‘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 […]
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 […]
Like a recurring dream, it comes back to me every Easter week – a vivid memory that seems to have lodged deep within me, and only emerges on a sunny afternoon in April. I’m about 14 years old and just up after a teenage type of flu. I’m walking along the Forge Cross road near my home. A Spring sun is shining. I’m wearing a new brown suit and new brown leather shoes. To my […]
There is something about Good Friday that I cannot get used to. It always comes into our lives so strangely new. It is more than the quietness of our small City or of the stillness of the fields that stretch out towards the Yorkshire Dales. It is as if creation itself participates in some kind of turning of the light – a light that touches the heart of each person and even of the cosmos […]
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 […]
It seems to me that, for the most part, in God’s plan, the institution of marriage is the natural way for the developing and intensifying of human love. To move from selfishness to an awareness of the needs of others – first the loved one, then the children – must be impossible without the experience of marriage. How else can the soul’s desires be purified and intensified if not in the cauldron of learning to […]
I was ‘doing supply’ for my brother in the N Ward of a large hospital in Manchester. As ‘acting chaplain’ I was called out one night to a patient in deep distress. The reason given to me by the doctor was as follows. ‘This patient is deeply disturbed by her sins and imperfections. She is convinced that she is not in the state of grace, whatever that may mean. Short of sedation, I can do […]
‘Rome Slams Abuses of the Mass’. Priests and parishioners are worried at these loud and recent messages about rubrical correctness around the sanctuary. Many objective commentators describe such Vatican warnings as sadly missing the point. Those who stop coming to Mass claim that they are bored by the irrelevance of our liturgies and homilies. The real issues, they say, are about what happens in their daily lives, and how the Eucharist might support and nourish […]
(notes for a Tablet article that remained unfinished – but worth sharing!) Every day I notice faces that ache to be touched. As people come with heavy hearts for a healing conversation, or with heavy sins for Confession, I think about the last time that the anxious edges of around their mouths and eyes were touched by a loving hand. Maybe never since childhood. At our workshops on hand-massage, there’s nearly always someone who will […]
Barrie and Tish, two of our parishioners in their early fifties, bought a boat this summer and are now sailing for Turkey. It was something they wanted to do for a long time. It will take them a couple of years to complete the adventure. Their regular ‘Postcards from the Sea’ are shared in our weekly newsletter. Last week they reported the repair, at Marseilles port, of a smashed mast, and now Combava is sailing, […]
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. […]
A few years ago a shy young couple from a ‘good Catholic family’ in the parish asked to get married in Church. Because I had never seen them at Mass I did not immediately agree to their request and suggested further meetings. Maybe it was the tone of my voice, or maybe they were not very keen in the first place, but the outcome was that I never saw them again. I did hear some […]
I received Selena into the Church twelve years ago. When Selena was a small girl she loved to wear her grandmother’s shoes. One day she fell and cut her leg. The wound needed some stitches. It healed in its own time. Selena is now 23. We met again recently. We talked about that moment in her young life. She said she still had the scar. Instead of disappearing, it grew as she grew, becoming more […]
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 […]
While January’s Janus, the two-faced Roman god of gates and doorways, is always depicted as unrelentingly and ambiguously staring at the past and into the future, our God of Epiphany is embraced as forever creating new possibilities from within the womb of the present. I like to think of January, my own birth month, as the month of courageous beginnings. There is something of the child-beginner about January. In the natural liturgy of the seasons, […]
It was a child’s comment to her father that started me off on a whole new way of thinking about Christmas. I was studying in the United States at the time, and ‘paying my way’ by ‘doing supply’ at a local parish in San Francisco. They were standing together in front of the crib. Musing to herself, her father heard her say, “I wonder if God enjoys being a baby.” Especially around this time of […]
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 and mistakes, its striving and hopes, […]
The theologian Karl Rahner wrote: ‘Today the Christian is aware of living on a tiny planet that is part of a system of a particular sun, which itself belonged to a Galaxy with 300 million stars and is many thousands of light years broad. In this cosmos of unimaginable size . . . ( we believe that) the eternals Logos of God, who drives forward these billions of galaxies became a human being on this […]
A Message from Fr Daniel in St Benedict’s Bulletin I pray for you these days. Alongside the joy there is much anxiety- about children, about extra precious, about memories of missing loved ones. Christmas, for many, is a strange time. But at its heart it is a stunning revelation that God is no longer an absentee landlord in heaven; each day he walks the earth with us in the person of our needy neighbour. It […]
He bears us on his shoulders…….With tenderness he restores our daily joy……..God loves us first, beyond each person’s faults and failings…… the attraction of his love. (EG 3, 44). Pope Francis holds that you cannot change the way God is in love with you, that his love flows all around you, and through you, and in you, and as you. You cannot lessen the divine love that is already and always, no matter what, wrapped […]
It seems to me that, for the most part, in God’s plan, the institution of marriage is the natural way for the developing and intensifying of human love. To move from selfishness to an awareness of the needs of others – first the loved one, then the children – must be impossible without the experience of marriage. How else can the soul’s desires be purified and intensified if not in the cauldron of learning to […]
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 […]
I was ‘doing supply’ for my brother who was chaplain to a psychiatric ward in a large hospital in Manchester. One night the bleeper summoned me to the bedside of Maria. When I arrived the doctor explained; ‘This patient is deeply disturbed by what she calls her sins and imperfections. She feels she is not in the state of grace, whatever that may mean. Her acute anxiety stems from an obsession with being perfect, from […]
Helen knew her weeks were numbered. We had chatted last August about her recurring cancer and about the young family she must soon leave behind. I carefully asked how she coped with her anxiety – and whether I could help in any way. Looking slightly surprised she said, “Oh no. I have two lovely children. And a great partner. God has given me time to prepare two little boxes for my sons. One day they […]