WeeklyReflection

Becoming the Vision

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In Eucharistic celebration it is WE who are changed and realigned without true nature. Taking part in communion does nothing other than transform us into that which we consume. Jean Louis Segundo suggests that we should not just be ‘Gospel consumers’ but ‘Gospel creators’. Perhaps Christians should make continual efforts to authenticate their sacramental life by being not only ‘Eucharistic consumers’ but of necessity ‘Eucharistic creators’ too, committed to establishing a new world order in […]

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The Eucharistic Conspiracy

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In the dynamic presence of the bread and wine on the table we have symbolised just about everything that can be predicated of humanity, the earth and everything on it and in it, the universe and the cosmos itself- the past, present and future of all creation. These rich and simple elements gather up the intense agony and ecstasy of the world, its darkness and light, its failures are mistakes, its driving and hopes, its […]

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Celebration of a Love Story

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Sacrament, in Christian terms, is not meant to be a notion or practice imposed from without, but rather to be regarded in the light of a world already filled and permeated with Love’s essence -a  world that tends toward the celebration in symbol and word of its own amazing story, beauty and hopes. The symbolic power of the sacramental action is to remember, affirm, celebrate and intensify the love and meaning at the heart of […]

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A Mothering Landscape

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Anois teacht an Earraig sang the blind Irish pilgrim-poet Raftery.  ‘On the brink of Spring, with the “stretch” in the days, I will raise my sail, and launch out anew.’  This is the time of year when nature beckons to us, the high roads call to us, something stirs in our soul.  Shades of Druidic customs awaken within Celtic hearts. On St Patrick’s day a few years ago, I said Mass on top of the […]

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Fields of Love

WeeklyReflection

Summer days and childhood memories!  When they come together, they twist our hearts without warning.  Like a high-octane cocktail, they hit us suddenly and mercilessly with emotions.  The smells, the sights, and the feel of summer so often strike, with painful intensity, at the tender, forgotten and sleeping magic of those special years.  There is a pathos, a poignancy and the strangest sadness in those moments of memories ‘that bless and burn’, as my mother […]

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The Half-Life will Kill You

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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 […]

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The Anger of a Struggling Heart

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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 […]

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A Post-Easter Word

WeeklyReflection

Is your heart a little lighter this Eastertide? It is meant to be. The Christian faith is an Easter faith. It makes an impact at the centre of our lives. Resurrection is to be tangibly experienced by each one of us. But it cannot be forced, it comes, like the dawn, as a bright gift to console and comfort. Christ rises in your heart, gently, slowly, whenever- you truly grieve at another’s loss  your heart […]

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Easter on the Pulse

WeeklyReflection

It was when the evenings were lengthening in the first week of the new millennium that Laura’s long lashes began to move again.  During those months of waiting, there was a paleness about her, like a sick baby, and her parents’ faces became etched forever with pain and fear.  It had been a long Good Friday for the Connolly family. One day Bruce’s artistic passion was no longer there.  The urge to paint had left […]

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Easter at the Forge Cross

WeeklyReflection

Like a recurring dream, it comes back to me every Easter week – a vivid memory that seems to have lodged deep within me, and only emerges on a sunny afternoon in April.  I’m about 14 years old and just up after a teenage type of flu.  I’m walking along the Forge Cross road near my home.  A Spring sun is shining.  I’m wearing a new brown suit and new brown leather shoes.  To my […]

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Good Friday’s Child

WeeklyReflection

There is something about Good Friday that I cannot get used to.  It always comes into our lives so strangely new.  It is more than the quietness of our small City or of the stillness of the fields that stretch out towards the Yorkshire Dales.  It is as if creation itself participates in some kind of turning of the light – a light that touches the heart of each person and even of the cosmos […]

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A Creed for the Child within us All

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We believe in the Child within us. We believe in the qualities of childhood, in openness and wonder, in trust and spontaneity, in wholeness and immediacy, in simplicity and playfulness. We believe that God is born anew in every birth, and that her heart beats in the heart of every child.   We believe that the Child within us is wounded. We believe that until these wounds are healed, we will grow more slowly, love […]

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Sabbath Time

WeeklyReflection

Mr Casey was always courteous.  He was the conductor on the Bus Eireann that dropped me at Lisivigeen, near Killarney, for my first ever summer holiday, eight miles from home.  I was seven then.  Our farmer friends were waiting at the crossroads.  Mr Casey helped me down the three steps of the bus with my strapped and bulging suitcase.  We waved him goodbye and set off across the fields for the farmhouse.  No emperor ever […]

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Praying for our Troubled World

WeeklyReflection

Pope Francis believes that the call to a prayerful concern for our troubled world, to a conversion of our lives to save our Mother-Earth, is much more than an added-on obligation. It is a knowing in the heart, a recognising of our wider family of origin and destiny, an awakening of the divine imagination already within the human psyche.  Our hearts, fashioned lovingly in the divine image, somehow sense this astonishing revelation of our intimacy […]

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With my Body I Thee Worship

WeeklyReflection

It seems to me that, for the most part, in God’s plan, the institution of marriage is the natural way for the developing and intensifying of human love.  To move from selfishness to an awareness of the needs of others – first the loved one, then the children – must be impossible without the experience of marriage.  How else can the soul’s desires be purified and intensified if not in the cauldron of learning to […]

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Are you Trying too hard to be Good?

