Jim Cogley’s Reflections Tues 31 March – Mon 6 April 2026

A Seminar entitled Fighting with God will be held in the Ignatius Rice Healing and Heritage Centre in Callan on Sat 11^th April. This is a not-to-be-missed event facilitated by Michael Flood, an opera singer, a victim of child abuse and once involved with the Special Forces. It will be a truly inspirational day from 10am-4pm and early booking is highly recommended to Jim Maher on 086-1276649. Cost is €50 and includes full lunch and refreshments.

You can tune in to live broadcasts usually daily at 10am weekdays and Sundays at 11am or recordings by going to Our Ladys Island Webcam

There will be a Healing Mass with blessing of Oil at 3pm this Wednesday 1^st April.

For ordering books at lowest prices go to jimcogley.com

Tues 31^st March – Recovering Catholics

Now in my early 70s I am still a fully paid-up member of the Catholic Church and have spent my entire life working within that system. On so many occasions I have ranted and railed against many of its practices and double standards. In more recent years I felt deeply betrayed by the imposition of a new Missal with poor English, convoluted language and words that make sense neither to priest nor people. This came at a time when the obvious need was for the Church to become more relevant. Daily I feel scandalized by the lack of equality within the system, especially in relation to women. In my early years I seriously wondered if I could live within a system with so many contradictions but slowly came to realize that the contradictions were also within myself and therein lay the real challenge; to hold opposites in balance. The Church could be compared to Noah’s Ark, that with so many animals packed into a small space; it must have stank to the high heavens, but it was still God’s vehicle of Salvation. The only other option is to be a good swimmer!

Wed 1^st April – Maturing in Faith

Any journey to mature faith will entail a large degree of offloading unhelpful and limiting beliefs. This process is like clearing out the old and making room for the new in the realization that there is not space for both. The more our faith deepens and becomes real we tend to move from what was the experience of external authority to the authority of our own inner experience. Once it was what the church taught that guided my path, now my authority comes from a deeper source. Carl Jung was asked if he believed in God? He replied, ‘I don’t have to any longer, I just know’. As faith matures, breaches of external rules and observance no longer engender the same levels of guilt as before. The question of how I perform becomes less important than how I feel and where am I at in my inner reality. Also a good sign that my faith has matured is that living the Christian life is no longer the struggle that it used to be and has become more characterized by a sense of daily surrender and allowing things and people to just be.

Thurs 2^nd April – Guilt and Unworthiness

In the Catholic tradition we majored in guilt and marinated in unworthiness from as far back as we care to remember. Jokes about Catholic Alzheimer’s spoke the truth ‘of forgetting everything except the guilt’. Even after honest confession, we still believed in a God who forgave but never quite forgot wrongdoing; there was always going to be a residual guilt that would only be wiped clean in Purgatory. Was it any wonder that people had a fear of dying? One 95-year-old on the day of his passing said, ‘This was the day I have dreaded all my life’. He had lived a good life, was hardworking and honest, raised an excellent family, yet he was terrified of dying. What a dreadful commentary on his religious practice! He had never heard of death as a joyful going home to someone you had always loved and who had always loved you. What a shame his brand of religion had denied him the prospect of unspeakable joy for the time of his passing.

Fri 3^rd April – Not Being Good Enough

Similarly with never feeling good enough and always falling short; all our lives we beat our breast and in all truth said, ‘Lord I am not worthy’. We forgot, or were never taught, that our being good enough was never the issue in the first place, nor was our falling short of the mark. In fact both of these are the essential starting points for the Christian journey. We can only begin with poverty of spirit as the way into the Kingdom. It is in the acceptance and confession of Christ as Lord of our lives that in relationship with him we become adopted children and as loved and cherished as he is. To then hold onto guilt and unworthiness now stands in direct contradiction to our baptized status of being In Christ, to use one of St Paul’s favourite phrases. There is a hymn that expresses this truth very succinctly: ‘He is all my righteousness, I stand complete in him’. It is not from any other place that true worship can emanate.

Sat 4^th April – The Curse of Perfectionism

Closely related to guilt and unworthiness was a teaching that contributed greatly towards these. ‘To be perfect as your heavenly Father was perfect’ was a favourite text for priests, most of whom were far from perfect themselves. This implied that moral perfection and external conformity to rules and regulations was someway attainable. It also implied that the shadow side of human nature needed to be suppressed and even outlawed. The emphasis was firmly placed on willpower rather than Divine Grace as the way to be saved. If you kept the rules then the rules would keep you and one day performance might ‘merit’ you entry into heaven. This interpretation of the text falsely gave the impression that it was possible to achieve salvation through one’s own efforts and good works. Inadvertently it was also a potent tool for institutional control that denied so many the joy of knowing and the reassurance of being in relationship with Christ as the Saviour.

