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Okay, so, apart from posts to mark the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV, I haven’t posted anything to this blog since the start of January 2025.  My first Broken Bay Pilgrim Stamp to be collected in the 'Jubilee Pilgrim Passport', featuring St John Vianney. This is mostly down to the year, for me, starting with a “sort of” setback which left me in a disoriented state for the first quarter of the year, or so, and not well disposed to doing anything particularly creative in the direction of new artwork. Nor did I feel it worthwhile to post anything about my father and I visiting the Sydney Bus Museum in Leichhardt for one of their open days, or our second visit to Hunter Valley Steamfest in Maitland either, or attending the 2025 Hunter Valley Airshow.  Inspecting the Riley Brothers Bus at the Sydney Bus Museum, Leichhardt, NSW. What has been occupying my attention, after a brainstorming session of possibilities with my mother, has been planning, mapping, testing, organizing, promoting, and leading Young Adult (18–35) Pilgrimages to the four Jubilee Shrines of Hope in the Diocese of Broken Bay for the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope:
 Viewing the relic of St John Vianney at St Mary Immaculate Church in Manly, NSW. The whole effort was started, for the most part, because I didn’t expect anyone else to try and do something Young Adult-focused at a Diocesan–wide level for the Year of Jubilee, and because the Diocese itself had a reshuffle of ministry appointments and parish placements such that the former monthly Young Adult gatherings of previous years were dropped from the calendar without ceremony. For all appearances curial priorities had changed and if anything was going to happen Young Adult-wise it would have to be a self-initiated, grassroots affair, which I threw myself into with far more effort and emotion than strictly necessary. These pilgrimages are meant to give my fellow peers an opportunity for pilgrimage during this Year of Jubilee who aren’t able due to financial or familial circumstances to go overseas on pilgrimage to Rome like many others are doing. The four pilgrimages are spaced out to be once every second month to aid in giving a sense of the Jubilee truly being a year-long event and not just a blink-and-you-miss-it four-weekend marathon done-and-dusted, don’t-need-to-think-about-it-again situation.
It is a moot point as to whether a four-weekend marathon mightn’t have been a better draw card for the intended audience, given that there have been only a handful of pilgrims turn up for both the first pilgrimage to Manly in March for the relic of St John Vianney and the second to Chatswood in May to visit the relic of Blessed Carlo Acutis. It’s depressing when spur-of-the-moment picnics and such get higher turnout from young adults than the thing that’s had so much blood, tears, and effort poured into it to give them an opportunity to gain the Year of Jubilee Indulgence and a reduction of a chunk of our time in Purgatory currently accrued to each of us individually — and that is worthwhile! ¹ I have to regularly remind myself that these pilgrimages aren’t a “me”–thing, they are from and for God — He’s the one who sparked the whole idea of organizing these walks — for purposes that only He knows the end result of, I’m just here to organise them. If even only one person shows up, that pilgrimage was successful. If you or anyone you know would like to join along for next two pilgrimages, the dates are as follows:
 — Draft promotionals -- These walks are open to all pilgrims from surround Dioceses and not just the Diocese of Broken Bay, and starting with the St John Paul II Pilgrimage they will be opened up to all interested pilgrims from 18 years old to retirement. Keep on the lookout for further details and Facebook Event pages about each walk from myself on Facebook or here on the blog. I hope to see you there. Vincent Cavanagh 9 June 2025 ¹ The Jubilee Indulgence is explained in an accessible and down-to-earth way to all by Bishop of Wilcannia-Forbes Columba Macbeth-Green in the video linked below: And in other news: I have turned OFF comments on all my blog posts, apart from those made by verifiable human beings, due to an influx of spam e-mail / robot comments over the past year. Moving forward I will be keeping the comments on this blog CLOSED until further notice. Thank you. Well, given that my 12 Months Later review of my social media exodus was read as more of a 2023 Review (which it was, to be fair) I might as well do another re-view for 2024 😅  'Silver screen' rising into position. Note the storm clouds in the background. 2024 was kicked off by going out with some fellow World Youth Day pilgrims to the Westpac OpenAir Cinema on the Fleet Steps overlooking Farm Cove and the rest of Sydney Harbour. The film we’d arranged to see was One Life (2023), a biographical film about humanitarian Nicholas Winton and more broadly about the Kindertransport of Jewish children from German-occupied Czechoslovakia to Britain at the beginning of World War II. This is hardly a film for the faint of heart and as if to accentuate this point we sat, in provided ponchos, for about the last two-thirds of the film under wave after wave of rain pouring over Sydney Harbour. Watching a film outdoors on Sydney Harbour in rolling rain running off my poncho-covered head is an experience I won’t soon forget. Speaking of World Youth Day Lisbon, much of 2024 was spent finishing off a 12-month voucher for photo printing by having a selection of my photos from 2023 physically printed and then arranged by me in a photo album. To mark the 1-year anniversary of the WYD Pilgrimage in July, I organized two get-together lunches for the Over 18s Pilgrim (Italy and Portugal) cohort which many appreciated. I cannot comment about my fellow pilgrims’ experiences. But for me, a year-and-a-half on from Lisbon I’m only just coming to grips with, and processing through, what we all went through over those 22 hectic days of pilgrimage across Mediterranean Europe. But I can say that, for having done it once, I at least have more of an idea of what to expect a second time around and how to manage things and myself better than I did the first time, please God.
