Jim Cogley’s Reflections: Tues 28 Oct – Mon 4 Nov 2025
Coming Wood You Believe Healing Seminars: with Jim Cogley & Luba Rodzhuk:
*Croí Nua Galway Fri 7th Nov 7-9.30pm & Sat 10am-4pm: Booking Croí Nua.
*Edmund Rice Centre Callan – Healing Childhood Trauma & Abuse Sat 15th 10am- 4pm. Bookings to Jim Maher on 087-9619436.
*An Tobar Retreat Centre Navan Fri 28th 7-9.30pm – Focus on Loss & Recovery
Saturday 10am-4pm Healing and Integration. Bookings to Spiritans on 086-8416110.
For ordering Wood You Believe books: jimcogley.com
For daily services usually 10am. Sunday 11am. Webcam: ourladysisland.ie
Tues Oct 28th – Christianity – Back to Basics
If I knew that this was my last day on earth and I would not wake up in the morning, on what basis would I hope to be welcomed into heaven? The answer to this basic question can be very revealing, so before reading on you might consider your unique answer. Some of the most common responses would be as follows: Because I am essentially a good person and have always done my utmost to lead a good life. Or, I have always done my best for people and never harmed anyone. For many, it might be, I have led a good religious life, always said my prayers, gone to church and obeyed the rules. Others might point to what they have achieved in rearing children, by being involved in their communities and doing things that bettered others’ lives. Some might point to their charitable efforts and raising funds for those in need. In general, leading a good moral life is understood as the way to eternal life. What if none of the above were the right answer?
Wed 29th Oct – A Fundamental Question
To depend on one’s own goodness and moral stature as the way to salvation sounds perfectly okay. But is this not reliance on self-righteousness? Scripture refutes all forms of self-righteousness as being utterly inadequate. Let’s take a few relevant quotations from the Scriptures like, ‘All people have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’. The implication is that even our best efforts fall infinitely short of the mark. Another verse says that ‘All our good deeds are as filthy rags in the sight of God.’ This has to be placed alongside the truth that good deeds are essential and go with us. However, if we are reliant on them to qualify us for entry they are just ‘filthy’ rags. In the Gospels we have the ongoing conflict between Christ and the Pharisees who were the paragons of virtue and the exemplars of what it meant to lead a moral and religious life. Clearly as Saul, later St Paul, the one one-time zealous Pharisee found out, this was not the way either.
Thurs 30th Oct – Have we made Christianity into a Humanist Religion?
As difficult as it may be to hear, holding onto the above beliefs is to have missed out on a core fundamental truth of Christianity. It is to have unconsciously slipped into the widespread belief that Christianity is simply about teachings that encourage us to live good and moral lives. This belief has become so widespread that the true Gospel message is not being heard. Most church going Catholics have been indoctrinated with the belief that to be a good Christian you kept the rules and the rules not only kept you but guaranteed you a place in the next life. Here the question must be asked, where does Christ fit into this belief, except as a historical figure who had some nice things to say? Form this standpoint is Christianity anything more than a humanist religion that encourages us to lead good lives and be kind to our fellow creatures?
Fri 31st Oct – Law or Grace
Laced throughout Paul’s letters is his contrast between living by the Law and living the life of Grace. This was his great conversion experience, the most astounding revelation of his life. On the road to Damascus, he had to fall from his horse that symbolized his former beliefs; he had to recognize his blindness to the truth, and he had to understand what it meant to be baptized into Christ. Words that characterized his former life as a pharisee would have been effort, struggle, merit, obedience, will-power, self-righteousness. All of these had to go and be replaced by a new spiritual vocabulary with words like surrender, yielding, letting go, grace and Christ-righteousness. The question is, which set of words do we find in our own spiritual vocabulary?
Sat 1st Nov – Sincere but Sincerely Wrong
Particularly in his letter to the Romans, Paul alludes to people being utterly sincere in their religious beliefs and yet being sincerely wrong. He could easily be talking about us today in relation to our Christian belief where a core element seems to be missing to the point of no longer being able to enthuse people in their faith and so they are falling away in vast multitudes. Have we not been espousing more the religion of the Pharisees than the true message of the Gospels? What Paul experienced, does it not need to happen to us, that we fall from the horse of our own making and finally discover in the humility of the earth what the life of grace is all about? There was something radically new and explosive about early Christianity that turned the then known world on its head, and it was not just a group of Christians leading a life of moral virtue and going to Mass every Sunday!
Sun 2nd Nov – All Saints/Souls
This weekend the two feasts of All Saints and All Souls come together. Both the Feast of All Saints and All Souls introduce us to November, the month of the Holy Souls, and together they have much to teach us about that reality called death that walks with us as an unseen companion on our journey through life.
