Jim Cogley Reflections – Tues 30 July – Mon 5 Aug 2024

Information: For web-cam live services and recordings – ourladysisland.ie

Weekday Masses are at 10am and Sundays at 11am

Website for ordering books, psychotherapy and other details – jimcogley.com

Email: frjimcogley@gmail.comfor correspondence

For anyone wishing to bring a group or organize a bus for our annual pilgrimage to Our Lady’s Island a booking form can be requested on 087-7569638. Details of Pilgrimage can be found on ourladysisland.ie

Tue 30th July – To Compare is to Despair

Envy is really the temptation to compare. In today’s culture it’s very difficult to avoid and not want to be someone other than who we are. This is presented as the secret to happiness as it presents us with images of those who are better looking, more talented, better educated and better off. All we need to do is walk out on ourselves. Comparisons are odious and envy is dangerous because it leads to despair. We become trapped by our false perceptions of others ‘perfect’ lives and so denigrate and devalue ourselves. To fantasise about another and what they have, and how gifted they are, leaves us totally devaluing our own life. Real life can never compete with a perception, and so it leads us down a spiritual dead end. To compare is ultimately to despair.

Wed 31^st July – The Advertising Myth

Advertising is the art of being able to present a completely new product as if it’s something we have longed for all our lives and show us images of people who having acquired it are now blissfully happy. So, we buy into the myth that we are intrinsically unhappy and need this ‘something more’ before we can be satisfied. These comparisons are unhealthy because they make us dissatisfied with who we are and lead us away from our true self. In the not so distant past, Envy was classed as one of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ and for good reason, because it attacks our core centre, the part that is made in the Divine likeness. To want to be someone whom we are not is a sure way of becoming unhappy with who we are. There is a certain futility in envy because if God made each of us unique why would we want to give him back a copy! Who we are is God’s gift to us and who we choose to become is our gift to Him.

Thurs 1^st Aug – Vocation – Called to Be Me

It is possible to read the lives of the saints and other great people and think that I need to become more like them, to become more generous, kind and loving, more patient and so on. While it’s good to admire greatness and emulate them in some way, to want to become like them is to deny the person that God has created. The fundamental vocation and the essence of holiness is to be my own unique self, not fashioned in the image of anyone, but my Creator. If at some deep level we don’t feel ‘good enough’ we will likely find someone who appears to be and see in him or her everything we seem to be missing. While we may appear to idealise them, at another level they anger us, because we see in them all the potential we have disowned in ourselves.

Fri 2^nd August – Who do you want to become?

There is a verse in Scripture that says, ‘Do not conform to the expectations of this world but be transformed’. Envy has to be one of the biggest obstacles to transformation, and an essential component of envy is conformity. When beginning work on the piece of bog oak sculpture shown above it was very rough and unattractive. My initial thought was, what can I make out of this? Slowly the realisation dawned that this was a very disrespectful question. This piece, as unattractive as it was in its raw state, had once been part of a magnificent oak tree. For 5000 years it had survived in a bog. It had its own magnificence, so who was I to ask, ‘What can I make out of you?’ The question I should have been asking is, ‘What would you like to become?’ From approaching the piece with this new thinking and respect, the piece evolved into a Bird of Paradise on one side and a dinosaur on the other. By nor forcing it to conform to my expectations I was free to allow a transformation process to take place.

Sat 3^rd Aug – Be Transformed

While few parents would admit it, many want their child to conform to their expectations. They have a mental picture of how they would like the child to turn out and unfortunately this is often to be something they were not, but always wanted to be. Such children live with these unconscious expectations and find themselves subtly going along with them. Underneath there will be deep anger but this is seldom acknowledged. Our education system, until recent times, was not about cultivating originality, but much more about conforming to the system, and being what it required you to be, and receiving academic rewards for doing so. Traditional religious practice was devoid of transformation because it was largely about conformity. Creativity that was an expression of individuality was often frowned on and conformity to the system of rules and regulation was erroneously presented as the path to Salvation.

