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 […]
Two themes are interwoven through these pages– the mystery of Creation and the mystery of Incarnation. If we get one wrong, we get the other wrong too. (And we certainly have!) For the enlightened Christian both are central – the source and wellspring of all else. They are not two separate, disparate acts of God, two unconnected epic moments for the world. Theologian Karl Rahner reassures us that Creation and Incarnation are two moments and […]
I want to focus on some delightful new glimpses and insights that are now emerging to enrich people’s faith. Millions are finding renewed and deeper ways of being Christian, of being Catholic, of being human. A radical new light is being shed on that moment of love 2,000 years ago, when God was revealed at the centre of our lives and of our evolving world. Something amazing is happening. Something that could never have happened […]
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. […]
Close mutual presence or ultimate intimacy with the Mystery called God is the final goal of the spiritual journey. This journey of longing for union is followed along two paths – the path of inward mindfulness and awareness, and the path of outward seeing and recognising. ‘God became human so that humans could become God. You could say that Creation itself and all its evolutionary wonders and potential first emerged, in the Big Bang, from […]
After nearly 60 years of pastoral and academic work, of studying, writing preaching and teaching, I offer the following few pages as my most honest, clearest and truest understanding of the meaning of Incarnation, the central teaching of our Christian faith. You could say it has taken me all this time to find my authentic heart, the cantus firmus (my enduring melody), and to risk singing it’s truth. This is my effort to find and […]
An Astonishing Secret :- Once we equate God with life itself a transformation takes place in the way we believe. Once we remove everything that separates divinity and humanity, heaven and earth, grace and nature, then we begin to truly and freely live and move in another milieu. Once we use the same name for the Gracious Mystery and Mother of all becoming, and the primal energy of creation and ongoing evolution, our faith cannot […]
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, […]
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 […]