In comparison to 2023: 2024 was an exponential increase of train trips, train festivals and rail heritage excursions with my father. Our travels took us north to the Hunter Region around Newcastle and as far south as Goulburn and the Southern Highlands. Indeed, there were many long days with very-early morning starts. But we enjoyed ourselves nonetheless, yet we were very tired by the end of those same days. September saw me travelling by airplane up to Brisbane for the IGNITE Conference 2024 organized by Emmanuel Community and its Ignite Youth ministry team. This was the real curveball of 2024 and it was my first ever experience of IGNITE.  Archbishop Mark Coleridge at the microphone. All the talks by various speakers that I went to were good and informative on different parts of the Catholic faith life. A special stand out was the Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge’s talk on Encountering the Scriptures where he discussed how the bible “goes to the heart of hopelessness to find a hope that cannot be destroyed.” He truly enkindled in his audience a greater appreciation of “the black fire on white fire” as the Rabbis describe the Holy Scriptures.  Emmanuel Worship on stage, IGNITE Conference 2024 Brisbane. The rallies at IGNITE were experiences. There was much good in them, but by the end of the three-and-a-bit days I was ready to run back to my bunk-hole at home and not have another thousand decibels going right through my body. After attending IGNITE and commuting across Brisbane each morning and evening, it has confirmed to me that what’s needed is smaller and quieter events where good conversation can take place. There’s a place for the big events, as long as they are not the only option available.  Kodak M38 point-and-shoot camera arranged with Kodak UltraMax 400 speed film. On a less frazzled note, that same month I also started shooting 35mm film with a re-loadable plastic point-and-shoot camera. It has been a nice change of pace from taking photos with my smartphone. I don’t really know or have even an idea of what 2025 will bring, apart for the Jubilee Year of Hope that has just begun. Dear God, may this new year see an outpouring of Your love and of experiences of hopes and dreams fulfilled. Let’s see if there’ll be a 2025 Review, eh? Vincent Cavanagh 3 Jan 2025 Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an account
of the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. ~ 1 Peter 3:15-16, NRSV Catholic Yes, I’m back and this may or may not be a newsletter under a different guise.
