Begin with the Heart Weekly Reflections

September 30, 2022

Begin with the Heart Reflections

The Begin with the Heart team are continuing Daniel’s legacy of celebrating a theology of nature and grace. Our aim is to foster and promote Daniel’s ministry by making his writing and teaching widely available. These weekly reflections are emailed out to our contact list and you are welcome to join it. We’d love to share any moments of breakthrough or insight you may have experienced . Please email contactus@astonishingsecreret.org Please note that during September […]

October 30, 2022

The Grace of Experience

web Master WeeklyReflection StClare

It is often said that people are searching for meaning in their lives. But could it be rather that they are looking for evidence that they are really and truly alive? A boy sat on the steps of a building with a battered hat by his feet. A cardboard sign read: “I’m blind. Please help.” The hat held a few small coins. A man was walking by. He dropped a euro in the hat, picked […]

October 23, 2022

Melody of the Moment

web Master WeeklyReflection John Ashbery, MaySarton

One Celtic evening, the mythical Fionn Mac Chumhail and his warriors were having a discussion about the finest sound in the world. His son Oisin extolled the ring of spear on shield in the din of battle. Another went on about the fearful cries of the stags and the baying of the hounds in the rising blood lust just before the kill. Yet another spoke of the song of his beloved as she played the […]

October 16, 2022

Threshold of the Soul

web Master WeeklyReflection

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 […]

October 9, 2022

Kitchen God

web Master WeeklyReflection

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 […]

October 2, 2022

More than Words – The Power of Art

web Master WeeklyReflection MatthewArnold

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, […]

September 25, 2022

Divinity in a Speck of Dust (Part 2)

web Master Theology of Nature and Grace, WeeklyReflection AstonishingSecret, CSLewis, StJohnHenryNewman

(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 […]

September 18, 2022

Divinity in a Speck of Dust (Part 1)

web Master Sacraments, WeeklyReflection AstonishingSecret, Eucharist

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 […]

September 11, 2022

The Divine Light of your Human Heart

web Master WeeklyReflection AstonishingSecret, EvangeliiGaudium, MechtildofMagdeburg

‘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 […]

September 4, 2022

Wake up to your Sleeping Power

web Master WeeklyReflection LaudatoSi

‘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 […]

August 28, 2022

Sabbath Time

web Master WeeklyReflection

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 […]

August 21, 2022

Fields of Home

web Master WeeklyReflection PatrickKavanagh

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 […]

August 14, 2022

Against an Infinite Horizon

web Master WeeklyReflection Lourdes

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. […]

August 7, 2022

Eternity of Childhood

web Master WeeklyReflection DylanThomas, TheTablet

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, […]

July 31, 2022

Seeing the Face of God

web Master WeeklyReflection AstonishingSecret, Lesmis

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 […]

July 24, 2022

Sacrament and Sacraments

web Master Sacraments, WeeklyReflection BeginwiththeHeart, SeanFagan

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 […]

July 17, 2022

Prisms of Revelation – Sacrament Revisited

web Master Sacraments, WeeklyReflection BeginwiththeHeart

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, […]

July 10, 2022

Ordinary Mystical Thresholds

web Master WeeklyReflection BeginwiththeHeart

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 […]

July 3, 2022

The Mystery of Being itself

web Master WeeklyReflection AstonishingSecret

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 […]

June 26, 2022

Healing a Broken Body

web Master Sacraments, WeeklyReflection Eucharist, YearoftheHeart

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 […]

June 19, 2022

Becoming the Vision

web Master Sacraments, WeeklyReflection Eucharist, YearoftheHeart

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 […]

June 12, 2022

The Eucharistic Conspiracy

web Master Sacraments, WeeklyReflection Eucharist, TeilhardDeChardin, YearoftheHeart

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 […]

June 5, 2022

Celebration of a Love Story

web Master Sacraments, WeeklyReflection Eucharist, YearoftheHeart

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 […]

May 29, 2022

A Mothering Landscape

web Master WeeklyReflection JohnPaulII, Mass, TeilhardDeChardin

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 […]

May 22, 2022

Fields of Love

web Master WeeklyReflection PatrickKavanagh

May 15, 2022

The Half-Life will Kill You

web Master WeeklyReflection Angelus, SamuelBecket

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 […]

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