There’s something about summer evenings that provides the space to remember stories. When our minds let go of the feverish lists that fill the working mornings of our life, we find a queue of shy visitors awaiting their turn to heal, comfort or amuse us. Such visitors come as stories – sad and happy, as memories that bless and burn, as special moments carrying traces of light, shadow and humour. One story concerns a parish […]
A friend of mine entered for last year’s Talent for Britain auditions. I tuned in to one of the first episodes. The panel judges were finding it all rather boring and predictable. During the interval they said so. Mr Potts, a sad-faced young man from Wales was next up. He said he would like to be an opera singer. I noticed two of the three judges throwing cynical glances at each other. Paul Potts opened […]
Fom the very beginning 14 billion years ago, the world was already permeated and filled with God’s compassionate presence. There never was a time or space in the history of evolution when God was absent from the world. In the person of Christ this tremendous love story has finally been revealed. The human is now the home of the divine. The redemption has happened. Salvation has taken place. What was begun in creation is completed […]
Love changes everything. Of course, the story of Creation is not just a story about us. It is the love story about everything. There is a story about Lady Julian of Norwich. One day she had a conversation with God: ‘And the Lord showed me’, she said, ‘a small hazelnut in the palm of my hand.’ ‘What is this Lord?’ she asked. ‘It is everything created’, the Lord said. ‘And how does that survive?’ I […]
‘Love changes everything’. Your heart must surrender to love before your life is transformed. It is the experience of unconditional love that empowers you and blesses what you do. Pope Francis says: ‘God loves us first beyond each person’s faults of failings. . . We are drawn by the attraction of his (Jesus) life.’ Pope Francis Pope Francis is talking here about the unconditional love of God – how do I understand this more deeply? A […]
(expansive thoughts for the start of a new year!) Your life will change when you begin to believe that God is not ‘out there’ anymore, that God is the unconditional love that lives intimately within your heart, and in the heart of the world. Your deepest and true self somehow already knows the astonishing secret that will now be gradually revealed. Be prepared to let go of the fearful, doctrinal teaching that many of us […]
Autumn is with us. With its perennial intimations of endings, many feel drawn to reflect more profoundly on one or other dimension of the mystery of their lives. This October, the aspect that keeps coming back to me concerns the nature of my innermost conviction, my fundamental motivation, the constant logo of my soul that sums up my reason for living. What, in essence, is the bare, core focus that sustains me when all else […]
The coming of summer stirs our hearts. As the warm and welcome colours of June play across the fields and streets around us, those vulnerable hearts are moved again by an aching kind of remembering and longing first awakened in our childhood experiences of nature. Because Pope Francis believes that God’s extravagant love is inscribed into all such explorations and yearnings, he regards those memories as small epiphanies of incarnate grace. Our friendship with God, […]
I was born and grew up in the shadow of the Paps in the South-West of Ireland. The Paps are two breast-shaped mountains that dominate the skyline along the road that runs from Cork to Killarney. They are named in honour of the goddess Danu (Da Chich Danann) who reigned supreme across Europe in more peaceful times. To complete nature’s astonishing silhouette, the local worshipers laboriously carried rocks and boulders all the way to the […]
‘Spirit always desires to incarnate itself.’ That is how Richard Rohr puts it. Translated into my current cancer condition it would mean that something truly divine is taking place in the growing or shrinking of my tumour. This understanding of our faith is, of course, as old as the hills. (And we are rarely reminded of it!) As Christians we should be identified by our ‘visceral’ attitude to Incarnation, and the paradox of suffering. Just […]
Don’t be put off by this phrase. It is becoming central to our understanding of Incarnation. This is one of the central themes of this book. In his The Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and of the World Pope St John Paul II wrote, ‘The Incarnation signifies the taking up into unity with God not only human nature, but in the human nature, in a sense, everything that is flesh . . […]
The poets and the artists bring the light we need to see and to recognise the divine contours of the cosmos of our hearts, and the heart of our cosmos. Unlike many of the official teachers of religion, they have never lost the sense of wonder at the mystery of the indwelling of God in Creation. For them, the smallest particle of creation becomes a window on God’s beauty. Their intense energy is spent on […]
The key, for the Christian, lies in the renewed exploration of Incarnation – that ‘Moment of Love’, and its astonishing implications for all Creation. There is a radical transformation of everything we believe when we are convinced that God is another name for all that happens, for all that is, for all flesh, blood and matter, for all creation and evolution, for every breath we breathe, for every beat of every heart, human or non-human. […]