‘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 […]
With the discovery of Earth’s bigger and older twin KEPLER-452b, and the publishing of the first Philae lander results from Comet 67P, frissons of excitement rippled across the land. Maybe there is life out there after all! And, if there is, what would the implications be for Planet Earth? It is a time for imagination, for a courageous trust in Creation. ‘We belong to a reality greater than our own’, writes Diarmuid O’Murchu MS, in […]
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 […]
Creation is clearly the first revelation of God. ‘Ever since God created the world, his everlasting power and deity have been there for the mind to see in the things that he has made.’ (Rom1:20) In his Summa Theologica Thomas Aquinas wrote ‘God produces man and diverse creatures so that what was lacking in one in representation of this great divine goodness might be supplied by another. The whole universe together participates in the divine […]
When the unfolding of life itself at all levels of being is understood as the unfolding of the incarnate mystery we call God, then many of the ‘certainties’ and boundaries of our faith are radically shaken. As our perennial dualistic indoctrination rapidly recedes under the holistic vision of a common intimacy and immediacy between Creation and Creator, our way of perceiving our earth, our universe and cosmos, is profoundly transformed. Set free from the limitation […]
Scientist Guy Consolmagno SJ, curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory, throws a deep and lovely light on our struggles to understand the questions I’m raising in these Reflections. These questions and suggestions concern the marriage between our faith and the revelations of science, between religion and cosmology (ie the origins of the universe). He suggests that we rephrase the beginning of John’s Gospel to gain a transforming insight into this most alluring mystery. He […]
What happens to our faith when we shift the locus of God from the private sanctuary of our routine worship into the raging, desperate realities of a speeding, spinning, graced and sinful world? How differently will we go to Mass, or kneel before the Blessed Sacrament, or begin the Creed, when the God we believe in is in no way confined to churches or religions, except in so far as these institutions, at their best, […]
“I swear to you by the stars above, And below, if such there be, As the High Court loathes perjurious oathes, That’s how you’re loved by me.” Valentine greetings such as Ogden Nash’s verse will criss-cross our planet this week-end as lovers compete for new expressions of their love. Little did the third century Saint realise what he was starting when he signed himself off with ‘from your Valentine’ in a note to a girl […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
‘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 […]