eucharist. Before returning to the Father he dined again with disoriented disciples in Emmaus, with confused apostles at the Sunday gathering and with his nearest and dearest at the lakeside breakfast in Galilee.

All this partying scandalized those who closed their ears and hearts to Jesus but excited those open to his teaching. So when he wanted to describe the kingdom of God or the afterlife or forgiveness or ministry or himself, time and again he chose images of food and drink, feasts and parties. He told parables about vineyards, grapes, wine and wineskins; about wheat, yeast and bread; about oil, mustard seeds, figs, mint, dill, cumin, eggs, fish and a fattened calf. He described prayer as asking Our Father for daily bread and forgiveness as a father holding a feast to celebrate his prodigal son’s return. Christian life is about bearing fruit and yielding a harvest. Christian leaders should be wise stewards who feed their household at the proper time, shepherds who feed Christ’s sheep, their preaching savoury like salt. The kingdom of God is like a wedding party, where Jesus’ disciples eat and drink at his table. And how does Jesus describe himself and his mission? My food is to do the will of my Father. I am the bread of life. And how does he leave himself for us? As food: Jesus’ body and blood, under the species of bread and wine, the staple foods of life. Jesus is remembered in the sacred meal, really present in the food and drink.

There is much more to be said about all this, but I know you did not all come here tonight for a theology lesson or even a long sermon. I know too that much more will happen in this Events and Conference Centre than partying. There will be ceremonies – even weddings (though Catholics would also approach the Church first!) – and certainly wedding receptions. There will be conferences and all sorts of events which make the most of the magnificence and elegance of this centre. Yet still we might reflect on why it is that we so love to feast and why we invite God to our meals. Of course it is not so easy to see if God is here or not and so people often ask his representatives. I know that Cardinal Pell very much wanted to be here tonight and that his call to Rome by the Holy Father may have caused some of that anxiety and need for forbearance that St Paul so realistically observes about even as he tells us to rejoice. So it was that I am happy to be here with you to stand in the Cardinal’s stead.

May we continue to see your good works, works of salt and light, as Jesus called them, brilliant and savoury, revealing and nourishing.  May this centre serve always to build community in Sydney as families gather, new families are formed, organisations gathered, knowledge pursued, company celebrated, God’s good things enjoyed. Some of you may know that I am the co-ordinator of the World Youth Day here in July 2008. We hope to have as many as half a million or more young people and others at the final Mass with Pope Benedict. But I will be looking to my friends here at Miramare Conference Centre to accommodate and feed, say, 100,000!

Now before we proceed to the intercessions and the blessing I must remind the Catholics present that this is a Friday of Lent and so they would ordinarily be expected to Fast and Abstain! But it is also the Feast of St Patrick, a Celt but tonight also an honorary Italian, and so all Fast and Abstinence is abolished this day, indeed forbidden. Bon Appetit, Salute and thanks be to God!