Too often we regard Holy Week, the Stations of the Cross, the ceremonies of the Triduum, as having to do with the salvation of our own souls only. There is a persistent tendency in many of us towards a private kind of religion. Irish Catholics of a certain age are prone to confine the mystery of redemption to a personal transaction between God and the individual. Heavily influenced by a flawed and limited grasp of […]
It’s a week since we celebrated the magnificent Easter ceremonies. We remembered our story, we prayed our hearts out, we took part in the Vigil liturgy as best we could. And then there was the Bank Holiday and soon we were all back at work as usual. The Paschal banquet of sublime mystery was over for another year. But have our lives this past week been different because of it? Do we have a clearer […]
In my pastoral experience a common cry from those seeking a fuller life concerns the inbuilt sense of inferiority and the fear of being judged. That is why we pretend; tell lies; it is why we try to impress in a thousand ways; it lies at the heart of our untold misery and even tragedy. Whether in the least competitive of small communities, or at the heady heights of political or religious power, you will […]
People are surprised at the extent of the choice they have about the direction of each day’s living, leading to profound satisfaction or disillusion. With God’s power in us, we are all blessed with the grace of choosing our way of being in the world. We do not have to be victims of what happens to us; instead we are blessed with the power of discerning our demons as disguised occasions of grace. But we […]
As priests what are we doing when we bless? Are we actually making something holy, adding on something that was missing, spiritually disinfecting a merely natural object? Or are we revealing hidden richness, divining a wellspring of sacred presence, already secure below the surface of everything? Is that not the true meaning of Incarnation? Is consecrated ground more sacred than the kitchen floor burnished and blessed by the feet of the families who played and […]
Everything about us reaches out to be loved and to love, to become the other. We long for intimacy. We are born for it. We are drawn and driven by this original and persistent desire of our being. Astonishingly, we are already encompassed by this ultimate and unique embrace – but we will not, dare not or cannot believe it. We risk staying stuck too long in the trappings of routine religion. Beyond our familiar […]
The mirror was as big as the wall of the room we were gathered in. It was my first Pilates class. Half way through I caught a glimpse of myself writhing on the floor, arms and legs all over the place like a beached octopus. Around me flexible bodies rotated rhythmically on their mats, balancing, stretching and pulsing to the music and the instructions. Sweat was dripping off my chin. My limbs were hurting. And […]
Recently, I took a walk along the prom here at Blundellsands. The crisp dry November evening brought families out, to stroll, fly kites and generally enjoy this beautiful Sunday, here was I, among my new neighbours. It felt good. However, as time went on, in the far distance, my attention was drawn to what seemed to be a stately vessel resting on the deeps, it was set against a backdrop of the faintest pastel hues […]
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 […]
When it comes to buying a suit, I’m an off-the-peg kind of customer. I’m neither a big man nor a small man – I’m somewhere in the middle. I was recently trying on a suit-jacket, in a local store. I was feeling pressurised by the sales assistant to purchase a suit that I did not feel comfortable in – something that wasn’t really ‘me’. I resisted the pressure and decided to wait for another day […]
The Christmas hype is all around us but the meaning of Incarnation has no ending. In January, the month of courageous beginnings, Christians will try to live out in their lives the Feast of Love and Mercy they have just celebrated. In a weeping world they will put love where there was no love and thus continue the human Incarnation of divine love. Life itself, all that it brings, all that we experience, every sensation […]
English poet Christina Rossetti was looking through the lens of Incarnation when she prayed: Lord, purge our eyes to see, Within the seed a tree Within the glowing egg a bird, Within the shroud a butterfly. God is now fleshed. To perceive the world in Christmas light is to discern the hidden depths of everything, the astonishing possibilities in all that happens, the extraordinary mystery abiding within the ordinary. This Christian revelation of an […]
The bishop was patient with us. We were working our way through the Any Other Business section at the diocesan Episcopal Vicars’ termly meeting some years ago. There was a request from the Catholic Women’s Ordination (CWO) group to publish the venue for their next meeting in the diocesan newspaper. Those who spoke were all against it. ‘But why are we afraid?’ I asked. ‘These women are not the enemy. They belong to, and love […]
