If we are to hear the silent music beneath the noisy traffic of our thinking, we need to learn how to leave the mind and focus on the senses. The distractions of modern life prevent us picking up the rhythm of grace. At a Metro station in Washington DC a man started to play the violin. It was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that rush hour […]
My brother Joseph had Down’s Syndrome. Every so often, in my dreams, he still comes storming back to deeply disturb my life. My mother adored him. And during those most difficult times, especially when Joseph’s severe diabetes demanded unrelenting attention, she was sustained by the certainty that in caring for Joseph she was entertaining angels unaware. If I had my mother back now I would tell her that it was even more that that. It […]
Matthew Arnold (19th Century) wrote: ‘More and more humanity will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.’ ‘The poet or the novelist who can find the words and images that speak to our human condition – to our loneliness and pain, […]
(An Extract from Daniel’s teaching in Episode 4 of An Astonishing Secret video course.) These sentences are pretty packed with meaning and they need to be unpacked so I just hope you can listen to them with the ‘ear of your heart’. Remember them when you can during the day, that’s how they become part of our consciousness. Listen, now, with the ear of your heart to this paragraph: ‘God became human so that humans […]
From Episode 4 of the Astonishing Secret Videos This episode offers many examples, once again, of what we could call ‘the sacramental vision’. That’s one word for this while incarnational approach. Or the ‘Catholic imagination’ is another old name for what we are doing in this course. They are all ways of interpreting the incarnation. So one little story may help us again to again to get the feel for what we are doing when […]
‘Incarnation means that each human person has been taken up into the very heart of God, into a boundless love that ennobles each human being, conferring on them an infinite divinity. We love this magnificent planet on which God has put us, and we love the human family which dwells there with its tragedies and aspirations.’ Evangelii Gaudium 178 As this book began, so it ends, with the meditative reflection of Rhineland Mystic Mechtild of […]
‘We lack an awareness of our common origin, of our mutual belonging, and of a future to be shared with everyone. Yet all is not lost . . . No system can completely suppress our openness to what is good, true and beautiful, our God-given ability to respond to his grace at work deep in our hearts. I appeal to everyone in the world not to forget our dignity . . .’ “As never before […]
Mr Casey was always courteous. He was the conductor on the Bus Eireann that dropped me at Lisivigeen, near Killarney, for my first ever summer holiday, eight miles from home. I was seven then. Our farmer friends were waiting at the crossroads. Mr Casey helped me down the three steps of the bus with my strapped and bulging suitcase. We waved him goodbye and set off across the fields for the farmhouse. No emperor ever […]
Summer days and childhood memories! When they come together, they twist our hearts without warning. Like a high-octane cocktail, they hit us suddenly and mercilessly with emotions. The smells, the sights, and the feel of summer so often strike, with painful intensity, at the tender, forgotten and sleeping magic of those special years. There is a pathos, a poignancy and the strangest sadness in those moments of memories ‘that bless and burn’, as my mother […]
I’m alone for a moment, on the ferry home, half-way between Calais and Dover. It is Sunday morning and the sun is shining on the green-blue sea. As spring turns to summer, millions travel to Lourdes. Our own parish pilgrimage is almost over. Our hearts are full of stories of pain and joy, of some dark moments and many bright ones, of shared secrets, and glimpses of the mystery and paradox of the human spirit. […]
The coming of summer stirs our hearts. As the warm and welcome colours of July play across the fields and streets around us, those vulnerable hearts are moved again by an aching kind of remembering and longing first awakened in our childhood experiences of nature. Because Pope Francis believes that God’s extravagant love is inscribed into all such explorations and yearnings, he regards those memories as small epiphanies of incarnate grace. Our friendship with God, […]
Whenever we encounter another person in love, we learn something new about God. Whenever our eyes are opened to acknowledge the other, we grow in the knowledge of God, opening up spiritual horizons, taking us beyond our limited spiritual constructs. (Evangelii Gaudium 272) Pope Francis is making a bold statement about the power of love and the divine nature of every person. To learn something about God we must experience human loving. And in loving […]
From its very beginning thirteen billion years ago, the raw material of the world was already permeated and filled with God’s subtle but powerful presence. There never was a time or space in the history of evolution when God was absent from this planet. In the person of Christ this tremendous love-story has been finally revealed. A new consciousness has enfolded the world. The human is now the home of the divine. The redemption has […]
