Begin with the Heart
Encompassing An Astonishing Secret
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  • The Video Course
    • Introduction
    • Episode 1: Love Changes Everything (40mins)
    • Episode 2: Theology is a Love Story (43mins)
    • Episode 3: The More Human We Are, The More Divine We Become (36mins)
    • Episode 4: Divinity in a Speck of Dust (27mins)
    • Episode 5: The Look of Love (39mins)
    • Episode 6: The Body is Beautiful (26mins)
    • Episode 7: The Humanity of Jesus (27mins)
    • Episode 8: Everyday through the lens of Incarnation (31mins)
    • Episode 9: The Home (27mins)
    • Episode 10: The Bigger Picture (37mins)
  • Reflections
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May 8, 2022

The Anger of a Struggling Heart

web Master WeeklyReflection Anger, Priesthood

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 […]

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May 1, 2022

A Post-Easter Word

web Master WeeklyReflection Easter

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 […]

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April 24, 2022

Easter on the Pulse

web Master WeeklyReflection Easter

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 […]

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April 17, 2022

Easter at the Forge Cross

web Master WeeklyReflection Easter

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 […]

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April 10, 2022

Good Friday’s Child

web Master WeeklyReflection GoodFriday

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 […]

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April 3, 2022

A Creed for the Child within us All

web Master WeeklyReflection Creed, Prayer

We believe in the Child within us. We believe in the qualities of childhood, in openness and wonder, in trust and spontaneity, in wholeness and immediacy, in simplicity and playfulness. We believe that God is born anew in every birth, and that her heart beats in the heart of every child.   We believe that the Child within us is wounded. We believe that until these wounds are healed, we will grow more slowly, love […]

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March 27, 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 […]

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March 20, 2022

Praying for our Troubled World

web Master WeeklyReflection HorizonsofHope

Pope Francis believes that the call to a prayerful concern for our troubled world, to a conversion of our lives to save our Mother-Earth, is much more than an added-on obligation. It is a knowing in the heart, a recognising of our wider family of origin and destiny, an awakening of the divine imagination already within the human psyche.  Our hearts, fashioned lovingly in the divine image, somehow sense this astonishing revelation of our intimacy […]

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March 13, 2022

With my Body I Thee Worship

web Master WeeklyReflection

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 […]

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March 6, 2022

Are you Trying too hard to be Good?

web Master WeeklyReflection

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 […]

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February 27, 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. […]

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February 20, 2022

Beauty and the Priest

web Master Sacraments, WeeklyReflection Priesthood

It was a dark, eerie Friday afternoon at the end of March.  The children were racing from our local school to the waiting bus.  Suddenly a girl noticed the magnificent rainbow.  There it was, an arc of beauty, elegant as a ballet-dancer, stretching gracefully across the blood-shot sky of our small city.  Fine-tuned as they were to the play of light and shade, to the dance of colours, from their Lenten class-preparation for the Feast […]

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February 13, 2022

The beloved Body of a God ‘who so loved the world . . .’

web Master WeeklyReflection

God was delighted to become human. Like parents’ love creates the baby, God’s love too overflowed into a baby 2000 years ago. Like parents, too, God was delighted with us and God is still delighted with us now. God became human so as to reveal an unconditional love for us. Nothing can stop God loving us always. No matter what, there is nothing we can do to make God love us one bit more, or […]

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February 6, 2022

The Hungry Heart

web Master WeeklyReflection RSThomas

People grow in faith through their experiences – and our experiences belong to the flesh. think then, for instance, of your own favourite daily bread – the touch of it, the smell of it, the taste of it. Think of the real red wine, your favourite wine, swirling it, sniffing it, and savouring it. Think of human flesh, your own beloved flesh and that of others, and of all the experiences and sensations it brings […]

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January 30, 2022

One Being, Many Names

web Master WeeklyReflection DancingtomyDeath, KahlilGilbran

(As we mark the d anniversary of Daniel’s death, this is the final extract of 3 from ‘Dancing to my Death’, where Daniel’s searing honesty shines forth as he seeks to understand God’s presence in the midst his struggles with cancer and a new stoma.) I can no longer believe in any kind of external God who will shrink my tumour just because I bombard him with prayers, pilgrimages, sacrifices and repeated religious routines. But […]

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January 23, 2022

One Sea – Many Rivers

web Master WeeklyReflection DancingtomyDeath

(As we mark the  anniversary of Daniel’s death, this is the 2nd extract of 3 from ‘Dancing to my Death’, where Daniel’s searing honesty shines forth as he seeks to understand God’s presence in the midst his struggles with cancer and a new stoma.) Occasionally the despair lessens, the depression lifts, and possibilities emerge. I have always found a healing in understanding something more deeply. During this time in my life only a stark honesty […]

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January 16, 2022

Slow Dawn over Aintree Hospital

web Master WeeklyReflection DancingtomyDeath

(As we approach the  anniversary of Daniel’s death, this is the 1st extract of 3 from ‘Dancing to my Death’, where Daniel’s searing honesty shines forth as he seeks to understand God’s presence in the midst his struggles with cancer and  a new stoma.) The days move slowly on but there are no changes to each morning’s shock. Now I know that my condition is not a nightmare from which I will awaken. The same […]