Sun 4^th Aug – Our Deepest Longings

‘I am the true bread, the bread of God that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. Don’t just look for the bread that cannot last but instead work for the food that endures to eternal life’. I see today’s Gospel as being all about longing for that which satisfies and being aware of that which doesn’t – not working for that which fades, but more for that which has a spiritual value.

In every human being there is a universal thirst or longing for something. All the leading psychologists of our age would subscribe to this view but would differ in what we truly long for. Freud said that the deepest longing of the human heart was for pleasure. Adler who was one of his disciples disagreed and said that it was for power. Victor Frankl, the man who survived the Holocaust, and developed a system of psychiatry called Logotherapy, said that our deepest desire is for meaning. Rollo May, who was not as well- known as the others, said that the most intense longing of our souls is for love. He was probably the one closest to Christ who saw more deeply into the human condition than anyone, and he would say that the supreme longing of the human heart is to be right with God, and only in being right with Him can we feel truly loved. Our hearts were made by God and for God and as St Augustine said, ‘They remain restless until they find their home in Him’.

Being right with God alone satisfies the soul. In the Bible this is called righteousness. Not fame, not money, not success, not pleasure, not someone special, not possessions and not power. All of these eventually turn out to be cul-de-sacs, taking us away from the direction of the one who alone can satisfy.

This deep longing in our hearts is often not obvious because we try to suppress it, we keep a lid on it, so that it doesn’t come to the fore. It might conflict with our other desires to do what we want and in the manner that we want, in other words to live life on our terms.

Some of you will be familiar with the name Malcolm Muggeridge who was a celebrated British author and broadcaster. He said that for much of his life he sensed that if he ever allowed the deepest longing of his heart to surface, he would have to give up so much of his old way of life. And so, for many years he lived with that conflict. Knowing that he wasn’t being true to his best self and yet not being ready to give in. It took a major crisis where things began to fall apart for him to eventually acknowledge that the mess of his life was entirely of his own making and this eventually led him to him accepting his need of a higher power and surrendering his life to Christ. That’s the age old story and not that much different for any of us.

Looking back over his years of conflict he saw his ‘beautiful’ life like being in an arid desert and he wrote:

‘What strikes me most forcibly about my life is that what seemed at the time to be most significant and seductive seems now most futile and absurd. For example, success in all its various guises, being known and being praised, enjoying celebrity status, ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money and travelling to exotic locations. In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy. It was like licking the earth while still starving for what is real. He concluded with the truth that had taken him so long to discover that ‘only Christ satisfies.’

Each of our souls has the stamp of Christ upon them. It’s his will and purpose that is written into the very structure of our being. As one 82 year-old man, who had given his life to Christ said, ‘I knew that at last, I had found the path I had been looking for all my life, for from the moment I put my feet on it I was no longer fighting with myself.’ It’s when we open our hearts to Christ that our souls begin to leap with joy because they recognise the master’s voice and the one who alone can satisfy our deepest yearning.

Mon 5^th Aug – Self-Acceptance and Envy

How does one break free from the trap that is Envy? Very often it is a serious blind spot and we may be totally unaware of it. Serious comparisons are made at a very unconscious level. Allowing myself to become aware of what is happening can be a great help, and the more awareness dawns the more I can avoid slipping into the trap. Learning to identify and being grateful for my own unique gifts and talents, rather than seeing them mirrored in others, can also be a great help. By becoming more aware of the painful lot of others and allowing myself to enter into their pain can greatly reduce my level of self-preoccupation. More than anything else that can release us from the snare of envy is a profound and ongoing commitment to self-acceptance. It is this acceptance of myself as I am with all the different layers of background, childhood, emotions, appearance and sexuality that helps me appreciate that when the good Lord made me he wasn’t just practicing and in fact he did a very good job! Without this acceptance on my part, the experience of Divine acceptance remains very poor and the wonder of my being remains shrouded in mystery.