Jim Cogley: Reflections Tues 29th April – Mon 4th May 2025

Coming Events

Three Wood You Believe evening seminars entitled Getting the Past out of the Present involving Personal and Ancestral Healing are scheduled to be held in the Edmund Rice Healing Centre in Callan, Co Kilkenny on Thursday May 1^st, 8^th and 15^th from 7pm to 9.30pm. The cost will be €20 per night and €50 for all three. Bookings by phone or text to Jim Maher on 086-1276649. Also, highly recommended is a full Saturday from 10am to 4pm with Donal Spring on Healing the Inner Child on May 10^th. This is a beautiful venue that is quickly becoming established as a centre of Healing.

A seminar entitled Personal and Ancestral Healing will be held in Lady’s Island Community Centre on Saturday31^st May from 10am to 4pm. Cost €40 with refreshments included. Facilitators – Jim Cogley & Luba Rodzhuk. Bookings by phone or text to 087-7640407. Early booking is advisable.

Also, for those interested in doing some serious inner work over a number of days a retreat will be given by Jim Cogley and Luba Rodzhuk in An Tobar, Ardbraccan Retreat Centre in Navan. This will begin on the evening of Monday 30^th June and conclude on the following Friday. Please make bookings to An Tobar ASAP as numbers are limited. 046-9078973, Postal Code C15 T884.

Tues 29^th April – The Current Drift

This week’s postings continue to reflect on where we have come from in relation to the particular brand of religion we have inherited. As a priest I have worked within the Catholic system all my life and am lucky to have come through with no major grievances in relation to it. However, it is necessary to understand where we have come from in order to appreciate why the church as we have known it is in terminal decline. What is happening on a wide scale at the present time is that so many are throwing out the baby of spirituality with the bathwater of religious practice. The rich truths and traditions of Christianity are now in danger of being lost as people reject what for them was not working and lacked meaning. As stated last week it was the Cullenization of the Irish Church back as far as 1850 that has had such a negative influence to the present day. It was this that gave rise to a clerical culture, a church-based religion that was separate from life, and a huge division between the sacred and the secular that was not there before. It was this brand of religion that promoted a god of fear, was hung up on sex, fed guilt and unworthiness and promoted obedience to rules and regulations as the path to salvation. This had become like the religion of the Pharisees that was so vehemently opposed by Christ. By no stretch of the imagination was it a religion that led people to experiencing life in all its fulness.

Wed 30^th April – An Intuitive Awareness

By the age of sixteen and having been an altar boy until then, by the grace of God I had an intuitive awareness that something was fundamentally wrong with the brand of religion I had grown up with. In my heart of hearts, I rejected it and became an agnostic. I still entered seminary largely because of a deep sense of call, but also to see if what I found there would be sufficient to prove me wrong. I have to say it didn’t. There was no life, no joy, no enthusiasm and I saw men in their final year with depression oozing from their faces. Seeing that, and if this was an expression of Catholicism, I was soon saying, ‘Let me out of here, I want none of this’. It was while heading for a concert given by Planxty, and in my heart preparing for the final exit, that I was met by a fellow student who invited me to come instead to a Charismatic Renewal meeting. That became my lifeline and provided the opportunity to explore what this thing called Christianity was all about. To that man and that providential encounter, I owe my ministry and perhaps my life.

Thurs 1^st May – A Spirituality of the Heart

I went through seminary years determined to be formed not by adherence to rules and regulations but by surrender to Spirit. It was in prayer meetings I began to learn about topics that I believed to be at the heart of the Gospel, like the ministry of healing, the nature of deliverance, gifts of the Spirit and radical discipleship. In the seminary it was a religion of the head, disembodied and jaded, while in prayer meetings it was a spirituality of the heart, alive and vibrant. There I was at home and with fellow students who were involved I had found my tribe. I deemed it such a godsend that in eight years, apart from holidays, I never missed a single meeting and from the early days was privileged to be one of the leaders. While today I no longer attend prayer meetings, and there are few left to attend, I still regard Charismatic Renewal as the crucible of my spiritual formation for which I am eternally grateful.

Fri 2^nd May – A Glaring Omission

As I look back on my seminary days is find it significant that there was almost never a mention of Cardinal Cullen and his enormous influence on the Irish Church. I can well remember his portrait on the wall but had no sense that it was his ghost that still stalked the corridors. In life and relationships, it’s never what we talk about that causes problems but more what we fail to address and don’t talk about that creates deep rifts in relationships. In Maynooth, for there to be any open and honest conversations about the influence of Cardinal Cullen it would have been a step too far in self-examination. So, there was never any willingness to look at a church that was clearly in deep trouble and to critically evaluate what had gone wrong. Around my own time there were a few attempts coming from students, but these were suppressed almost immediately. Even having spent eight years in the place there was never an opportunity to give any form of feedback on the nature and adequacy of the training we had received.

