More than 700 people gathered online and in person in small groups across Australia on Tuesday for the Marist Association of St Marcellin Champagnat’s annual Marian Lecture.
This year’s lecture was delivered by award-winning journalist, author, philosopher, film maker and academic, Stan Grant. It was held at Southern Cross College, in the Sydney suburb of Burwood.
Professor Grant, a Wiradjuri, Kamilaroi and Dharrawal man, has blazed a trail for First Nations journalists in a four-decade career, reporting from more than 80 countries.
His latest book, Murriyang: Song of Time, offers a path to peace and forgiveness, grounded in the Wiradjuri spiritual practice of deep silence and respect.
In his opening, Professor Grant recounted a recent spiritual experience in the Oxfordshire countryside that stirred his sense of wonder, time, and divine presence.
Using this setting as a launching point, he explored the themes of faith, modern alienation, freedom, love, and hope, rooted in Christian theology and challenged by contemporary secularism.
“I wake early before sunrise to walk and think. It is my sacred time…. in the distance I heard the tolling of a church bell. I visited there and walked in the footsteps of forty generations of Christian pilgrims.”
At the heart of the lecture, Professor Grant highlighted Mary, the mother of Christ, whose “yes” to God – what Hans Urs von Balthasar called Geschehenlassen, or “letting be” – embodies divine obedience and radical agency.
He presented this Marian consent not as passive submission, but as a profound act of freedom: a deliberate choice to participate in God’s creative love.
“What a beautiful gift to locate creation in the mother’s love. In the smile of the mother the child is awakened to the grace of God,” Professor Grant said.
He critiqued sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of “liquid modernity”, a phase of modern society marked by constant change, and uncertainty where humans become unmoored from deep truth and tradition.
Instead of despair, Professor Grant called for a return to the mystery, magic, and miracle of faith.
He urged the audience to reclaim freedom not as self-determination but as “unity with God’s will”, drawing from both Greek (freedom as the good) and Jewish (freedom as covenant) traditions, synthesised in Christianity.
“Freedom is not individual will; it is unity with God’s will,” Professor Grant said.
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Pilgrims of Hope Stan Grant Delivers Inspiring 2025 Marian Lecture (Marist Association of St Marcellin Champagnat)
