Jim Cogley: Reflections 21st – 27th May
Notices: Next week’s postings will be a few days late in arriving.
Three pieces of Wood You Believe wood-art are for sale on e-Bay with proceeds going to Mary’s Meals. Every €11 will translate into 100 meals for needy children, so I ask you to get involved so we can raise as much as we can. The auction closes this Wednesday. Access the e-Bay auction sites via the following links:
For anyone interested in a Wood You Believe Retreat that will focus on healing both at a personal and ancestral level there is one scheduled for July 16 to 19th in Slí an Chroí Retreat Centre in St Patrick’s College, Kiltegan. It is advisable to book early. Phone: 0596473650 or 0894690508.
May 21st – Reflections on an Oak Tree
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One of the places I have worked for nearly twenty years giving retreats and seminars, almost on a monthly basis, was the Emmaus Centre in Swords. In the grounds, opposite where I used to park, there is a truly magnificent oak tree and it felt as if I journeyed with it through the seasons and it never failed to inspire me. Before getting out of the car it always invited me to just stop and stare and on occasions, while driving there, I even looked forward to the encounter. An oak tree is four hundred years growing, four hundred years living, and another four hundred dying – a true source of wonder. This specimen could well have been there for close to a thousand years. All that time ago it was just a tiny acorn that somehow managed to hold its ground and continued growing in spite of all the winds of adversity that came against it.
Wed May 22nd – The Big Questions
The magnificent oak tree in Emmaus became the bearer of my projections as I allowed its seasons to reflect my own inner seasons. I sat staring at its bareness during the winter months when there was no evidence of life, often when I felt empty myself. Spring came and new life appeared with its annual surprise, life out of death, like Easter in nature. During summer it was breathtaking, full of leaves and laden with acorns. Then came autumn and the scene changed. The leaves began to fall and the ground became ankle deep in acorns. Walking among them my reflection became serious and began to focus on the three big questions that humanity has asked since the beginning of time; questions that all the great religions have tried to address; Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?
Thurs May 23rd – A Bundle of Divine Potential
God speaks through nature and in that oak tree I seemed to be finding answers to the age-old questions. If God was like the tree then we all come from Him and if we do, then we carry the same DNA as our parent. In fact each acorn has the potential to become like its parent and so each of us is born with divine potential. If the nature of our creator is Love then this is what lies at the heart of our creative potential. In essence this answers the question as to why we are here, it is to become more like the one we came from, we are here to develop our god-like potential for Love. The acorn in its essence, exists for one purpose only, to become like the one from whom it came – to replicate itself according to the original pattern.
Fri May 24th – What Are We About?
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Drawing a parallel with the human story, I decided to craft an acorn that reflected both realities. Inside the acorn is mounted a very beautiful heart made of tiger stone. As I often walked through layers and millions of acorns, I was forced to think how many of these will reach their potential and become an oak tree. The reality is very few. The majority will rot back into the ground and become fertilizer for another generation. In the history of humanity, we also have relatively few who willingly allowed the seed that they were to die, take root, bear fruit and leave a legacy that bears witness to the potential of what it means to be a fully realized human being. We can look on Christ as the figure who most closely resembles God’s idea of what a fully realized human being can be like. So in his essence he is both God and Man, the full-grown oak tree, and so at home in his humanity that his divinity shone through.
Sat May 25th – What Stymies Our Potential?
Inside the acorn shown earlier is a tiger stone heart shaped feature. It looks good but it is small, hard and closed. Many allow their hearts to become like this and refuse to open up and become vulnerable. There is something within us that knows when we are moving in the direction for which we were created. It’s like working with wood and knowing when we are going with the grain. When we engage in anything that is contrary to love we experience a sense of going against the grain. Not doing the loving thing, indulging in negativity and judgements, holding onto resentments, allowing bitterness to take root, not being honest with ourselves, or needing some outside substance to feel good about ourselves, all stymie our potential for love and literally turn our hearts to stone.
Sun May 26th – Trinity ‘24
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‘Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord?
The one with clean hands and a pure heart’.
But are there not many ways to climb?
