OF YOU MY HEART HAS SPOKEN

  God is beyond time, yet his timing is impeccable, precise, spot on. This is a blessing that has been evident in my life many times over many years. A few weeks ago as I was preparing to board the ferry to Ireland, I got word that a friend had died during the night in Cork and I arrived home just in time for her funeral, something that mattered for me and her family. Travelling to her funeral meant that I stayed with our Community in Thurles which gave me the opportunity to visit my good friend John who has been seriously ill for most of the past year. He was well enough, sitting out in his chair, but neither of us realized that these would be our last conversations. A week later he became unconscious and, again, I was free to go to him, spending his last three days with him, his family and the community. The grace of being with him when he died, participating in his funeral. All of these are reminders to me of God’s Providence , confirmations that He is not only with me but...

  The Climb The Cloud The Vision and The Voice Word without Speech No Sound The Holy One Calling Be Holy I am struck With amazement Astonished Transported To the hushed Half-light Of Saturday night's Cathedral Waiting For confession's Mercy The ardent Thirst for holiness Inflaming My soul Centre-point On the horizon Of my destiny Hope that Sustains My every endeavour The mountain The valley The desert and The river Of my heart Oh my Holy One My Love I offer you Childlike obeisance On the earth floor Of my life Glimpsing glory Through a prism Of clay (In memory of my First Profession as a Pallottine, September 12, 1975)

Three former Provincials - Derry Murphy , John and me Thurles Cathedral bell rings out the midday Angelus .  I pray it out loud for John. We are alone and this is one of the prayers I associate with him. "May Thy Divine assistance remain always with us." Then there is only the sound of him breathing through his final sleep on earth, a sleep that began more than two days ago. We thought then that he would go quickly enough. He thought it himself. His last words were something like, "it's time for me to go to the Lord." But the Lord has His own time in the mystery of things. And I am in no rush, being home on holidays with all the time in the world. Like his sister Rita said yesterday, isn't it good to have all the time we can have with him, even if we want him to be free of this final struggle. But there's actually little sign of struggle, just a slow, steady and heavy breathing. There were moments of obvious pain yesterday but even then he doesn't u...

  When a son of Gera  Flings verbal dirt and stones  Into my sorrow  And I am tempted  To cut him off for good I am reminded  That God may have bid him Do it As He did the original  To King David  Perhaps I have offended  Neglected him And have need of repentance  I am reminded too That He has bid another To make my spirits soar With laughter  And the Hand that hurts Is the Hand that heals

Who am I and  Why should I be favoured?  Why should I be honoured with a visit from the Mother of my Lord, Mother of the Word Incarnate? She comes as I wait upon the Word of God at the beginning of the day Sifting through the usual words of comfort that emerge I recognise It when It arrives, and often It is not a word at all But a silence that enters from without and rises from within all at once. A silence that takes hold of my entire being so that I am, for a while, nothing other than pure silence.  It is the silence of the Aleph , the silence of God, the silence of God's presence. The Beginning and the End, the Aleph and the Tav , the Alpha and the Omega It happens on the deck of ship as it sails across the sea and can last for hours. Within this Sacred Silence I am whole, with no trace of anxiety, no burden, free of all that is negative or unwholesome. You might even say that I transcend, or that I am transcended by grace, by the movement of the Holy Spirit. ...

Sunday August 3, 2025 "I go out there to wrestle with emptiness. And success would be to bring exactly nothing home with me." (By Tim Robinson, from Connemara, Listening to the Wind.) To bring exactly nothing home with me. Yes, that's the ideal. Not sure that I can actually succeed in bringing nothing but maybe I can bring much less than I had planned. Maybe it isn't necessary to fill my car again with stuff to bring across the Irish sea. And in this process of clearing out my room, making way for another, I just have to look at what needs to be taken and what should be discarded. There are framed pictures, a mall box of them. There are the pictures coloured and painted by the children over the years for me personally and done so often with great detail and care. So I think I'll bring those with me. But all of the boxes of notes that go back 30 years, retreat notes and talks that I've hauled about with me, thinking that I might make use of them, that they migh...

