Jim Cogley’s Reflections: Tues 2 June – Mon 8 June 2026
Wood You Believe – Seminar: Healing of Childhood Trauma and Abuse
Born out of immense suffering in the Christian Brothers Order and arising from revelations of Sexual Abuse within their schools, a significant initiative has been launched at the birthplace of their founder Blessed Edmund Rice in Callan to create a Garden of Healing. This will be 15 large Stations of the Heart, sculptured in marble, that will reflect essential stages of the journey towards recovery.
A unique seminar will be offered on Sat 20th June where the models, originally made in wood, will be used to guide participants through a process of healing. It will also be an opportunity at this time of new beginnings for those taking part to refine the vision based on their own experience and create a legacy for the future.
This will be facilitated by Jim Cogley and Luba Rodzhuk from 10am to 4pm and bookings can be made to Jim Maher on 086-1276649. Early booking is advised.
Also a 5-day residential retreat will be given by Jim Cogley and Luba Rodzhuk in the Spiritan Retreat Centre in Navan June 22nd to 26th. This will be entitled Coming Home to Ourselves –The Healing Journey. As these events tend to fill up quickly early booking is advised on 046-9078973.
The first Wednesday of the month Healing Mass will be at 3pm this week in Ladys Island. All are welcome.
Tues 2nd June – Medjugorje
Recently a large group of around forty-five of us enjoyed a seven-day visit to Medjugorje. Quite a few were from our Lady’s Island while almost all the others had spiritual connections with the place. Apart from a Covid interlude these trips have been happening for the past ten years and been a very enriching and spiritually awakening experience for all concerned. A place of spiritual awakening is how I can best describe Medjugorje. It is undoubtedly a place where hearts are touched and lives are changed. Generally having been there, pilgrims become like the three wise men in the Nativity story and come home by a different route. While it is associated with ongoing apparitions of our Lady, it will be by its fruits, born in the lives of its pilgrims that it will ultimately be known.
Wed 3rd June – A Different Experience
For me travelling this year was very different from others and while I went with faith that all would be well, it was also with some trepidation. With an injured knee I was in pain and hobbling along plus a kidney stone that was acting up, so my spirit was willing, but my flesh was weak, and it could have been a most uncomfortable time. So, there was no climbing up Cross Mountain or Apparition Hill and there were a lot more taxi rides than usual. Yet for most and me personally it was by far the best trip ever. The Lord having slowed me down I was able to spend far more time in prayer and enjoy some remarkable and life changing encounters with people. Every day amazing things were happening usually in the form of coincidences that were truly God-incidences but then what is a co-incidence but a miracle where God chooses to remain anonymous!
Thurs 4th June – Discomfort or Suffering
One lesson I learned this year from carrying painful physical baggage was not to make it worse by engaging too much with it. Discomfort is one thing that we can’t avoid but it’s possible to greatly increase our level of suffering by becoming too identified with our ailments. We energize them when they take too much of our focus and they can draw us into the trap of self-pity, especially when we talk too much about them. Often while on the cross of pain we desperately want sympathy and there will be those who will offer it to us. What we may really need is someone to speak the truth that we don’t want to hear and say, ‘Come down from there and stop feeling sorry for yourself, we need the wood for the fire’! Anything that gets us too focused on ourselves, is lethal for our spiritual wellbeing and doesn’t allow us to rise above pain. When we get too wrapped up in ourselves, we make a very small parcel!
Fri 5th June – A Thin Place
One way Medjugorje is sometimes described is a ‘thin place’ where there is a close connection between two realities that we call this world and the next. More correctly it is a place where the essential oneness of all reality finds expression and something of Kingdom living can be experienced. We can look at the ease with which twenty thousand people attend daily events with absolutely no stewarding or policing. At times of adoration and during the daily apparitions a total silence descends on the place. This even extends to nature as I witnessed a few years ago on Apparition Hill. The dawn chorus was in full swing, cocks were crowing and dogs were barking. Yet at the time when the apparition was happening all noise gave way to a sacred stillness and resumed just as soon as the apparition concluded. A police presence seems almost irrelevant in the area as there is an innate sense of safety afforded by divine protection.