This Year of Mercy is already seeing some powerful articulations and celebrations of divine compassion throughout the Christian world. A million lives will be transformed. A million hopes renewed. A million holy doors opened in human hearts. For this blessed springtime of the soul to continue Pope Francis emphasises that our celebrations of mercy must reach beyond any routine actions and prayers; they must be fleshed and heart-felt. In Misericordiae Vultus, his Bull of Indiction […]
‘Excitement and joy flow out from Tom and Rhianna whenever they talk about the pregnancy. Their delight is infectious but more striking is their sense of privilege – to be having this baby is a wondrous gift for them. Together they’ve opened up a heightened awareness of the miracle, hope, promise of this one new life, a recognition of the holiness, fragility and wonder of this baby, their baby. There is a new stillness in […]
We are gently challenged by the incarnation to trust in the extravagance of the divine heart. At all times this beautiful world is encompassed by God’s love. 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. Skelley writes, ‘We do not sometimes have experiences of love, fear, ourselves, or […]
We met under a shower of bird notes Fifty years passed, love’s moment in a world of servitude to time. She was young; I kissed with my eyes closed and opened them on her wrinkles. From A Marriage by RS Thomas Tucked away in some part of our soul there will be a precious memory of a season of love. It may have been in our childhood, our teenage years or last August, but […]
I was walking by the obelisk in the Market Square. Mt mood wasn’t great. The sudden floods had thwarted me all morning in my efforts to visit some parishioners. It was now bucketing it down. I had a small hole in my shoe. And I had forgotten my cap. Like a child I was whining, ‘Why are you picking on me, God?’ That was the moment I saw it – a tiny, fragile snow-drop peeping […]
He was a young man. He was crouched over the wet mud in the dug-up Market Place. Very intently, he was scraping away dirt from an embedded stone. In his hand was something that looked like a small spoon. Most of the stuff he would throw away but every now and then he paid special attention to some tiny fragment, placing it carefully to one side. ‘Excuse me, what are you doing?’ I ventured to […]
Our thoughts are rarely at peace. We must go outside them, or inside them, or underneath them. When we are in our mind we are mostly fretting. When we are at peace it is rarely the fruit of our thinking. How do we find another way of being present to our restless ourselves, to the negative effect of others on us? We look for a place of a larger freedom, a larger field that includes […]
In the documents of Vatican 1 and Vatican II there’s an image of God, when creating Adam and Eve, seeing, in imagination, a unique man, Jesus, who would exist in the distant future. It was God’s image of God’s own self-made human in a real person. As he shaped and moulded Adam and Eve from the mud, his artist’s eye was on that inner picture of divine incarnation in a certain baby, nearly 14 billion […]
‘I wish those angels and demons would finally get off my back. One’s trying to take a piece of me, the other to heal the hurt . . . Night and morning you’re in my head.’ Singer Peter Andre may be reflecting on his own troubled life when he wrote these words for his recently-released CD – Angels and Demons. When I was small I could have written those words too. On my left shoulder, […]
Wet and weary we entered the Cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. The 100 km Camino walk was over and our bones ached during Mass. As we got up to leave, a huge thurible (the botafumiero) was let down on a thick rope on to the sanctuary floor. A tangible frisson of anticipation stirred throughout the packed pews. The censer weighed 80 kilos and stood 1.60 metres tall. The Camino de Santiago, the Way of St […]
It was a short story: it was a long story. Four cold, clipped words and two numbers hid a world of wounds. ‘No 4: Male – Estimated age, 2.’ A very ordinary sign that still plays havoc with countless hearts – and will continue to do so for a very long time. I’m standing near a small boy’s grave in Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was a victim of the Titanic disaster, […]
A constant theme in all of Franciscan theologian, Richard Rohr’s, teachings is the gold to be found in the rubble of our lives. What makes a thing sacred or profane is precisely whether we live on the surface of things or not. This is what theologian Karl Rahner called ‘the mysticism of ordinary life’. The divine is hidden but accessible in every authentic experience of despair, beauty and love. ‘Whenever we encounter another person in […]
‘When I saw him walk out through those prison gates on Robben Island’, a young man with shining eyes declared on television after Nelson Mandela’s funeral, ’the deepest experience of a personal freedom surged through my heart.’ Listening to him speak, you just knew that his life had radically changed. Something precious had been unlocked in the core of his being and he would never forget. We notice the same kind of phenomenon with regard […]