“It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.”

What do you think of when you hear the word ‘culture’? Some people mean posh things like opera, art galleries and universities.

What’s the best kind of leader? Plato in his Republic famously said it was a person with vision and principle who didn’t want to be leader and thus a philosopher-king would be best.

More than a little OTT – over the top – wouldn’t you say? Five bridesmaids forget to bring extra oil for their lamps, which given that the bridegroom came late to the reception and the girls were presumably not professional bridesmaids, seems a simple and forgivable oversight (Mt 25:1-13).

A rather gruesome story for a school Mass and a Fathers’ Day celebration, but Christianity is brutally honest about the suffering in any life.

St Dominic was a paradoxical figure. “His face was always radiant,” Blessed Jordan chronicled, and “by his cheerfulness he easily won the love of everybody. Without difficulty he found his way into people’s hearts as soon as they saw him.”

Earlier this year Charity Sunshine Tillerman Tillemann-Dick, a coloratura soprano, died aged 35. She had long struggled with idiopathic pulmonary hypertension that enlarged her heart to more than three times normal size and, in 2009 and again in 2012, she underwent double lung transplants.

The phrase ‘salt of the earth’ is commonplace in modern English. It comes, of course, from Jesus’ words in our Gospel passage today (Mt 5:1b-2, 13-16). It has come to describe those who are commonsensical, practical, honest, reliable. But is that what Jesus had in mind?

“My soul is bursting as it magnifies the Lord. My spirit is overjoyed with God my saviour. He looks on me in my lowliness and raises up all the lowly. He loves me in my emptiness and fills all the hungry with good things.