Sat 6th June – Protection
Divine protection seems to have been afforded to Medjugorje from the earliest days of the apparitions in 1981. Not long after the Bosnian War broke out towns and villages throughout the area being reduced to ruins. There were numerous squadrons that took off from nearby Mostar with orders to bomb Medjugorje but on each occasion the pilots reported that a thick cloud had covered the target and they had to return to base. The church of St James that had taken forty years to build would have been the main target and this is now by far the busiest church in the world. Unlikely many holy sites where commercialism extends to the shrine entrance, in Medjugorje it is obvious that most if not all of the traders have been touched by the message and so there isn’t the greed or heavy sell that is so obvious in other such places.
Sun 7th June – Invitation – The Call to Follow
Most of you will have heard of a world-famous painting by Holman Hunt of Christ, the Light of the World with a lantern in hand knocking on a door that represents the human heart. The latch is on the inside implying that he never forces himself but waits for us to respond by turning the knob. It’s not an easy piece to reproduce in wood so here is a piece something similar with Christ as the Good Shepherd, staff in hand, also knocking on the door that is our heart. The original painting has inspired countless thousands to give their lives to Christ and is still to be seen in Oxford.
A lady described a dream that found an echo in the painting. In it she heard someone knocking at her front door that in her heart she knew to be Christ. She did respond and opened the door but instead of inviting Christ in she began to engage him in conversation. First, she thanked him for calling but made the excuse that she couldn’t possibly invite him in because her house was in such a mess and with so much clutter there was hardly room for herself. He just replied, ‘It looks like you could do with some assistance.’ Then she said, ‘I also have a garden at the back that is so overgrown and untended that it reminds me of my family background, and I don’t want to go there myself quite apart from letting you see it’. ‘Well’, he said, ‘I also happen to be a good gardener and that is the work I like doing’. She still had a lot of ‘buts’. ‘I also have a room that is full of stuff back as far as my childhood. That room represents so many painful memories that I just locked away in there’. ‘I also am good at healing, that is my specialty,’ he gently replied. ‘How’s your bedroom?’ he probed? She blushed and said, ‘I hoped you wouldn’t ask that because I am in a relationship that is not healthy, but I don’t have the strength to break free and stand on my own two feet. I think it’s the fear of being on my own.’ ‘If you have me,’ he replied, ‘you will never be on your own again ever, and by the way, my presence will change the way you see everything and everyone.’
‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘I am really terrified to let you in because if I do there’s going to be very little room left for me.’ ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘it sounds like that with all the clutter and baggage you are carrying from your past and that relationship that is causing you so much guilt that there is very little room left for you anyway. What you might find is that if you take the risk of inviting me in things will certainly never be the same again, but you will also find that you never before had such freedom and so much space for to be truly yourself.’
She woke up still thinking about her conversation and it had such a deep impact on her that she realized that the invitation still held, and the Lord was still waiting for her decision.
When the Lord called Matthew, the tax collector, to follow him it was one of those moments of grace that could have so easily been lost. His house was far from being in order. He worked for the occupying Roman forces, he had betrayed his own downtrodden people, and daily ripped them off to make himself wealthy. He would have been regarded as ritually unclean because of his lifestyle and denied access to temple worship. Still, he responded to the Lord’s invitation, he got up and followed him and there is no evidence that he ever tried to change himself but after a very short time in the presence of Christ he was certainly a changed man. It is to him that we owe the first of the Gospels.
To all those onlookers, who like so many of us thought he should get his house in order first, Christ said, ‘I came to call not the virtuous but sinners to repentance’, in other words, those who are not right and who never can be by themselves. You don’t have to change in order to be loved, but you do need to open your heart and experience for yourself how the love of Christ can transform your life.
Mon 8th June – Good Tree – Good Fruit
For many years I turned down offers to go on trips to Medjugorje. Why I am not sure, but it may have been because of skepticism at the idea of Our Lady appearing daily and for over forty-fiveyears. Now the more I visit, the greater is my conviction that something truly supernatural is happening there and that it is the greatest centre for faith renewal in the Catholic Church. Just to see the sincerity of devotion from 20,000 gathering for Adoration most evenings is a sight to behold that brings newcomers to tears when they first witness it. How can one knock the phenomenon of 70,000 young people being drawn together for worship in the sweltering heat every August. Nor is it possible to criticise the many humanitarian organisations that have their origins there. Ultimately, as Christ says, a good tree can always be recognized by its fruit and that is evident in abundance.