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 as the Father of Jesus, the […]
Autumn in North Yorkshire. We were gathered in the parish school for our Autumn ‘Mass of the Sick’. The SVP stalwarts who lovingly prepare these popular Eucharists, had begun, with their children, the custom of blessing each needy parishioner as I moved around anointing them. Before this particular celebration we had wondered about asking those same parishioners to bless us, as well. We were a little anxious. Some in our team thought it might be […]
I sometimes try to figure out why do we bless things? I’m often called to bless water for holy water, to bless animals that might be sick and so on. But you see this whole theology would say – everything is blessed already so why do we bless it? Do we make it more holy by blessing it? Do we add something to it? We don’t? In my mind, we don’t. We bless it maybe […]
Now, here and now, in the language of our senses, in all that we are saying: “What would be the spiritual horizon?” Think of the day, think of your life, think of your daily routines. Whatever you are doing – your work – and how do you see all that at the deeper level of God’s presence? As I was writing this, I just thought to try it out, so I looked out the window […]
There is no person, event or experience too insignificant to be an experience of God. “Whatever touches the human heart,” wrote St. John Chrysostom, “touched the heart of God as well.” Our personal experiences of the agonies and ecstasies of life, of terrible suffering or sublime joy, of the most ordinary and menial of moments – all, it is true, are the intimate embrace of a most devoted God and lover. This transformation begins with […]
However, not all theologies are love stories – as we will now see. May I mention, in particular, two of these theologies. They are the two we will be most familiar with and we will explore briefly the story behind both to give us a deeper grasp of this course. One is called a theology of Sin and Redemption and the other is called a theology of Creation – a theology of Nature and Grace […]
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 […]
(Pre-empting Magnifica Humanitas??) On March 9th AlphaGo, a computer programme designed by the British Artificial Intelligence company DeepMind, beat Lee Sedol, the world’s top-rated Go player. Go is an ancient chess-type Chinese board game. Why was this event so widely reported in social media? Because, as The Times leader reported, ‘The computer was not programmed how to play the game; it taught itself . . . AlphaGo can act, but it can also react. It […]
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 it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station. After three minutes, a middle-aged man stopped for a few seconds and then hurried on. A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip – tossed in the box by […]
Whenever something is portrayed as so utterly itself, it cannot help revealing something of the Other To see God in the everyday, the divine in the worldly, the transcendent in the ordinary – that is what this chapter is about (indeed what the whole book is about) but here we call on the artist to help us achieve this kind of seeing. The emphasis will be on the artist as painter, and as painter of […]
(August reflections are all short pieces from Travelling Light) We forget that the world is the body of God, that, as the poets remember, eternity is caught in the most complex moment, infinity in a passing gesture and divinity in every aspiration of the human heart. Without the fact of the enfleshing of the Word, no poet or mystic could hold, with absolute certainty, what Hebrew authors glimpsed- that every drop of water, every grain […]
(August reflections are all short pieces from Travelling Light) To be truly present, however, requires persistent awareness, attention, focus, the ability to stay with, to wonder at, to be lost in, to wake up to the holiness of the present moment. That is the reason for the prayer of quiet, for contemplation, for meditation for the mystical path. That is the reason for celebrating the sacraments, with all those natural elements that remind us of […]
(August reflections are all short pieces from Travelling Light) At this point in my scribbling, I pause to look around me. I stretch and breathe. My body is a little cramped but it feels good. I’m having a pint and a snack here in downtown Albuquerque. The Budweiser tastes sweet; the Cajun style chicken is spicy and tasty. It is stiflingly hot outside; the air conditioning inside is a heaven. A small child’s face is […]
(August reflections are all short pieces from Travelling Light) In his celebrated Jubilee letter, Pope John Paul engaged with a theology of creation. As well as telling the mythical tale of humanity’s fall from grace and a subsequent salvation, this rich understanding of revelation holds that creation and incarnation can also be read as the greatest love story, revealing all of us as being a delight to God, carefully fashioned in God’s image. With or […]
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. Michael Skelley writes, ‘We do not sometimes have experiences of love, fear, ourselves, or anything else and then also have experiences of God. The basic, original experience of God, on the contrary, is the ultimate depth and radical essence […]
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 […]
A reflection on the spirituality of mindfulness The balance of our minds is a fragile thing. The daily diet of bad news has profound effects on our moods and our thinking. The terrible tragedies and mindless acts of cruelty that are relentlessly reported eventually disturb the delicate equilibrium of many souls. The resulting insecurity is constantly spreading and is too often expressed in break-down, despair or thoughts of suicide. A serious, silent tipping point is […]
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 […]
The most useful way we can contribute to the divine will for the unfolding of an evolving humanity and universe is to increase the pure energy of love at every moment of our lives. We put love where there was no love before. The next big breakthrough in the story of our evolving world, is the creation of more love, to spread it, to become it. It is the main implication of the Incarnation. And […]
In a weird way all my life I’ve been very aware of the incompleteness of everything. Nothing was enough. I always wanted more. (Spare me giving embarrassing examples!) Then I came across this gem of a paragraph by the beloved spiritual writer Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest. With time ticking away for me now, a precious time when a vague awareness can assume fine edges and a sharp focus, it seemed to bring its own […]
We have often mentioned the True Self and the False Self in these pages. This kind of distinction is very helpful in our pursuit of spiritual maturing, of the complexities of befriending our authentic, complicated selves. Nobody writes of the faces and peculiarities of these twins within the womb of every soul with the authority and sure-footedness of Richard Rohr who has walked with us through the pages of this book. While experiencing many glimpses […]
Like a bird on a wire: The beloved Leonard Cohen has sung about the freedom he had sought for all his life. ‘Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried, in my way, to be free’. So have we all, I suppose – from the baby trying to establish its individuality, separateness and personhood by saying no, to the old woman or man in the nursing home, […]
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 breathtaking 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 […]
Caro Papa Francisco, After reading your encyclical Laudato Si’ I had a dream. Before I tell you about it may I thank you on behalf of millions who are finding new hope in your redeeming leadership. You are parting the veils for us, allowing us glimpses into the meaning of mystery, liberating us by the beauty of your vision. Like Plato and St Thomas Aquinas before you, your word for this way of seeing and […]
What have Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin in common? All three scientists suffered some bruising encounters with the Church authorities of their time. Each of them experienced extreme difficulties in having their scientific discoveries accepted. In 1988, conscious of this past ‘failure in dialogue’, Pope St John Paul II asked the participants of a conference in Rome this question: ‘Does an evolutionary perspective bring any light to bear upon theology, the meaning of the human person […]
‘It was dark and I was taking the washing off my line. The lights streamed into the darkness from the kitchen, where my three girls were sitting around the table, cups of tea in hand, chatting about their day. I watched the interaction between them, saw their animated discussion and knew that there, right in the heart of my home, God was too. A beautiful presence that set the place into radiance’. Paula, a friend, […]