OF YOU MY HEART HAS SPOKEN

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...

May and Pentecost Mary and the Holy Spirit Conceiving Jesus, giving birth to the Church. “Wild air, world-mothering” Wind that blows where it will. The Holy Spirit teaching. Promise of Jesus Ever unfolding the More of God. And suddenly the familiar surprises. It often happens with Scripture. A passage I have been reading all my life unexpectedly says something new. You can be doing the same thing day after day, seeing the same reality year after year when, out of the blue it causes you to pause, to look and look again. To see with new eyes. The statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. It has been part of my life since birth. At home. In Castlegar Grotto. Lourdes. Here in Hastings. I’m very fond of it. But it is always just a statue, a reminder, never taking the place of the reality. Even as I pray beside it here, I turn my gaze to the Tabernacle. To Jesus. On Friday evening I closed the church as usual and went up into the Sanctuary for a brief prayer and, upon turning to leave, something about ...

The Pleasure and the Pain Sacred hush On Holy Ground I whisper to God The pleasure and the pain Of Temptation Beguiling and persistent In pursuit I fear its strength I fear my weakness I trust in grace - but for it I fall Lord, that I may      Desire You more      Love You more Than every passing passion As it once was So may it be again Amen! +++ The Train I would never  Have fallen for you Had I not left the train In search of a faster Journey home Had I not missed The connection  I would never Have seen you Your young loveliness  Drawing near to my ageing senses Seeking direction I might have averted my gaze But let my foolish eyes Linger longingly Drawing you in  To the long grass Of my dreams Falling over a threshold  That was not mine To cross +++ The Park Bench I want what that man has feel the need of it badly this rare bench upon which he happily sits this humid morning are you lost? he asks kindly yes! and weary to...

  “Behold I am making all things new… …A new commandment I give you”   The Apostles of the early Church were keen to tell what God was doing in their lives in order to encourage and put fresh heart into their fellow Christians. We need the same kind of encouragement so that we know that God is actually at work among us, doing something new, sometimes in very small ways. After Saturday evening Mass I spent almost an hour hearing the confessions of those who are keen to experience God’s Mercy in a definitive way. The thing is, these were not old people at all, but they were young people in their teens and twenties. So, when we lament the absence of the young, it is necessary to know that they are with us, even if that is in small numbers. But they are emerging, and they are very committed to their faith. Earlier in the day I heard the First Confessions of almost forty children who are preparing for their First Holy Communion. A most beautiful and pure experience of the i...

It happened while I was in the kitchen, shortly before 5pm, putting away the groceries and listening to BBC World Service which gave excellent coverage of the Papal Conclave. The reporter said there had been hope of a result around 4.30 but when that didn't happen we would have to await another ballot.  Then suddenly he exclaimed, "white smoke!" I ran to the television. What a sight, what a sound, what utter joy on the faces of the people in St. Peter's Square. It was electric!  White smoke billowing from the most watched chimney in the world. And the family of seagulls on the roof beside it. The new-born chick almost symbolic of what was taking place. Despite the abundance of seagulls in Hastings, I had never seen such a young chick before. A first! New life!  I had tears in my eyes. We were witnessing something quite unique, very special, a universal and unifying joy. A vocation unfolding before our eyes. Our common vocation. The vocation of the one w...

  I found myself sitting across the desk from a young psychiatrist who communicated with me through her computer screen, a different doctor each time for six months, and none of them ever seemed to get me. They just thought I was suicidal, which I wasn’t, and I didn’t seem to have adequate words to express the true nature of my sense of the pointlessness of life. It was a time in my life when I might have been relishing the fact that I had been elected Provincial of the Irish Pallottines, enjoying the “honour” given me. But there I was in an acute state of disintegration, embarrassed and ashamed. A priest in a position of authority, reduced to this. And I realize now that the honour was in fact in that very place where I thought it was not. Throughout my life I have sided with the underdog, felt empathy for the poor and the suffering and have found myself to be “with” people, side by side with them in whatever suffering they were experiencing. But in this case it was no longer ...