Sun 5^th April – Easter – The Feast of Hope

The Brazilian writer and journalist Fernando Sabino once wrote, ‘In the end, everything will be all right. If it’s not all right, it’s not the end.’ That’s what Easter is all about, everything will be okay in the end. There is no need for despair no matter if the world seems to be going mad and there’s no end to the bad news, there is always reason for hope that can be understood as Holding Only Positive Expectations.

We tend to look at the chaos in the world, or in our own lives, and see it much like what we view in the photo. It’s the cross of pain and suffering that initially doesn’t make sense. All we may see are random and jagged pieces of wood. However, as we look closer they all form a pattern that makes up the face of the crucified Christ. In other words, Christ appears not on the Cross but out of the Cross. In the depths of suffering, the divine image is to be found and once we see it that is what dominates the picture and no longer the Cross.

The message of Easter is not primarily a message about Jesus’ body, although we’ve been trained to limit it to this one-time resurrection miracle. We’ve been educated to expect a lone, risen Jesus saying, ‘I rose from the dead; look at me’! That is probably  why many people, even Christians, don’t seem to get too excited about Easter. If the message doesn’t somehow include us, we humans don’t tend to be that interested in theology. Let’s examine the real message of Easter a little deeper and ask what is it really saying? Every message about Jesus is a message about all of us, about humanity. Sadly, the Western church that most of us were raised in emphasized the individual resurrection of Jesus. It was a miracle that we could neither prove nor experience, but that we just dared to boldly believe.

But there’s a great secret, at least for Western Christians, hidden in the other half of the universal church. In the Eastern Orthodox Church—in places like Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Egypt—Easter is not usually painted with a solitary Jesus rising from the dead. He’s always surrounded by crowds of people—both haloed and unhaloed. In fact, in traditional icons, he’s pulling people out of Hades. Hades is not the same as hell, although we put the two words together, and so we grew up reciting in the Creed that Jesus descended into hell and wondered how could that be?

Instead, Hades is simply the place of the dead. There’s no punishment or judgement involved. It’s just where a soul waits for God. But we neglected that interpretation. So the Eastern Church was probably much closer to the truth that the resurrection is a message about humanity. It’s a message about history. It’s a corporate message, and it includes you and me and everyone else. If that isn’t true, it’s no wonder that we basically lost interest.

Today is the feast of hope, direction, purpose, meaning, and community. We’re all in this together. The cynicism and negativity that our country, the US in particular, and many other countries have descended into show a clear example of what happens when people do not have hope. If it’s all hopeless, we individually lose hope too. Easter is an announcement of a common hope.

When we sing in the Easter hymn that Christ destroyed death, that means the death of all of us. It’s not just about Jesus; it’s to humanity that God promises, ‘Life does not end, it merely changes, and even as our earthly body lies in the dust, we gain an everlasting dwelling place in heaven’. That’s what happened in Jesus, and that’s what will happen for us. In the end, everything will be all right. History is set on an inherently positive and hopeful tangent.

One day all of history with all its misery and suffering will be fully revealed not as an almighty man-made mess as it appears to us today but as HIS-STORY. That is the Good News. Look at the picture once again and see not just the Cross but more importantly the face of Christ.

Easter Mon 6^th April

Easter Poem – Daniel O’Leary

In Your Heart

Christ Rises in your heart when:
You wake in the morning with new hope;
You go to bed with a forgiving heart;
You truly grieve at another’s loss;
Your heart rejoices at another’s joy;
You keep your temper with a trying friend;
You refuse to nurse a niggling hurt;
You try again to beat your fears;
You face the routine of another day;
You try again to say , ‘I’m sorry’;
Your broken heart begins to mend;
You notice beauty you missed before;
You weep at the greed that causes war;
You delight when love comes round again;
You put together the broken pieces
And make with God a work of art;
You dare to love despite the grief;
You discover, within your winter,
A summer-time that never ends;
You hold the earth and all people
As you hold the hearts of those you love;
You trust in dawn at the darkest hour;
You accept your weakness and it makes you strong;
When you try to live in the present moment:
You know your freedom is truly won
And you dance on your grave like the Easter Son.