Jim Cogley’s Reflections: Tues 30th June – Mon 6th July 2026

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There will be a Healing Mass this coming Wednesday July 1^st at 3pm in Our Lady’s Island

Tues 30^th June – Traveller Culture

A lady of traveller background arrived at my door and said, ‘I am not here looking for money, but I am here to ask you to teach me how to pray. I am trying my best, but it doesn’t seem to be working because I can’t feel any sense of connection with God whatsoever. I go to holy places, and I attend Mass, I say the prayers, but it feels totally empty’. I then asked if she felt any sense of connection with herself and she said, ‘I don’t think that I ever have.’ I explained to her that having that would be the starting point for feeling connected to Spirit and that it would be useful to talk about her life’s story and where she was coming from. Like so many she felt fearful about doing this and that it would be opening up a huge can of worms that all her life she had been trying to keep the lid tightly closed. Like so many she thought that she could find connection with God and bypass herself.

Wed 1^st July – Keeping the Lid in place

The traveller lady was typical of most of us who have grown up in a society where keeping the lid of things was the norm. Emotional issues were not talked about, and suppression and denial of one’s feelings was almost considered a virtue. A sister of ninety after listening to a talk on Honouring how we feel, remarked how difficult she found this since from her early years she had been taught not to have emotions and never allow herself to feel. This sounded like the perfect formula for having a religion of the head but with no spirituality of the heart. Herein lies the curse of external religious practice that is divorced from the wellsprings of the heart. So many who have faithfully gone through the motions of religious observance all their lives have never had any direct experience of the numinous (something having a strong spiritual, mysterious, or awe-inspiring quality). So, they feel that their faith has no foundation and as a consequence are walking away from a practice with a sense of guilt that they have failed, while in fact it has failed them.

Thurs 2^nd July – Unexamined Beliefs

Opening up about her personal story the traveller lady invited me into the murky world of traveller culture and revealed unsavoury elements that would not generally be known. This would be no different from settled culture with its our own taboos and unexamined beliefs that we still like to cling to in defiance of common sense. In her case, she was part of a family of eleven who in her early years were extremely poor and slept under tents. Her father was violent towards his wife, and she left him and the family and went off to the UK with another man. They were now abandoned and left at the mercy of an angry alcoholic father who was totally unable to cope. He drank his dole money with no regard for his children who quite often went to bed hungry. This neglect she claimed is not unusual in the travelling community to this day where the only way men deal with how they feel is by drinking themselves into oblivion.

Fri 3^rd July – Behaviour related to Background

With cramped conditions with twelve in a tent and only bodies for warmth it was inevitable that sexual abuse would be rampant. However, this would never be acknowledged with very few able to speak about it even to this day. It was her belief that with so much buried of a sexual nature it was contributing largely to later dysfunctional behaviour. This included a high rate of alcoholism in the male population and a disproportionate level of suicide that is more than four times the norm. The levels of anger, the number of feuds, the never-ending violence, she felt were also related, plus a restlessness and unease that was obvious in the travelling population in general. The abusive practice of teenage marriages, even before the legal limit, was leaving many trapped in misery since the policy of separating if a relationship wasn’t working was completely frowned on. Allied to this was the practice of parents arranging partners for their children that is still practiced and only slowly dying out.

Sat 4^th July – Unjust and Limiting Beliefs

Another dark aspect of traveller culture not well known was, and still is, the way when a mother leaves her family, no consideration is taken as to why she had to do so, but this impinges unfairly on her daughters in a negative manner with the attitude of ‘like filly like foal’. They are not afforded the respect that is their due because of their mother’s actions. Another prevailing attitude is that if someone loses a partner quite young they are not entitled to marry again or if a marriage has not worked out neither partner is entitled to have another relationship. This false belief that marriage is for eternity and not just for life is only slowly changing in the wider community with the understanding that the strength of the first marriage can be honoured in the freedom to enter into a second relationship.

Sun 5^th July – The God I Believe In

A question well worth asking for all of us is, ‘What kind of God do I believe in?’ It’s such an important question because the answer will influence every aspect of our lives. Many of us may have gone through an agnostic or atheistic phase in earlier years. In the middle of that there is a lot of loneliness, desolation, lack of meaning and life having no purpose. If the goal of life is the grave, then whatever we do in life or with our lives doesn’t make much difference and all we are left with is a feeling of emptiness and futility.

Most of us will have experienced a Catholic upbringing where the God of fear and punishment was far more to the fore than the God of love. This was the God the vast majority believed in, perhaps a just but a punishing God who had a great memory for wrongdoing. Even if you repented and admitted your sins He may have forgiven but He didn’t forget and once you blotted your copybook it could never be erased. This wasn’t the God of the second chance, and a saint was someone who never went astray from day one and not someone like the prodigal son who had kicked the traces and strayed far from the beaten path.

This image of God was quite dangerous and contributed to untold suffering. If God was punishing, then society could be punishing. Parents felt they had a divine right to punish their children as a way of discipline. Teachers felt justified to  beat the daylights out of their pupils. Girls who had unplanned pregnancies could be sent to Magdalene homes for life and cruelly be forced to have their babies adopted. Compassion was not a word that we could associate with that time in society when the majority believed in a God of punishment.

Coming out of that time many believed in a God whose expectations to be perfect were so high and whose opinion of them was so low that they always felt unworthy and never good enough, as if they were always living under the divine frown. No wonder so many unfortunates went to their graves in fear with no sense of a joyful homecoming, of going home to someone who had always loved them and whom they had always loved. To carry ‘Catholic guilt’ across the threshold was the lot of so many who were convinced that only a time of punishment in Purgatory was awaiting them on the other side.

It feels tragic and unbelievable that we moved so far away from the image of God as presented by Christ who told us explicitly to call God ‘Our Father’. Living with this image of God as Father has such extraordinary implications:

Would any truly loving father want his children to be more aware of their mistakes and shortcomings than of His love for them?

Would any loving Father want their child’s homecoming to be anything other than a beautiful and joyous reunion?

Would a loving father not delight in generously pouring out his gifts upon his children and seeing them happy and contented?

Would a loving father see any wrong in his children even if they had a lot to learn and were a bit wayward at times?

Would a loving father be happy with seeing his children always feeling they were falling short having to try harder to earn His love?

Do you think that a loving father would want to see his children stressed out of their minds, always laboured and overburdened with the pressures of life and He not wanting to help?

Remember that this was the image of God presented by Christ in the Gospel of today: ‘Come to me all you who are laboured and overburdened and I will give you rest. Accept my lordship in your life and learn from me for I am meek and humble in heart’. For so many that is a far cry from the image of the God we grew up with.

Mon 6^th July – The Pain of Unspoken Truth

With so much pain, rejection, abandonment, abuse in that traveller lady’s early life was it any wonder that she would have difficulty praying? For a long time, we erroneously believed that we could bypass how we feel when it came to praying. Not so. Such a story would inevitably keep her a prisoner of her past, deny her hope for the future and condemn her to an existence rather than having a life. For a long time, we thought we could close a door on our past and it would conveniently disappear. Now we know that far from disappearing and remaining quiet it returns, apparently to haunt us, but perhaps more to seek integration and to find its rightful place in our lives. One thing for sure is that reality is something we can never escape from, it can only be denied for a time, but only with acceptance comes transformation.