If we take the Feast of All Saints that was yesterday and reflect on what it is about. First, we have the officially named saints, presented to us as models of virtue who have taken their place in that great hall of fame stretching down through the ages. It may be that the truly real saints are not the great ones but the little ones, largely unknown who have struggled against insurmountable odds and proved victorious against the worst onslaughts and tragedies that life could throw at them. Recently in a house where there were three children in wheelchairs, I saw the infinite love and care of their parents and thought, who are the real saints? On the Feast of All Saints, we are talking about that vast multitude of ordinary souls who were never named but are saints nevertheless; many of them belonging to our own family tree; the people we have known and loved ourselves.
Perhaps the most comforting reminder that this feast offers is that the dead are always with us, not as they were but wherever we are. It’s a doctrine called the Communion of Saints. When someone dies, we say that they expire, and we think of their soul as leaving his or her body. An ancient belief had a slightly different take on this that was perhaps even closer to the truth. They believed that when someone dies the body leaves the soul and not the other way round. So the body leaves and is buried or cremated but the soul remains as part of that delicate fabric of relationships that were part of that person’s life.
It is a very basic truth that we don’t bury anyone; we only bury the clothes they wore in life that they no longer need. While the grave is a useful reference point for the process of grief to look too long there for the one we have lost is to miss out on the truth that we never lose what we have truly loved and the place we find them is right within our hearts. To look for connection with our loved ones in the graveyard is as Christ said to be looking among the dead for the one who is alive.
Our loved ones are nearer to us than we are to ourselves, we just need the eyes of faith to see that all those we have loved and lost while no longer with us as they were are still very much with us wherever we are.
The Feast of All Saints is for those who have arrived and that of All Souls is for those who are still on their journey. For thousands of years, it has been believed that while death is a journey to Heaven it is also one that may be long or short depending on the spiritual readiness of the soul.
Many today treat Purgatory, like Limbo, with a pinch of religious salt, and take the view that when we die, we either go up or down and that’s it. Personally, I believe that view to be utterly unrealistic and totally lacking in any understanding of the spiritual journey and what our lives here on earth are all about. How could we believe in divine justice and say that the likes of Stalin or Putin who aligned their lives with darkness could be place alongside beings of light like Francis of Assisi and Teresa of Avila?
Purgatory is something that has been verified in countless cases of clinical death experiences where people talk of a realm of dejected spirits. This is what we would have traditionally called Purgatory. When asked what they mean they usually say a place where souls seem to be held back or are holding onto something that is preventing them from moving forward. Teasing that out further the general sense is that morbid grief for a loved one and a refusal to let go of the departed can hold them back on the other side. That however is only one part of the story the bigger question is how ready the soul may be to take its journey into the light. The things that hold someone back in life may well be the same issues that prevent them from moving forward in the next:
To live in the past with mistakes and regrets is a sure way of not moving forward in life. Could a lack of self-forgiveness not also hold us back in death?
To have lived a life that has caused suffering and hardship to others while dying with no remorse or repentance must surely have consequences on the other side.
One of the biggest regrets for the dying is the realization that they lived someone else’s life but were not true to themselves. Could that too have a bearing on the soul’s passage?
To have lived with bitterness and resentment and leave behind a legacy of division must surely have a bearing on the other side.
Some years ago while being a chaplain to a Nursing Home I would regularly get calls to attend someone who was dying. The matron was not Catholic but quite tuned in spiritually to the needs of her patient and would often ask me not just to anoint that person but to check his or her energy. In other words, if there was something the person might have been carrying that was making it difficult for them to die peacefully. Very often there was some grief or resentment, and this was where that person needed prayer in order to let go and find peace. When helped this way the difference would become apparent immediately.
The question is how many die without ever finding peace and that is why the Bible reminds us that, ‘it is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be freed from sins or entanglements and so enter the peace of Gods Kingdom’.
Mon Nov 3rd – Not Effort but Revelation
Reflecting on my life I now consider the darkest, most difficult period, the time of feeling most lost, to, paradoxically, have been the most fruitful and transformative. It happened early in seminary formation where I found myself saying, ‘I know something of what it means to be a Catholic but what Christianity is all about I haven’t a clue’. Growing up I just presumed the two were the same but going through my agnostic phase was where Catholicism lost my interest but Christianity became my focus. So many historical accretions surrounding Church and Catholicism had blurred my vision and I needed to strip them back to get to the core truths. It was like starting from scratch and allowing myself to know nothing. My prayer was simply to be shown. I knew that I could never figure things out myself and so I trusted in a process of revelation and that if there was a God He would be greater than all my doubts and reveal Himself to me. I truly feel that prayer was answered fully because the faith that came into my life rather than diminishing has daily grown stronger and having reached my seventies is more exciting and vibrant than it ever was.