MOSES AND THE BOG (Holy Ground)

It’s funny where a reading can take you. Moses on the west side of the wilderness brings my mind to a kind of wilderness of the West of Ireland. The Bog. Not that it’s confined to the West but that’s where I have known it, this very Irish reality.

Bogland has yielded up turf to generations of Irish people, gift of the earth to us, this God-given gift that has warmed the homes of countless families when there was little or nothing else to keep them warm. Turf has given us the fire on which the kettle was boiled for the tea. On it bread was baked and dinners cooked.

It gave our homes an unparalled atmosphere, feeding the contemplative spirit by which we gazed in long silence upon its flame, learning our own lessons there. It facilitated companionship, the gathering of people around the open fire in night-time conversations and music. The Rosary and other prayers prayed there.

The harvesting of turf speaks of good neighbourliness, people out working together, helping each other out.

One of my lovely memories of childhood in Raford is of bringing tea and bread across the fields to my grandfather in the bog, helping him to load up the cart with turf, climbing on top and making the journey with him back home.

The smell of burning turf still awakens something precious in the psyche and even in the soul of people of my generation. It is a holy and a sacred thing, even as it approaches its retirement and is viewed negatively by the city that does not understand it, by a way of life that has forgotten that there are values other than the material, values even more important than the physical.

I would dare to say that the culture of turf and the open fire was mentally, emotionally and psychologically healthier on many levels. Much less stressed. Kinder. More content.

Patrick Kavanagh left behind the boglands of Monaghan to find real life in Dublin city, but he would eventually come to catch a glimpse of God in the Bog back home, a place where one might not expect to find God at all. But He is there, in every bog because it is His place before it ever became ours.

“Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God was breathing His Love by a cut-away bog.” (The One)

God being discovered in ordinary and, sometimes the least likely, places. As Moses discovered.

Moses was going about his ordinary task of herding the sheep when he glimpsed the strange sight of the Burning Bush through which God revealed Himself, speaking to Moses and calling him to another way of living. It was as always God’s initiative, but it also required Moses to be paying attention to his surroundings. Attentive and alert for the moment of surprise. It is a holy thing, this holy ground of a person's encounter with God in the ordinary.

Opportunities for such divine encounters are provided in whatever context we find ourselves – in the country, the city, the sea or the sky – and the repentance that we are called to is, like Moses, to turn and see what is there, the One Who Is there - the I AM - and hear what He is saying to us.

As with Moses He reminds us that the place where we are standing is Holy Ground, every place and every moment of encounter with God is sacred and deserving of our respect. The bed of the sick is a Burning Bush, as is the confinement of depression, the prison cell of addiction - whatever affliction may be our experience. We are called to take off our shoes in one way or another, touch the reality of where we are with the bareness of our foot – to do that emotionally, mentally, spiritually and maybe even physically.

You get to do this on every level in St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg. That which is tender in us touches and endures the roughness of earth and rock. Real. Without pretence or affectation. It is raw prayer.

On the Holy Ground of our being, our present reality, God tells us that He has seen our affliction, He has heard our cry, and He has come down to help us, to lead us on the slow but certain path of our exodus.

But we have to be there in the encounter. It is we who must see and hear and it is we who must move from where we are to the place of liberty. Though sometimes people’s dejection is so deep that they can do none of these things, as Moses was to discover when he went to tell the people of Israel what God was promising. They had to somehow be forced into going where they were afraid to venture. Life does that to us. God does it to us.

A simple bush on a mountain became a place of divine revelation and a fig tree in the Gospel tells us something of God’s ways of dealing with us.

A useless barren tree, bearing no fruit! What would you do but get rid of it. But not Jesus. He is the gardener who offers a second chance to the barren soul, working with it, labouring to make it living and productive. This is the good news of redemption which is offered to us by Him.

I have seen, I have heard, I have come down, I will give you another chance.

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I am a child
In my Grandmother’s
Kitchen

With the evening
Closing in

And we are alone
The two of us

By the open fire

And she handing me
Rice on a red plastic
Plate and I savouring

Its loveliness

The lapping of flames
In turf and the clock ticking

We are not in need
Of words
And do not speak them

I am a child
In my Grandmother’s
Kitchen

Kneeling at her feet
Hands joined and resting
On her lap

Finding God in
The kitchen and the home
Of our lives

And being loved
This is my prayer

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“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.”

― Alice Walker, The Color Purple