The photo shows a lone climber making his or her way up a mountain. In a symbolic way it can represent the spiritual quest of our journey towards God.
A lady was struggling with her faith and didn’t really know if she believed in God anymore. She was typical of so many today for whom the cosy cradle of non-questioning acceptance has become too small and she now finds herself having fallen out into an uncomfortable place of questioning non-acceptance. She made remarks like ‘all this questioning is doing my head in’ and ‘I don’t know how I am ever going to figure out this God bit, and yet I know that it’s so important.’ ‘If you were a small pool of water on the seashore would you be able to figure out the ocean’ she was asked. ‘No of course not’ she replied. ‘Then is that precisely what you are trying to do with your little brain? Why not give your head a rest and trust that if God exists He is greater than all your doubts about Him. Just let go of your questioning and allow the tide to come in. It is within God’s remit to reveal, but it is not within your ability to figure Him out.’
Over the years I have genuinely trusted that the tide of God would flow into my life, and my experience is that it has and in ways beyond my wildest dreams. One thing I find to be happening is that my understanding of this God we believe in is getting bigger and bigger and can no longer be contained within much of my former beliefs. Let me share just two examples:
I grew up with a cosmology where heaven and earth, above and below, the spiritual and the material world were very separate. God was up there somewhere, and we were down here, and so He was remote and not terribly interested in human affairs. Our Celtic roots tells us that God is everywhere, in all things and yet above all things. This is what I now believe, that God is at the heart of all His creation and it is in the depths of creation that we find Him.
This had changed my understanding of sin away from the usual ‘hot potatoes’ of inappropriate actions to a refusal to go deep. Sin is to live a superficial life where we just skim the surface and are not prepared to look beneath. This is where we live in what the Buddhists call Maya or the world of illusion, the world of passing things, which we so cling to as if they were going to last. Our experience is that real life is never found on the surface but only by going deep. Jesus told his early disciples to pull out into the deep in order to find a big catch. Staying in the shallow waters of life is never the place to catch the big fish that are needed to nourish the human heart.
More and more I find that the Catholic God that I grew up with has become far too small for the God that I now know. Our Catholic God was so small that of all his creation for thousands of years only a small bunch of Catholics were going to end up being with him and all the rest was a waste of time and space. Worse still all the Non-Catholics were going to hell. Here let’s be real and ask, how could we ever have believed such nonsense, that salvation was reserved for 0.01% of the human population, and even out of them, there would be lots who wouldn’t make it either because they ate meat on Friday or missed Mass on a Sunday!
The curse of all religions has been self-righteousness. This is the belief that my way is the only way to come to God and it is this notion that has caused so much death and destruction that countless numbers have run in the opposite direction.
In a very real way, we badly need to allow our religious beliefs to catch up with our 21st century awareness. For far too long we held this concept of God as being ‘only for us’. Because of this thousands of lives have been lost and countless people have been martyred for not accepting and practicing the ‘true’ faith.
We badly need to expand our concept of God making the Divine Being large enough to reach by any route. Suppose any of us had been born into another faith culture should that have left us at a disadvantage in having a relationship with God? Surely only a very unjust God could do that to anyone.
Going back to the photo at the beginning of a lone climber making his/her way up the mountain. I think of a few lines from one of the psalms:
‘Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord’?
and the answer is given as:
‘The one with clean hands and a pure heart
who desires not worthless things,
Who does no wrong to his neighbour.’
But, can we not accept that there are as many ways as there are climbers?
Mon May 27th – What determines our Destiny?
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What our purpose for being here during our earthly experience is to learn the art of loving and so to grow in love. This is in essence our spiritual path, to be like the early Christians who were not remotely interested in following rules and regulations that had not yet been formulated, but to become more like Christ in thought, word and deed. The photo shows a bell made of yew and is based on John Dunne’s poem, For whom the bell tolls. Inside is a concealed measuring tape. One day the bell tolls for all of us, and then the big question will be, how are we going to measure up? In other words, how far have we advanced in the development of our potential to become like the one from whom we came and to whom we are now returning? As St John of the Cross says, ‘In the end of the day we will be judged on Love.’