You can do it like I have 💀 by staring off into the sea of empty calorific YouTube video suggestions wondering what that last thought was that you didn’t want to forget. Or reading through multiple inter-referenced substack pages and church journalism and a touch too much European politics “news” – which I still don’t have my head around; and should probably be grateful for that fact. Or not-quite-compulsively checking either the weather application or if there are any updates on Facebook Messenger to previous text messages (or trying to reverse engineer which comment someone liked due to the latest update, grrr!) Speaking of substack pages, one that I’ve been gravitating back to of late—and isn’t as overly swimming in bar graphs or generally depressing as others—is the School of the Unconformed by Ruth Gaskovski. For about the past year(?) or so she has been doing shared essays with her husband Peco that they cross-post between each other’s substack page (Peco’s is Pilgrims in the Machine). The general theme of their essays is regaining man’s [1] humanity from both the jaws and bowels of the inhuman Machine world we now find ourselves living in. Of which this quote by Ruth from their recent article, ‘Building People with Three-Dimensional Memory’, is an example: The incessant distraction of interfacing with devices leaves us feeling as if our brain and our body are forever in a different place. It almost seems as if we are in a race to upload our life into the virtual universe. Our desire to capture and share the present is numbing our ability to form natural memories of the moments we want to actually treasure. By excessively documenting our lives artificially Marshall McLuhan might say we are “autoamputating” our memory. And Peco continues in his section of the piece by exemplifying how technology is artificially engendering the tell-tale symptoms of Alzheimer’s into all of us glued to our digital devices: Some segments of the culture might experience a carefree insouciance as they become largely forgetful of what has come before—the wisdom, knowledge, and traditions of history—and more gripped by the here-and-now stimulation of their screens. I would highly encourage anyone else interested to read the whole article here. As well as Ruth’s interview with Erin Loechner (don’t worry, I’d never heard of her either), ‘Turning the Algorithm Upside Down: The Opt-Out Family’, where Erin answers Ruth’s daughter’s question of whether there even is a “healthy” way to be on social media: I know the more palatable answer here is to speak of digital well-being and balance and how to successfully navigate the algorithm in a way that we can consume the good without the bad. But we can’t. Just like any mind-altering drug we might ingest, social media makes it so we are not in control of the experience we’ll have immediately after. And I can no longer see any potential reward in delivering our God-given brains to a [tattooed] group of tech bros in Silicon Valley.” [Note: At the time of writing, this post by the Gaskovski’s was open to non-subscribers (June 2024), future readers of this blog post may find these articles behind Subscription/Pay Walls. Their substack posts tend to be open for a few months before going behind the Subscription Wall, depending on whether an article is important enough that it remain open for the greatest number of people to read and gain use from it.] Keepin’ Up wit’ Gen ZNow on to lighter fare. Amongst my varying sojourns through internet-life I have compiled a list of all the various different Internet Grammar and Acronyms that I’ve come across over the past month or so: LLAP ‘Live Long and Prosper’ 🖖 rekt Internet form of ‘Wrecked’. 🗿 Moai (Easter Island Head) emoji. Used to communicate a deadpan or shocked/embarrassed-into-speechlessness expression. Or alternatively—if in Japan—used to arrange meeting up with people at the Moyai statue near Shibuya Station in Tokyo. IYKYK ‘If You Know, You Know’ Vietnamese “teencodes”: Hixx or Hixxxxx – written version of 😢 (crying face emoji). Huhu – written version of 😭 (loudly crying face – or as I know it, ‘waterfall tears’). TIL ‘Today I Learned.’ ily / ILY ‘I Love You.’ Not to be confused with illy, the Italian Espresso company. bby / BBY Internet alternative form of ‘Baby’. (ex. ‘Woohoo BBY!’) More often used when using ‘baby’ as a term of endearment. RTFM ‘Read The … Manual!’ Often used within the Linux user community forums. Jubilee 2025For those of us not on TikTok (or whichever platform it was announced on), the Reverend Samuel French (@frsamfrench) will be leading a pilgrimage in the footsteps of St Paul through Greece and Turkey with Harvest Journeys exclusively for Young Adults aged 18 to 35 for the Holy Year of Jubilee in 2025: ‘Pilgrims of Hope’. More information about the pilgrimage can be found here. AS I WROTE at the beginning of this blog, this post may effectively be a newsletter in all but name. Yes, there are already plenty of other blog posts on this website that have been tagged with “newsletter”, but I specifically chose to name this RANDOM Things #001 because I’d prefer to make a clean break of the prior hodgepodge of blog posts and because the perfectionist in me wouldn’t let up unless I went through and counted every-single-blog-post with either tag or semblance of “newsletter” both on this website and its predecessor. Which is not an option that I look upon with any enthusiasm, hence why RANDOM Things #001. I do—and I ask that you reading this likewise—not expect this to in any way be a regular or (dear God save me) quarterly affair. It is my estimation that RANDOM Things be more of an ‘every now and then’ or just ‘I haven’t painted anything, but here’s what’s been kicking around in my head recently’ type of blog post. So until the next one of these not-newsletters eventuates; Peace and Happy Feast of St Peter and St Paul. Vincent Cavanagh 29 June 2024 Footnotes [1] As in the genus man (mankind) of which both men and woman, male and female, make up the whole category (ex., “earth men” and “Men of Earth”) – for the peculiarly post-Age of Aquarius pedants out there. |
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