Sat 3^rd May – Life Denying Religion

Under Cardinal Cullen, the very religion that should have offered a path for people to find freedom and fulfilment became a form of enslavement and oppression. It was anti almost everything human and in the words of Patrick Kavanagh was ‘an insult to the Incarnation’ of God becoming human. With huge focus on strict adherence to rules and regulation as the path to salvation people lived fear-based and guilt-ridden lives, never knowing Gods favour and living perpetually under His frown. To reinforce his position Cullen brought the Redemptorist order from the Continent whose job it was to preach parish missions with their particular brand of hellfire and brimstone preaching. During the early part of the 1900’s Ireland had more inmates per capita in mental institutions that any other country in Europe, even Russia, and is it unreasonable to say that many of the inmates were there as a consequence of such an unhealthy form of religion.

Sun 4^th May – No Eyes For Easter

A common feature of the Resurrection accounts is the failure of the disciples to recognize the Risen Lord when he appears to them. Even Mary Magdalene who was his closest companion and who had always accompanied him on his travels failed to recognize him at the tomb on the Easter morning and thought he was the gardener. This seems strange since many of them had already heard reports that he was risen. Surely it couldn’t have been that their sight was bad, or that Jesus had changed beyond recognition. For to understand what is happening here we need to draw on our own experience. There is physical seeing with the eyes but there is also emotional seeing with the heart. When our hearts are wounded it has the effect of distorting the way we see with our eyes. Like those wounded disciples we can be so focused on death that we are unable to see life; we can be so trapped in our inner darkness that the light cannot penetrate. In all the resurrection accounts Christ led his disciples through a process of healing before their eyes were opened and they could see the reality of his resurrected self.

There is a rather sad Eastern story about a father and son who lived in a small town during a time of war. One day while the father was on his travels the town was bombed, and many buildings were burnt to the ground. The man returned to find that his home was a burnt out shell and close by lay the charred remains of his beloved son. These he had cremated properly, and the ashes were placed in an urn and given back to him. Years after rebuilding his home he still held onto his son’s ashes. Not only did he keep them close by while he slept but he took them with him wherever he travelled.

In reality his son was still alive and in the ensuing rescue operations after the bombing was transferred for treatment to a faraway town. Badly burnt and traumatized he had suffered memory loss and had no way of connecting with who he was or where he had come from. Years of therapy brought back glimmers of his past and he went in search of his roots. He found his way to where his home once stood and recognized his father through the window. With great excitement he knocked on the door and when the voice inside asked who was knocking, he replied, ‘It’s me, I am your son,’ To his surprise his father was dismissive and instead of being overjoyed, he told him to get lost, that he was an imposter. His sons remains were on the mantlepiece and he had no time for such nonsense. Again, the son tried but to no avail and went away sad and questioning his new-found memory.

For the father like the early disciples after Easter his gaze was so fixated on death that he was unable to recognize the life that was standing on his doorstep. Such is our story also. Resurrection doesn’t make sense to those who are still holding onto the past and caught in the memory of Good Friday.

Our memories are so much part of who we are. Some are pleasant while others are far from being so. These are the ones we try to repress and deny yet the more we do so the more they come back to haunt us. The Resurrection accounts show this happening quite clearly. After a night of fishing the disciples catch nothing. The Risen Jesus stands on the shore and tells them to try again and when they do the nets fill up. This awakens the positive memories of when they were first called to be disciples, also by the Sea of Galilee. The next memory is not so pleasant, for Peter at least. The sight of a charcoal fire was definitely going to bring him back to the night of Jesus’ arrest. Earlier in the day he had protested undying loyalty, but Jesus had told him that before the cock would crow he would have denied him three times. Standing beside a charcoal fire, and afraid of being found guilty by association, he swore three times on oath that he didn’t know Christ. Suddenly he was now being confronted by the memory of his betrayal but this time it was for healing.

This is how our reactions have so much to teach us. While we relate in the present we react from the past. Every time we react to a person, a situation, an event or even a place we are re-enacting an earlier trauma that has got buried somewhere years earlier in our minds. We then think that the problem is in the present while in fact it comes from the past. Our reactions so distort the present that we see it and feel it as if we were back there again. It’s never the trigger in a gun that carries the explosive, it just sets it off, and many of us are well loaded! Even if someone triggers our anger to a huge extent it is still our anger that we have to deal with.

Mon 4^th May – Kavanagh Commentary

The poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) was probably the best commentator on the Church of his time. He was a mystic who never found healing from his past and so lived a dysfunctional lifestyle. That caused him to be greatly misunderstood. His poems glisten with mystical truth while written with a broken pen. He was classed as a ‘bad Catholic’ at a time when any criticism of the established order was frowned on and considered heretical. He considered the brand of religion as instigated by Cardinal Cullen as being ‘an insult to the incarnation’. He saw the effects of it all around him, how it controlled people by guilt, fettered them with unworthiness and failed to awaken divinity within. Particularly it was riddled with guilt in relation to almost all things of a sexual nature. This was to the point where even what happened in the marriage bed was matter for the confessional. With his poetic insight Kavanagh could see clearly what for the vast majority was hidden in plain sight.