Jim Cogley Reflections – Tues 18th March – Mon 24th March 2025

Tues March 18^th – Telling the Story

While reflecting recently on the story of Jesus curing the man born deaf who had a speech impediment, I was struck by both of those two realities, his inability to hear and his difficulty with speaking. As always going beneath the obvious I found myself considering the relationship between the two and how they fit into the wider context of telling one’s story. We are born deaf to much of our own story, where we come from in terms of ancestry, and so much of our early life and influences. What we can recall visually is small in relation to what has passed into our unconscious. Our ability to speak our truth and to express fully who we are is directly related to our past, and particularly those parts that act as impediments. These are like blockages in the well of our truth and wisdom that need to be unblocked in order to give us free access to the water of life.

Wed 19^th March – The Past in the Present

A man shared recently that nothing he had ever done in his life had ever worked out in spite of his best efforts. Life seemed very unfair to him, that no matter how hard he tried without ever being unkind to anyone, no amount of effort or goodwill ever paid dividends. With a dawning awareness he began to see how and why nothing could work out and it had nothing to do with effort. Into everything he had done he had carried a big suitcase of unresolved hurt and rejection. For some time, he would manage to keep the lid on this but inevitably it would open with the contents becoming more familiar with each opening. In terms of relationships not working he had been rejected and now this undermined every attempt to be in a long-term relationship. In work his issues with not being acknowledged by his father had carried through into his work where he always had issues with authority figures. It was his past that was ever present and never where he thought he had left it.

Thurs 20^th March – The importance of Awareness

Exploring Connections

To talk about one’s past is a way of understanding how it is still influencing our present. One of the earliest and most useful pieces of wisdom that I got from psychology was always look for connections. In other words, look at what is happening in your life right now that is causing you distress or discomfort and notice if there is a connection with something from the past. Often, we find that our present difficult emotional difficulties are not new but have been recurring over and over throughout our lives. Not only that but they seem to have our fingerprints. This is not a far our description because they have literally been laid down at an early stage of our lives and then life continues to stamp them into our experience. This happens because some part of our psyche has been wounded and is still seeking healing and integration. So it becomes like a painful lesson that keeps recurring until we learn what it is teaching us, and only then can we move on to something else.

Fri 21^st March – Look for Connections

Looking for connections between present reality and past experience may not be as simple as it sounds. Our ability to visually recall painful events from the past is quite limited especially if they were too traumatic or happened quite early. A time of separation from mother as a baby or being in hospital at two can only be remembered as a painful emotion, there can be no visual recall. Yet these can still keep arising as we journey through life. This is where reflection is such an important key to healing and integration. We don’t learn from experience but only from reflection on experience. So, when something is recurring, the memory of a past event may not be found in our memory but only in our body. It is the body that remembers what the mind was unable to register.

Sat 22^nd March – Unlived Life

A second piece of useful advice I found in psychology is not just to always look for connections but also to look for the unlived life. Our unlived life represents those parts of us that have never been acknowledged, integrated or allowed to belong in our lives. It is as if as we journey through life, parts of our soul/psyche got split off and disconnected. These painful realities have been abandoned and left buried in our unconscious. However, they have not been buried dead but very much alive. In fact, each is like a ball of energy that in its attempt to get our attention can also sabotage our lives. These parts are also our source of strength and energy for living and being creative once they are acknowledged and allowed to come home to where they can become part of the whole.

Sun 23^rd March – Moses

Today instead of sharing from the Gospel I will offer a reflection based on the first reading and against the backdrop of the life of Moses who is one of my favorite characters in the Old Testament. We are told that he was 120 when he died, and his life neatly divides into three periods of forty years. The first forty he spent trying to make himself somebody, the second forty God spent making him a nobody and in the last forty God showed what he could do with a nobody.

After being born to a Hebrew mother he was sent floating on the river Nile where he was rescued by the princess of Egypt who adopted him as her own son. In those years he had it good and wanted for nothing and was treated as a prince of Egypt. At the point when he was at the height of his powers and could have been very influential in improving the lot of his fellow countrymen who were enslaved you could say he blew it and became a victim of his own anger. He saw an Egyptian striking an Israelite and instead of giving a reprimand he murdered the guy and buried his body in the sand. Someone was watching from a distance and before the matter came to light, he had to flee for his life. They say that anyone who commits murder is condemned to live for the rest of their life with the fear of being murdered. Such was the lot of Moses and he found himself in the desert land of Midian.

It’s interesting that Midian means strife and so it would appear that he spent the next forty years in the strife we all experience when we try to run from our past. During that time he didn’t appear to prosper because when we meet him in today’s reading he is a shepherd who doesn’t even have his own flock. It’s the flock of his father-in-law Jethro that he is leading across the desert.

This is a very interesting detail, because all he can see for his 80 years until then is a wasted life that had begun so full of promise. However, what he is unable to see just then is that very shortly he will be leading the flock of his heavenly Father across that same desert and that the lessons he has learnt in his experience as a shepherd will prove invaluable in the difficult task that lies ahead.

While this sounds like the story of Moses from 3000 years ago it is still our story for today. We often find ourselves going through a really difficult time, call it a desert patch in our lives and wonder if it has any meaning or purpose or what it might be all about? The mystery is that when we do come through, we discover a new ability to bring others through what we have known. It’s as if we can hold the light for them because we have been there ourselves. One young man was having a particularly tough time, and he prayed, ‘Lord what is this all about?’ All he heard in the depths of his being was ‘My Son this is part of your training’.

I look back to 10 years ago when I suffered severe burnout and felt broken far beyond repair. I was in the grip of mental torture and convinced I was staring death in the face. Yet miraculously I did come through totally unscathed and from where I am now, I regard that as the most important and transformative experience of my life.

It was at this stage in Moses’ life, perhaps the point of greatest brokenness, looking at a wasted life, that God intervened and called him for his life’s work to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt. At that stage this man who at 40 was mighty in word and deed and full of ego and good intentions, was now 80, very aware of his weakness and suffering a stammer.

Amazingly it was at the point of greatest weakness when he had nothing going for him that God called him and used him to become the great deliverer of his people.

Mon 24^th March – Awareness

Without awareness, wherever we have come from is where we are going. This is a powerful but challenging truth. However, we need to think of awareness at two levels. First there is the superficial awareness of knowing details of when and where certain things happened. The deeper awareness is being aware of the emotional contents associated with painful realities. For example, we may know that we were adopted but have no awareness of how this may have impacted on our emotional life. We may know a father walked away when we were an infant and never consider how that may continue to affect us. What life will teach us is that nothing can be dismissed or left behind.  It will continue to show us in no uncertain terms that wherever we have come from and whatever we have left behind is never back there but always manifesting itself in the present.