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January 9, 2022

Themed Quotes

web Master WeeklyReflection HorizonsofHope

The Sacredness of Ordinary Life God is always incarnate, always just below the surface of our daily lives. . . . Every moment of every authentic experience carries the felt message for us of divine grace. . . . God is the energy that sustains all our human happenings and emotions. . . . To become more aware of God’s earthy, hidden dynamic all around us, we need to Look more intensely, Think more imaginatively, […]

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January 2, 2022

Two Blessings

web Master WeeklyReflection AstonishingSecret, HorizonsofHope

From Horizons of Hope  Ruah – the breath of God. Pope Francis prayed that we may have a big heart, open to God. May this blessed openness set you free to surrender your future to the powerful RUAH of the Holy Spirit. May you stay strong and persevering, courageous and whole-hearted in your commitment to this vision. May your love be always stronger than your fear, your light always stronger than the shadows that will […]

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December 26, 2021

Treasured beyond Measure

web Master Incarnation, WeeklyReflection MaryOliver

Too often at Christmas, the real magic is missed. There is nothing infantile about the infant; the innocence of the child is the power of God filling the hearts and souls of all beloved and broken people with hope and light Back in the 1950s, during December days, at around 6 p.m., a small army of boys and girls were collected from the neighbouring villages of Knocknagree, Gneeveguilla and Barraduff, and taken to Rathmore Creamery, […]

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December 19, 2021

He’ll be Here by Midnight

web Master Liturgical Year, WeeklyReflection Advent

It happened in Rathmore, my home village in the south of Ireland.  It is one of my first memories.  It was Christmas Eve and I was four.  The snow had started to fall.  I was standing near the small door between our small shop and our small kitchen.  I was beside myself with anticipation, hyped to the gills with Santa Claus.  Christy Cremin had just bought his weekly ration of Woodbines.   “Where is he now […]

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December 12, 2021

Growing in Compassion

web Master God in the Ordinary, WeeklyReflection

Friday was such a lovely day. After a few grey and cloudy weeks, the sun broke through, crisp and bright and full of promise-the promise of more to come, I’ve long and warm summer evenings. But winter too has its own beauty. The December light is different over the fields near Aberford, revealing the strange emptiness of the hedges and trees. Stripped of their green clothes, how poor and better they look; and all the […]

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December 5, 2021

Synod – A Way of Being Church

web Master WeeklyReflection Synod

(Pope Francis has called the Church to work towards synodality, a more inclusive and consultative way of being Church. Daniel was appointed Parish Priest of St Benedict’s Garforth in 1991. After a long parish process of listening, consultation and discernment, via many meetings at house-group and parish level, underpinned by prayer and Gospel reflections, Daniel wrote the following message in the parish bulletin. Synodality in action 30 years ago!) ‘Yesterday I asked God for the […]

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November 28, 2021

God’s Embrace Holds Us

web Master Incarnation, WeeklyReflection PassionforthePossible

The incarnation has revealed what true humanity is, to be realised not by running away from the world or turning our backs on it in indifference and fear. Christ does not reveal what it is to be divine but what it is to be human. That our God-likeness might become complete is the purpose of creation. And the way to human fulfilment is to penetrate right to the heart of the world, in all its […]

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November 21, 2021

Letter to a Young Heart

web Master God in the Ordinary, WeeklyReflection

Dear Child, Let nobody ever own you. You are too precious to be possessed by anyone or anything. Only God is big enough for you.  You really are the love-child of Life, fashioned from the desire of a divine heart, the energy of the stars and the human love of two people, we, your parents. Never forget your amazing heritage. Remember the invincible power that is within you. With God there is nothing you cannot […]

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November 14, 2021

A Spirituality of Humanity

web Master WeeklyReflection

If our religion, our going to Mass, our being Catholics is not purely about making us more sensitively aware of the fragility and frailty and fears of both ourselves and those we serve, then what are they about?  If grace does not fill us with the courage and the power and the energy to work miracles for each other, then is it not all too heavenly to be of any earthly use?  The Catholic traditional […]

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Astonishing Secret: The Book & DVD Set

book cover for An Astonishing SecretYou may have found this site because you have read one of Daniel's books or you may have attended one of his retreats or courses. If this online video course interests you then why not buy the book as well?

The book is available from all good booksellers.

In Ireland/ UK you may wish to buy it from Columba books:

Buy the bookColumba books Ireland

In Australia you may wish to purchase it from Garratt publishing:

Buy the BookGarratt Publishing Australia

The videos comprising this course are now available on DVD.

logo of pauline books and media

They can be obtained from Pauline Books & Media UK.

Pauline Books & Media

Candlelight Fund

a lighted candle

A CAFOD candlelight fund in memory of Fr Daniel has been set up. All profits from 'An Astonishing Secret' will go to this fund. If you would like to contribute simply click on the button below and type Daniel O'Leary into the search box. You will then obtain more details.

Candlelight Fund for D J O'Leary

Dancing to my Death

Book cover for Dancing to my death

This is Fr Daniel's last book, only completed a few weeks before his death. This is also available from Columba books

Horizons of Hope

Available from 11th Feb 2021 from most good booksellers

cover of book

This new book comprises articles from The Tablet and notes found on Daniel's laptop after his death.

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