OF YOU MY HEART HAS SPOKEN

“Come away to some lonely place all by yourselves!” (Mark 6:31) Dawn I sit on a dune in the cold dark before dawn, facing east where the sun will rise, contemplating the beauty of God to the restful rhythm of ruminating camels. God is in this place to be adored, honoured and praised. And when I pray “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit” – a prayer without me in it - it seems as if all of heaven responds “Amen!” and the sands of this desert respond “Amen! Glory be!” The rising of the sun will be beautiful, awe-inspiring, but it is not the sun that I am waiting for. I wait for Jesus who comes once more from east and west, north and south. He comes anew each day to tell us of the Father’s Love. The sun is a reminder of this reality and even as we wait, He is already present in our waiting. This is the most silent, still and solitary part of the day – precious as water in this Sahara. I drink about four litres of water here each day. May I drin...

“…the Lord whom you are seeking will suddenly enter His Temple and the Angel of the covenant whom you are longing for, yes He is coming!” (Malachai 3:1) The Lord whom you are seeking will suddenly enter His Temple. He is Himself the Temple and we are His Temple. It is we who seek Him We who are longing It is in our longing that we present ourselves before the Lord so that we are there – present and prepared for when that sudden thing happens. The healing that we seek will suddenly happen The conversion we are awaiting will unexpectedly take place The Love we are longing for will suddenly arrive. And we will, like Simeon, say, “at last!” That will be our prayer of relief and gratitude. But we have to be there in the Way and in the Place where it will happen and we have to seize the opportunity when it presents itself. I’ve been seeking Jesus all my life, often finding Him, often avoiding Him. For many years I’ve had this image of Jesus and myself. I’m...

I don’t like Monday but I love the Word of God. Monday morning, even though it’s my day off, feels like a hangover. Heavy, slow, dull. And it’s raining, so the temptation is to stay in but there’s a movie that I want to see – A Hidden Life – and it’s only on in Ashford at lunchtime. I get myself together and out the door. Walking down the street I run into a young family from the parish who are on their way back from the doctor. I hear them before seeing them. The young voices exclaim my name in unison and one of them looks up at me and says, “I am sorry about your brother-in-law!” It is so tender the way she says it. “Thank you!” I reply, adding that he needed to die because he was in a lot of pain. “He rests now” I say and she adds “in peace!” The Word of God is alive and active and it comes to us in many forms. It is impossible to resist it when spoken by a child and my mood is completely altered, the strain in me dissolved. Yesterday was Word of God Sunday, named so ...

“This is the war on the ordinary people”, the man shouts and shouts again on the crowded train. We’re squeezed in like sardines. Standing. There’s chaos at the station. Delays and cancellations. Yet, most of us remain silent in the face of it and some try to stop the man shouting his protest against this form of war on the people. I’m happy to have gotten in to the train at all but I wonder if it is our silence, our quiet resignation that allows government to become so detached from what is happening in ordinary lives. Although, it’s only a week since people had the opportunity to protest by means of the ballot box and they chose not to protest at all. Maybe they are too tired. At Dublin airport the wind howled through the departure door, rain swept down across the tarmac. We were left standing on the stairs for quite a while after having presented out boarding passes. A young official asked, “would anyone like to skip the queue?” Two of us accepted the invitation to go down...

From the train - Galway to Dublin January 15, 2020 “The nail bomb is an anti-personnel explosive device packed with nails to increase its effectiveness at harming victims." (Wikipedia) Death is like a nail bomb that scatters itself indiscriminately, fragmenting further what is already fragmented. It scatters people, pushes them against each other, pulls them apart. Some deaths do that.  Others are grace-filled, a grace that bathes the most severe sorrow in peace.  Those who survive have a choice to make. It's within our gift to decide what to do with what we inherit. That choice is simple enough, though never easy, when what comes to us is a loving legacy. When division is left behind, the task given us is much harder and it calls us to be more than who we are, to go far beyond ourselves, so that painful history does not have power to destroy our present and future.  Being mourner and priest is seriously challenging, more than those closest can ever imagine. There is ...

  He left home A stranger The heat of winter's Fever burning On the wrong Side of everything While the claimed The honour  Of a  superior choice He wasn't worth A word of farewell Did silence not tell That they might never Meet again?

Ballyloughan New Year's Day 2010 Coming to the end of this year and the decade since 2009, I’ve been looking back in gratitude at those ten years, going back a further ten to the end of the year in which Maura had died and the arrival of the new millennium. This is what I wrote then in my diary: “The sea at Ballyloughan was still and clear as glass, reflecting all the colour - the orange, dark red and pink of the sky as the sun went down over the hills of Clare. The buildings too were washed in the colour and a cargo ship, moving slowly towards the docks, cast its shadow as it passed between the sun and the Galway coastline. The sound of birds echoed, birds skimming in formation over the water, flying towards the south. I stood in contemplation and awe and worship. Even Vincent Browne or Stephen Hawking, if they stood here, would understand worship, without having to have it explained. It seems kind of God to let me witness this at year’s end and maybe it’s an omen of be...