WeeklyReflection

I was ‘doing supply’ for my brother in the N Ward of a large hospital in Manchester.  As ‘acting chaplain’ I was called out one night to a patient in deep distress.  The reason given to me by the doctor was as follows.  ‘This patient is deeply disturbed by her sins and imperfections.  She is convinced that she is not in the state of grace, whatever that may mean.  Short of sedation, I can do […]

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Against an Infinite Horizon

WeeklyReflection

I’m alone for a moment, on the ferry home, half-way between Calais and Dover.  It is Sunday morning and the sun is shining on the green-blue sea.  As spring turns to summer, millions travel to Lourdes.  Our own parish pilgrimage is almost over.  Our hearts are full of stories of pain and joy, of some dark moments and many bright ones, of shared secrets, and glimpses of the mystery and paradox of the human spirit. […]

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Beauty and the Priest

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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 […]

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The beloved Body of a God ‘who so loved the world . . .’

WeeklyReflection

God was delighted to become human. Like parents’ love creates the baby, God’s love too overflowed into a baby 2000 years ago. Like parents, too, God was delighted with us and God is still delighted with us now. God became human so as to reveal an unconditional love for us. Nothing can stop God loving us always. No matter what, there is nothing we can do to make God love us one bit more, or […]

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The Hungry Heart

WeeklyReflection

People grow in faith through their experiences – and our experiences belong to the flesh. think then, for instance, of your own favourite daily bread – the touch of it, the smell of it, the taste of it. Think of the real red wine, your favourite wine, swirling it, sniffing it, and savouring it. Think of human flesh, your own beloved flesh and that of others, and of all the experiences and sensations it brings […]

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One Being, Many Names

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(As we mark the d anniversary of Daniel’s death, this is the final extract of 3 from ‘Dancing to my Death’, where Daniel’s searing honesty shines forth as he seeks to understand God’s presence in the midst his struggles with cancer and a new stoma.) I can no longer believe in any kind of external God who will shrink my tumour just because I bombard him with prayers, pilgrimages, sacrifices and repeated religious routines. But […]

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One Sea – Many Rivers

WeeklyReflection

(As we mark the  anniversary of Daniel’s death, this is the 2nd extract of 3 from ‘Dancing to my Death’, where Daniel’s searing honesty shines forth as he seeks to understand God’s presence in the midst his struggles with cancer and a new stoma.) Occasionally the despair lessens, the depression lifts, and possibilities emerge. I have always found a healing in understanding something more deeply. During this time in my life only a stark honesty […]

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Slow Dawn over Aintree Hospital

WeeklyReflection

(As we approach the  anniversary of Daniel’s death, this is the 1st extract of 3 from ‘Dancing to my Death’, where Daniel’s searing honesty shines forth as he seeks to understand God’s presence in the midst his struggles with cancer and  a new stoma.) The days move slowly on but there are no changes to each morning’s shock. Now I know that my condition is not a nightmare from which I will awaken. The same […]

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Themed Quotes

WeeklyReflection

The Sacredness of Ordinary Life God is always incarnate, always just below the surface of our daily lives. . . . Every moment of every authentic experience carries the felt message for us of divine grace. . . . God is the energy that sustains all our human happenings and emotions. . . . To become more aware of God’s earthy, hidden dynamic all around us, we need to Look more intensely, Think more imaginatively, […]

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Two Blessings

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From Horizons of Hope  Ruah – the breath of God. Pope Francis prayed that we may have a big heart, open to God. May this blessed openness set you free to surrender your future to the powerful RUAH of the Holy Spirit. May you stay strong and persevering, courageous and whole-hearted in your commitment to this vision. May your love be always stronger than your fear, your light always stronger than the shadows that will […]

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Treasured beyond Measure

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Too often at Christmas, the real magic is missed. There is nothing infantile about the infant; the innocence of the child is the power of God filling the hearts and souls of all beloved and broken people with hope and light Back in the 1950s, during December days, at around 6 p.m., a small army of boys and girls were collected from the neighbouring villages of Knocknagree, Gneeveguilla and Barraduff, and taken to Rathmore Creamery, […]

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