There is no person, event or experience too insignificant to be an experience of God. “Whatever touches the human heart,” wrote St. John Chrysostom, “touched the heart of God as well.” Our personal experiences of the agonies and ecstasies of life, of terrible suffering or sublime joy, of the most ordinary and menial of moments – all, it is true, are the intimate embrace of a most devoted God and lover. This transformation begins with […]

However, not all theologies are love stories – as we will now see. May I mention, in particular, two of these theologies. They are the two we will be most familiar with and we will explore briefly the story behind both to give us a deeper grasp of this course. One is called a theology of Sin and Redemption and the other is called a theology of Creation – a theology of Nature and Grace […]

Dear pilgrim, right now it is your heart’s faithful beating that is keeping you alive. Night and day it is attentive to its life’s task. Even before you were born it was busy learning its trade in your mother’s womb – an apprentice heart becoming familiar with the timing and tuning of its teacher, adapting, like second nature, to the rhythm of its model. It wept when your mother wept; it was happy when she […]

(Pre-empting Magnifica Humanitas??) On March 9th AlphaGo, a computer programme designed by the British Artificial Intelligence company DeepMind, beat Lee Sedol, the world’s top-rated Go player. Go is an ancient chess-type Chinese board game. Why was this event so widely reported in social media? Because, as The Times leader reported, ‘The computer was not programmed how to play the game; it taught itself . . . AlphaGo can act, but it can also react. It […]

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 it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station. After three minutes, a middle-aged man stopped for a few seconds and then hurried on. A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip – tossed in the box by […]

Whenever something is portrayed as so utterly itself, it cannot help revealing something of the Other To see God in the everyday, the divine in the worldly, the transcendent in the ordinary – that is what this chapter is about (indeed what the whole book is about) but here we call on the artist to help us achieve this kind of seeing.  The emphasis will be on the artist as painter, and as painter of […]

(August reflections are all short pieces from Travelling Light)  To be truly present, however, requires persistent awareness, attention, focus, the ability to stay with, to wonder at, to be lost in, to wake up to the holiness of the present moment. That is the reason for the prayer of quiet, for contemplation, for meditation for the mystical path. That is the reason for celebrating the sacraments, with all those natural elements that remind us of […]

(August reflections are all short pieces from Travelling Light) At this point in my scribbling, I pause to look around me. I stretch and breathe. My body is a little cramped but it feels good. I’m having a pint and a snack here in downtown Albuquerque. The Budweiser tastes sweet; the Cajun style chicken is spicy and tasty. It is stiflingly hot outside; the air conditioning inside is a heaven. A small child’s face is […]

Even if we wished we would be hard put to avoid the experience of God. The experience of God is practically inescapable. We cannot help coming into the embrace of divine compassion whenever we experience anything. Michael Skelley writes, ‘We do not sometimes have experiences of love, fear, ourselves, or anything else and then also have experiences of God. The basic, original experience of God, on the contrary, is the ultimate depth and radical essence […]

Love is all that we spend our lives seeking, but we forget along the way that love is present the moment we surrender to it. And the moment we surrender, we are no longer afraid of dying, or whether or not there is eternal life, because we have already found it, in love. Just one glimpse of true love, within and around us, shows us heaven. Love is eternal life. Because love sings forever, and […]

A reflection on the spirituality of mindfulness The balance of our minds is a fragile thing. The daily diet of bad news has profound effects on our moods and our thinking. The terrible tragedies and mindless acts of cruelty that are relentlessly reported eventually disturb the delicate equilibrium of many souls. The resulting insecurity is constantly spreading and is too often expressed in break-down, despair or thoughts of suicide. A serious, silent tipping point is […]

‘Please turn back’ my passenger said after we had travelled six or seven miles, ’I’ve forgotten my mobile.’ There was panic in her voice. Even though there was no emergency in her life just then, and we would be back in a few hours, the thought of being phoneless was very distressing for her. Full-blown FOMO – the fear of missing out – is one of the most insidious social anxieties of our age. The […]

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 […]

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 […]