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 […]
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, […]
Pentecost always reminds us that the Holy Spirit is a power at work in a continually renewed universe, and is present in the innermost mystery of all things. Grace and science come together to offer a fuller picture of what is true: that God’s love is embodied in all humanity, and in the evolving world itself. Breakthrough into new vistas is an essential dimension of Pentecost. This Sunday’s Collect implores God to “fill now once […]
Everything Belongs and is Already Within When I look at the utter magic of nature, at the exquisite colouring and shaping of all things, the endless variety of species, the time and tuning of things, the rhythm and rhyme of things, the miracles of scientific discoveries, the astonishing newness of life’s unfolding, I say to myself ‘Is this source, force and energy of life the same mystery that we call God; the God we worship […]
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 […]
From the front door of the Great Hall on top of an Oakland hill we had a stunning view of San Francisco Bay. Inside the Hall, however, things were not so pleasant. About 80 of us were gathered at one end while our director slowly called out a list of negative attitudes that were seen as blockages to the flow of life and love within us. As the name of each shadow was announced, those […]
I reached one of the big ‘Os’ on my recent birthday. For some reason there was a striking similarity in the themes of the cards I received. Most of them were urging me into a new phase of rather desperate self-expression and risky escapades. There were pictures of breath-taking bungee-jumping, parachuting out of airplanes, and death-defying goats leaping perilously across yawning chasms. I unwrapped a T-shirt recalling Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ in bright red […]
It has been two weeks 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 since been different because of it? Do we have a clearer […]
On a dark, chilly evening in early March I was walking home through a small park in Crosby with my shopping. Impossible to miss, I stared at the sudden appearance of the crocuses – violet, white and blue – translucent in the shadows, staked out like a rosary between tree trunks. Overnight, from drab patches of lifeless leaves and muck, something beautifully fragile and life-giving had soundlessly emerged. Pope Francis was sensitive to this phenomenon […]
My spondylosis was flaring up again, and needed attention. The Kinsley Surgery waiting-room was hot and crowded. A child with some kind of painful rash was becoming alarmingly upset. We were all looking at her and at the flustered mother, already holding a baby in her lap. She pleaded with, explained to, and scolded the suffering, obstreperous little girl to no avail. We were all becoming uncomfortable and uneasy. Clearly embarrassed the mother handed her […]
Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Yes we were. And we still are. Because he is crucified everyday. Our Lord is being crucified all around us at every moment and most of us are too blind or too busy to see. There is little point in walking, singing, weeping, praying before the suffering face of Jesus today if we do not see his anguished features in the sad stories on the ‘News at […]
We are now at the beginning of October. I have always celebrated this week when we honour those special saints Thérèse and Francis of Assisi. They specialised in living the way of unconditional love. They knew spiritual things, as St Paul put it, ‘in a spiritual way’. With Teilhard de Chardin, they regarded love as the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious personal and cosmic force. Teilhard’s wish was that humanity would […]
Much of all this is challenging and confusing, but only because it is different from what we were often (very erroneously) told. It is the heart of our faith but in a new language and imagery. It is worth all the energy and passion we can muster to understand it more profoundly. This theology tries to tell the Christian Story in terms of a deep and endless love: always flowing from within, the work of […]
Occasionally in the middle of my restlessness and worry I will reach for a pen and a page to take my mind off the situation I want to deny. I find a blessed relief in mulling over the love-story of Incarnation, ruminating on the forgotten theological and spiritual teachings, and their implications for our lives and that of our precious world. And so, in the lovely light of these thoughts in many of these pages, […]
Lent is here. It stirs something in us – a strange, unsolicited desire. There are intimations of a journey to be made, a river to be crossed, a hill to be climbed. Beyond ‘giving something up for Lent’ a deeper echo reminds us of a waiting desert. And something tells us that this is a dangerous place to go. We resist the call into our own mystery, our own depths. We fear further hurting by […]
Awareness is always about presence. But how often are we present to ourselves and to our environment in a distracted world where electronic multi-tasking rules, even while we’re having a meal with a friend? From both within and without, that inner sacred place is continually invaded. Without this grace of space there will be no stillness for catching the cadences of the unfinished symphony beneath the surface of what happens. One Celtic evening, the mythical […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
In the first month of the new year, millions are ready to overcome their natural fears of the unknown and throw off the habit of the familiar to embrace a journey that requires patience, determination and boldness to change not only the way of looking at life but life itself. It is very early on the first day of the year. Intent and attentive, I’m sitting here at the window of my new home. The […]
The Christmas hype is well and truly over 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 […]
January is a month for courageous beginnings. Yet so many of us are starting the new year with less conviction than usual. This is an extraordinary moment in our history where fragmentation and confusion are casting heavy shadows over our day-to-day lives. Widespread populist power is a growing phenomenon in a radically changing world – a fragile world so wounded by the nightmares of terrorism, political upheaval and global warming. The challenges that face us […]