OF YOU MY HEART HAS SPOKEN

  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...