Within the horizons of the theology of nature and grace, there is a basic theology of sacrament without which we will always struggle to fully understand and teach the Christian faith. Once we make that central ground of revealed truth our own, then we will have immense confidence and consistency in the way we approach our teaching and catechising. What follows is an effort to explore the central Christian notion of sacrament, beginning with Christ, […]
St Paul’s prayer for us to ‘put on Christ’, to have ‘the mind of Christ’, is substantially answered when we learn to see things sacramentally. To look at anything in the light of Incarnation is to notice the ‘surplus of meaning’, the ‘excess of significance’ in what is going on around us. The work of evangelising is like bringing colour into what was only black and white before. It is about completing what was already […]
Once we equate God with life itself a transformation takes place in the way we believe. Once we remove everything that separates divinity and humanity, heaven and earth, grace and nature, then we begin to truly and freely live and move in another milieu. Once we use the same name for the Gracious Mystery and Mother of all becoming, and the primal energy of creation and ongoing evolution, our faith cannot ever be the same […]
The experience of sharing and consuming Love’s Body, the Blessed Sacrament of the Universe, the Cosmic Bread of Incarnate Divinity, the Sacred Wine of a growing humanity, the Holy Communion of all forms of life, brings, as well as deep joy, forebodings, where the future appears as a yawning chasm into which a mutilated and drained earth must fall. Let us look briefly at some reasons for such deep concern. Thomas Berry wrote about the […]
In Eucharistic celebration it is WE who are changed and realigned without true nature. Taking part in communion does nothing other than transform us into that which we consume. Jean Louis Segundo suggests that we should not just be ‘Gospel consumers’ but ‘Gospel creators’. Perhaps Christians should make continual efforts to authenticate their sacramental life by being not only ‘Eucharistic consumers’ but of necessity ‘Eucharistic creators’ too, committed to establishing a new world order in […]
In the dynamic presence of the bread and wine on the table we have symbolised just about everything that can be predicated of humanity, the earth and everything on it and in it, the universe and the cosmos itself- the past, present and future of all creation. These rich and simple elements gather up the intense agony and ecstasy of the world, its darkness and light, its failures are mistakes, its driving and hopes, its […]
Sacrament, in Christian terms, is not meant to be a notion or practice imposed from without, but rather to be regarded in the light of a world already filled and permeated with Love’s essence -a world that tends toward the celebration in symbol and word of its own amazing story, beauty and hopes. The symbolic power of the sacramental action is to remember, affirm, celebrate and intensify the love and meaning at the heart of […]
Anois teacht an Earraig sang the blind Irish pilgrim-poet Raftery. ‘On the brink of Spring, with the “stretch” in the days, I will raise my sail, and launch out anew.’ This is the time of year when nature beckons to us, the high roads call to us, something stirs in our soul. Shades of Druidic customs awaken within Celtic hearts. On St Patrick’s day a few years ago, I said Mass on top of the […]
Summer days and childhood memories! When they come together, they twist our hearts without warning. Like a high-octane cocktail, they hit us suddenly and mercilessly with emotions. The smells, the sights, and the feel of summer so often strike, with painful intensity, at the tender, forgotten and sleeping magic of those special years. There is a pathos, a poignancy and the strangest sadness in those moments of memories ‘that bless and burn’, as my mother […]
At 84 Samuel Becket was asked about the possibility of his retirement. “What!,” he exclaimed, “Me? Retire? Never – not with the fire in me now!” Not all of us are that lucky. In my travels I meet teachers and priests for whom the original vision of their vocation has all but disappeared. There seems to be a universal kind of ennui, a deep-seated sense of pressure, that is driving people to retire as soon […]
I could feel the anger coming on. If he does not stop soon, I was thinking, I’m going to lose it. He didn’t and I did. With little warning, the red mist struck. It does not happen to me very often. I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve exploded in company. Strangely enough, I haven’t ever regretted those out-of-control moments. There was always something real about them. When such outbursts […]
Is your heart a little lighter this Eastertide? It is meant to be. The Christian faith is an Easter faith. It makes an impact at the centre of our lives. Resurrection is to be tangibly experienced by each one of us. But it cannot be forced, it comes, like the dawn, as a bright gift to console and comfort. Christ rises in your heart, gently, slowly, whenever- you truly grieve at another’s loss your heart […]
It was when the evenings were lengthening in the first week of the new millennium that Laura’s long lashes began to move again. During those months of waiting, there was a paleness about her, like a sick baby, and her parents’ faces became etched forever with pain and fear. It had been a long Good Friday for the Connolly family. One day Bruce’s artistic passion was no longer there. The urge to paint had left […]
