Nga mihi atawhai - greetings to all in mercy! Matariki starts early this month, on June 4, and with it comes the call to join Maori in celebrating their new year. The appearance of the Pleiades, a cluster of stars in the pre-dawn sky, is the centuries-old signal for Maori that nature’s cycle of growth and life is about to begin once more.

Nga mihi atawhai - greetings to all in mercy! If Catherine McAuley were here today, chances are she’d be encouraging us to add our signatures to a Closer Together Whakatata Mai card, launched by the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services as a way of highlighting income inequality in our country.

Nga mihi atawhai - greetings to all in mercy! Mercy Global Concern was established at the United Nations headquarters in New York in 1998 by the Sisters of Mercy, as a way of extending their voice for the less privileged. Within the one forum on Earth where all nations have the potential to meet as equals, Sisters of Mercy have been working to make explicit options on behalf of the world’s poor.

Nga mihi atawhai - greetings to all in mercy! This year’s McAuley Lecture was presented at four venues throughout New Zealand by Mary Reynolds rsm, executive director of Mercy International Association. Family illness prevented Mary from travelling here as planned; instead, her lecture took the form of a DVD presentation at the scheduled venues.

Nga mihi atawhai - greetings to all in mercy! Distinguished Mercy author Mary C Sullivan rsm is surely counting the weeks until her new biography on Catherine McAuley, The Path of Mercy, is published in the United States early next year. Last month, she was in Birmingham, England, to present a series of talks at a reflection day for Sisters of Mercy from throughout the United Kingdom.

Nga mihi atawhai - greetings to all in mercy! For those impressed by the synchronicity of numbers, the second Friday in November – 11.11.11 - promises to be a date of rare significance. Nations in many parts of the world will remember it as Armistice Day - ‘Poppy Day’ in the United Kingdom - marking the official end of the First World War.