Tomorrow brings together the anniversary of the atrocity of Hiroshima and the Feast of the Transfiguration. Every year the collision seems both inescapably apt and awful beyond words. It demands we understand glory and bear its weight. An eye-witness account by a Jesuit living in Hiroshima in 1945. Tomorrow’s gospel reading: Six days later, Jesus …
Category Archives: Thoughts
10 Years
I was ordained a priest 10 years ago today. It hasn’t been the ten years I imagined it would be — marked more by failure than success, more by sickness than health — but, I realise reflecting on it, still good, very good. I chose a phrase from St Ignatius and a fragment of a …
“A Template for Daily Meditation”
Shawn Anthony, at Lo-Fi Tribe, has written a piece (which has now disappeared — January 2007) on how to structure a daily space for meditation–what he calls a template. It made me think about two of the templates I am familiar with and have found helpful along the way–the monastic practice of Lectio Divina and …
‘Firefly’ and Finding God’s Will
I used the following reflection on story and discernment a few weeks ago with a group trying to reflect on their own life and ministry together and discern a possible way forward. I’m posting a slightly edited version here…
A little while ago I was given the DVDs of a science fiction show I’d wanted to see but missed called ‘Firefly’ — think Cowboys and Indians in spaceships — and it’s a lot of fun, and very well written, with 8 or 9 well-drawn characters that over the short series grow and take shape and show their stories and change each other in all sorts of ways and hint at secrets and stories yet to be told. Because it was a series that was cancelled part way through. A story with no ending. With loose ends. A dozen stories still waiting to be told. And my intense curiosity about each character and what they still had left to tell, and about the group, the whole, and their collective story which seemed to be going … somewhere, having some significance. I hate not knowing what happens to Inara. I really want to know who Shepherd Book really is and where Simon and his sister are headed. And I never will. Unless I make it up myself. And that doesn’t really work. Because half the pleasure is not in making up, but in appreciating the reality of the characters and the sense that behind them there is an author with a hope.
Pray As You Go To Keep Going
The good news: Pray As You Go has been extended indefinitely. There’ll be (week-)daily podcasts for the foreseeable future as the project has been a great success, both in terms of number of downloads (past the quarter million mark) and user feedback. The bad news: my health has been pretty lousy recently and blogging has …
Four Dozen
Today I hit 48. I’ve decided four dozen sounds better or 40 (base 12). Come to think of it in our digital age a much more natural base is 16 which makes me 30 (in hexadecimal). Of course I dread to think what age I’ve just reached in binary! 110,000 — about what I feel.
St. George’s Day
St George, patron saint of England, gets buried under bigger beasts today, overshadowed by the Resurrection, Thomas’ affirmation of faith, and the forgiving breath of God. I thought the least I could do was uncover a 7 year old homily for St. George, though in truth I think it’s more in praise of dragons … …
Poems for the Easter Octave VII
A Letter from Brooklyn An old lady writes me in a spidery style, Each character trembling, and I see a veined hand Pellucid as paper, travelling on a skein Of such frail thoughts its thread is often broken; Or else the filament from which a phrase is hung Dims to my sense, but caught, it …
Poems for the Easter Octave VI
Everything is Going to be All Right How should I not be glad to contemplate the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window and a high tide reflected on the ceiling. There will be dying, there will be dying, but there is no need to go into that. The lines flow from the hand unbidden and …
Poems for the Easter Octave V
O Taste and See The world is not with us enough O taste and see the subway Bible poster said, meaning The Lord, meaning if anything all that lives to the imagination’s tongue, grief, mercy, language, tangerine, weather, to breathe them, bite, savor, chew, swallow, transform into our flesh our deaths, crossing the street, plum, …