  Martha and Mary. We miss the point when we get caught up in the argument of the two sisters and, most people come down on the side of Martha because she is us. We are her. We are busy. We want to be distracted. And we ask a fair question, “what would the world be like if everyone sat down like Mary?” Nothing would get done! But, of course, we miss the point. Martha and Mary are not the point. The point of it all is Jesus. It is He whom we serve. It is to Him that we listen. On a personal level, this Gospel has been significant for me since the first time I read it. As a young student I “knew” that I belonged in the place that Mary occupies. I felt that keenly and lived it to a great degree as a young priest in Tanzania. I feel it now as a call to return to the place where I truly belong. My home at the feet of Jesus, listening to Him. The new translation of the Lectionary adds another personal dimension for me. It is the word “portion.” Mary has chosen the “good porti...

We excavate The foundation Of our lives Drawing up Fragments of memory Broken pieces Of our past "But do not linger Long with these" Says my Soul For they are not The purpose Of our seeking. We will dig And delve deeper still And not give up Until we uncovered The Treasure of God's Glory Hidden in the mystery Of our being

  A garden in the city. The only cool place on this rather hot morning. Beautiful. Nothing to do but watch the antics of two cats. The mother, who has been named Beauty and her unnamed kitten, whom I have decided to call Binti. A wild, frightened thing and very funny to watch. I think if I remained long enough in the garden and sat still enough she would become accustomed to my presence, not take off in fright every time I stand up. It's the morning after a very emotional weekend. Part of me feels like a traitor. It's the kind of road I naturally go down. But I really must start taking into myself the sheer depth and strength of the love that the people of Hastings parish have for me. That there is love between us has been clear all along. I know this in my head. But it's another thing to absorb it into the fibres of my being, to risk being possessed by it, overwhelmed by it, consumed. Consumed. I have been consumed by my work in Hastings. Only now do I realise it. People h...

“So if I fly too far Will I still have a place inside your heart When you see what I've become Will you love me for who I am, not who I was”   ( Chance Peña )   At St. Richard’s College Year 11 closing liturgy, I was surprised to hear them sing a song from my own generation, Abba’s ‘Slipping through my Fingers’. It tells of the growing of a child, the adult’s feeling, the fear, of losing her and it speaks of wanting to “freeze the picture”, something that is natural as we grow older. The letting go must be very difficult for parents.   But, keeping things as they are, holding on to what is – this is not what a young person on the verge of adulthood needs.   It’s common for me to wake up to a song in the morning, for that song to stay with me through the day, to find myself singing it and, more often than not, I find that God communicates with me in this way. He is telling me something in the song.   Lately, the song has been ‘I Am Not Who I was’ by Ch...

  LONGING is the title of a book being advertised on Instagram. It was published about thirteen years ago. Longing is something I am seldom unaware of – all the physical longings that stir in me every day. The emotional ones. Spiritual – my longing for God. And they are all interconnected. And, mistakenly, I tend to think of them as MINE! The author, Joey O’Connor, suggests that the question we need to ask in life is not “who am I?” but “WHOSE am I?” That second question brings me back to the time after my Mother died and a woman asked me, “whose are you now, whose son?” It stopped me in my tracks. It wasn’t something I had thought about. I am nobody’s, I thought, nobody’s son. This left me with a profound sense of emptiness and, at the same time, a certain sense of liberty. The liberty of no longer being answerable to my parents. But there was emptiness in that liberty. To my great surprise, at the age of fifty-three, I became my Mother’s “lovely son.” It was one of the last thing...

  Sunday evening sitting on Seamus McDonagh’s bench down at Rock-a-Nore. June first. A strong westerly wind presses cold against the back of my head, the sound of it merging with the waves washing radiant white on the shore. The roar of wind and sea is all I can hear. And the occasional sound of twittering birds. Seagulls are strangely silent as they swoop and soar at high speed out into the horizon. I lean back, looking up at the white wispy clouds and further into the blue of the sky. Then close my eyes, with mind and heart raised up to heaven. The glory of it. The word GLORY has been with me all day and I estimate that I have used it at least sixty times today in prayer. It occurs more than six hundred times in the Bible, and it refers to the radiant manifestation of the majesty of God. We are touched by it; we enter into it in Jesus who shares His divine Glory with us. This is what we are called to when we pray. Our entry into glory is facilitated by two important mov...