It has been two weeks since we celebrated the magnificent Easter ceremonies. We remembered our story, we prayed our hearts out, we took part in the Vigil liturgy as best we could. And then there was the bank holiday and soon we were all back at work as usual. The paschal banquet of sublime mystery was over for another year. But have our lives since been different because of it? Do we have a clearer […]
Lent is here. It stirs something in us – a strange, unsolicited desire. There are intimations of a journey to be made, a river to be crossed, a hill to be climbed. Beyond ‘giving something up for Lent’ a deeper echo reminds us of a waiting desert. And something tells us that this is a dangerous place to go. We resist the call into our own mystery, our own depths. We fear further hurting by […]
The coming of summer stirs our hearts. As the warm and welcome colours of July 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, […]
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 can use intuition and anticipate the […]
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 […]
The mirror was as big as the wall of the room we were gathered in. It was my first Pilates class. Half way through I caught a glimpse of myself writhing on the floor, arms and legs all over the place like a beached octopus. Around me flexible bodies rotated rhythmically on their mats, balancing, stretching and pulsing to the music and the instructions. Sweat was dripping off my chin. My limbs were hurting. And […]
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 […]
Our understanding of the Holy Spirit is mostly too limited and too undeveloped. It is time now to acknowledge and release her surging power throughout all life. We need to begin delighting in, and celebrating the dynamic Spirit pulsing through the Church, through humanity, through the evolving universe and through every corner of our own hearts We were on our way back home after Benediction one bright night, many decades ago, my mother and myself, […]
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 […]