Peace, these days, is an elusive grace. There’s always something to make us fearful, stress-filled, distracted. There is no denying the current spreading anxiety, a sense of a lost order. How do we protect ourselves from daily bulletin of another crisis? How do we nourish our fragile spirit in the face of a relentless destruction of our l people and our planet that is played out before us on every evening news. To what hope […]
God created us, and became one of us for no other reason than to draw us towards transcendent shores of joy and peace and justice. These shores do not belong to heavenly landscapes. They are the shores on which we live – where terrorists strike, where recession hurts, where churches fail, where families collapse, where fear lives. In the face of the terrible evidence of a fallen humanity, beginnings are still epiphanies of God’s faithfulness […]
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 […]
One Celtic evening, the mythical Fionn Mac Chumhail and his warriors were having a discussion about the finest sound in the world. His son Oisin extolled the ring of spear on shield in the din of battle. Another went on about the fearful cries of the stags and yet another spoke of the song of his beloved as she played the harp to soothe her hero after a day of blood and gore. The wise […]