Jim Cogley Reflections – Tues 25th March – Mon 31st March 2025
Tues 25th March – How We see Things
A central part of the Gospel teaching today is where Christ tells us to take the plank out of our own eye first before ever attempting to remove a splinter from someone else’s eye. In other words, don’t ever try and change someone else unless you are prepared to change yourself first. The piece shown was just a piece of firewood that a lady gave to me thinking that I might find a use for it. What I saw was a knot and the way the wood formed around it made it look like an eye. The knot that formed the eye had a number of cracks that to my mind made it a lot more interesting. So I doctored it up and what you see is the final result.
Wed 26th March – The lens by which we view reality
Then I began to reflect on how we see things and how our perception is so hugely distorted by the particular eyes by which we view reality. The Jewish Talmud teaches that we see things not as they are but as we are. We all suffer from distorted vision. None of us can see reality clearly. We have all noticed how some are so quick to take offence while others you could insult them to their face and they would just laugh it off. Some are always seeing hurt and taking offence even where there is none and would be very slow to admit that someone else might see the same situation very differently.
Thurs 27th March – Perceptions
Our sight may be formed in our mother’s womb but our perception is formed by our early experiences in life. If our earliest experience is one of rejection or abandonment, then that becomes the lens through which we view reality and so our adult experience will either be fear of rejection or experiencing it over and over. So here is the challenging truth, ‘unless we are aware of where we have come from in our early years, that is the place we are going’. That means there is something in us that creates our future along the lines of our past and particularly what we have turned a blind eye to back there will end up being right in front of us in the present. Here let me offer an example:
Fri 28th March – The ever-present past
A man shared recently that nothing he had ever done in his life had ever worked out in spite of all his best efforts. Life seemed very unfair, 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 and pretend there was nothing wrong, but inevitably it would open with the contents becoming more familiar with each opening. In terms of relationships not working he had been rejected by his mother and now this undermined every attempt to be in a long-term relationship. It was his granny who had reared him, and his neediness made him smother every woman he had met in adult life. Then in work his issues with not being loved 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.
Sat 29th March – Replicating our Past
How someone’s past creates their future seems quite mysterious and even unfair, but we know that it does. Past events, particularly when we choose to look in the opposite direction, perhaps because of fear, become what we see in the future and then our life is like driving a car, what we look at in front of us determines the direction our lives will go. It’s no wonder then that without awareness the place we are coming from is also the place we are going.
Sun 30th March – Prodigal Son 2
Perhaps you have heard the yarn about the return of the Prodigal Son and the night-long party that ensued. In the wee small hours, the father asked the prodigal what he ever did with all the money he went away with. “To be honest,” replied the prodigal, “I spent about a third of it on women, another third on booze and I must have squandered the rest!”
The Prodigal Son parable is regarded as the greatest short story ever told. The real star in the story is the father who of course represents God and is both masculine and feminine, father and mother. In the parable he had two boys, one was rebellious, the other was religious. But he loved each of them equally. And because they were his family, he refused to give up on them. While the younger brother was away sowing his wild oats and wallowing in sin, the older brother was at home working hard and wallowing in self-righteousness. One was guilty of the sins of the flesh which are the obvious ones while the other was guilty of the sins of the spirit. These are the not so obvious ones like judgement, self-righteousness, intolerance, lack of compassion and no forgiveness.
Only when the younger brother lost everything did he discover that living in submission to his father’s rule was the safest and most fulfilling place you could be. He had to go away before he discovered that. He had to go astray in order to find his way. Only when the older brother discovered the difference between rule-keeping and relationship was he able to understand his father’s words….’Everything I have is yours’. He was convinced that he had to earn his father’s love by always being a good boy, as so many good people go through their life thinking.
One son was a miserable rule-breaker while the other was an equally miserable rule-keeper, and we can ask which one do I identify with? The problem was that neither knew the father because they were so self-centered. But that changed when they discovered that he loved them in spite of their flaws. He loved them both not because of who they were but because of who he was. One thought he couldn’t be loved because of the mess he had made of his life while the other thought he couldn’t be loved unless he earned it.
This is where the story is also our story. Those who feel they have messed up and made lots of mistakes can live with a sense of unworthiness, that God could not possibly love me because of the wrong things I have done. Another type might think that having played it safe all my life and never putting a foot wrong and having kept all the rules why do I have such an emptiness deep inside? Surely God rewards goodness so why do I not feel his love.
It is possible to go to church, keep the commandments, live a good life and be a good person like the elder brother, and still not know God and his love for me. How can that happen is the big question? It boils down to a realization that God has loved me from the beginning and never stopped loving me when I was making my worst mistakes. The question could be asked, when did the father forgive his wayward son? Was it when the son decided to return or when? The answer is there was no time because in the father’s gaze of love there was no offence. In welcoming him back the father just wanted his son to know that love and so he killed the fatted calf, put shoes on his feet and a ring on his finger. All of these were to reassure his son of who he really was and who he always was even when he was facing in the wrong direction.
Without knowing God, we will have no anchor in our lives. We will find ourselves tossed to and fro by every wind of circumstance, temptation and emotion. If we do know our God then we will begin to understand ourselves, know whose we are, where we are supposed to be and what we are supposed to do.
Mon 31st March – Luck or Fate
Certain phrases, when something challenging crops up, we hear used again and again, like, ‘It’s just my luck’, ‘This always happens to me,’ or ‘If I kept ducks they would drown.’ Many feel they are not responsible for their own lives and instead are subject to outside mysterious forces that keep them always in victim mode. Carl Jung completely dismissed the concept of outside forces at work and replaced it with individual responsibility. He postulated FATE as being that force that always works towards wholeness and in doing so replicates in the present what was not allowed to belong or be felt in the past.