Jim Cogley’s Reflections: Tues 7th April – Mon 13th April 2026
An Event Not to be Missed
A soulful evening of song and story will be given by one of Ireland’s best known opera singers Celine Byrne on Friday 17th April at 7.30pm in the Edmund Rice Healing and Heritage Centre in Callan. Spaces are limited so early booking is recommended to Jim Maher on 086-1276649. Tickets cost €20.
7/4/26 – Do not Cling
A simple truth from nature points to a profound reality. Two birds can only fly together if they are free of each other. Tie those birds together and although they have four wings, they will be unable to fly. The message of Christ to Mary Magdelene, when overjoyed at seeing him alive, she wanted to reach out to hug and embrace, was, do not cling to me for I have not yet ascended. In life if we are possessive and cling to someone too much, we call it control. This is a factor, more than anything else, that can undermine any relationship. When someone passes over to the other side, for some reason, we feel justified in trying to hold onto them. In the early days of the grief process that may be understandable; long term while it may hold the soul back from its journey, it will certainly hold us back from ours. To remain in a clinging mode is to condemn ourselves to isolation and loneliness. The way to enter into communion with the one who is departed is to avoid clinging and release them to the light. Death breaks an earthly tie but love survives when grief has passed because love can never die. The grief process is not about saying farewell but it is about releasing and giving freedom.
8/4/26 – Companionship on the Journey
In the well-known story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus after Jesus’ death, the importance of there being two of them cannot be overstated. Jerusalem represented all their hopes dreams and expectations but just now hope was hopeless; their dreams had become nightmares, and their faces were twisted with grief. They were now going in the opposite direction away from Jerusalem. As they walked along together, they were telling the story of what had happened to Jesus and trying desperately to make sense of it all. Jesus joins them as the third party and places everything in the context of a bigger story where he shows them that it was necessary that the Christ would suffer in order to enter into his Glory. Remaining too isolated and thinking we can figure something out on our own rarely ever works. We can never be objective to our own subjective reality. It is only in opening up to a significant another that the Spirit of Jesus becomes present as that third party offering us the awareness or wisdom that we need at that time.
9/4/26 – Jesus showed them his Hands and his Feet
A significant detail of the Resurrection accounts is that when the Risen Jesus appears to his disciples he still has the wounds that killed him. One might think that they should have disappeared during his process of transformation. Yet they remained to the point of being part of his new identity as the Crucified Christ. It was these very wounds that when touched by his fearful disciples that dispelled doubt from their hearts and reawakened their faith. From being sources of death, they had become sources of life. In life we all carry wounds, but we carry them in different ways. The ones we don’t or won’t deal with we continue to inflict on others. It’s hurting people that hurt others. Then there are those who have transformed their wounds and found healing. Having come out the other side they are now are able to use the wounds of their experience to bring healing to others.
In the presence of someone who has suffered there is no judgment.
10/4/26- Healing of Memories
Our memories are so much part of who we are. Some are pleasant while others are far from being so. These are the ones we try to repress and deny yet the more we do so the more they come back to haunt us. The Resurrection accounts show this happening quite clearly. After a night of fishing the disciples catch nothing. The Risen Jesus stands on the shore and tells them to try again and when they do the nets fill up. This awakens the positive memories of when they were first called to be disciples, also by the Sea of Galilee. The next memory is not so pleasant, for Peter at least. The sight of a charcoal fire was definitely going to bring him back to the night of Jesus’ arrest. Earlier in the day he had protested undying loyalty, but Jesus had told him that before the cock would crow he would have denied him three times. Standing beside a charcoal fire, and afraid of being found guilty by association, he swore three times on oath that he didn’t know Christ. Suddenly he was now being confronted by the memory of his betrayal, but this time it was for healing.
Healing is not pretending that the hurt never happened, but it is about coming to the place where it no longer affects us.
11/4/26 – No Eyes For Easter
A common feature of the Resurrection accounts is the failure of the disciples to recognize the Risen Lord when he appears to them. Even Mary Magdalene who was his closest companion and who had always accompanied him on his travels failed to recognize him at the tomb on the Easter morning and thought he was the gardener. This seems strange since many of them had already heard reports that he had risen. Surely it was, not that their sight was bad, or that Jesus had changed beyond recognition. For to understand what is happening here we need to draw on our own experience. There is physical seeing with the eyes but there is also an emotional seeing with the heart. When our hearts are wounded it has the effect of distorting the way we see with our eyes. Like those wounded disciples we can be so focused on death that we are unable to see life; we can be so trapped in our inner darkness that the light cannot penetrate. In all the resurrection accounts Christ led his disciples through a process of healing before their eyes were opened and they could see the reality of his resurrected self.
12/4/26 – Locked Doors
In today’s Gospel we see the disciples gathered in a locked room. The recent violence of what we now call Holy Week had made them security conscious. They had become runaways from a society that they feared as hostile, so they lock themselves away in what they hoped was a safe house. What were they doing as they whiled their time away? This we are not told but it is safe to suppose that they were talking and not about the weather, but about recent happenings, where their hopes had been shattered and their dreams had become one long nightmare. Just imagine the scene, physical doors tightly closed but doors of hearts slowly beginning to open as they share their feelings with each other. As those heart doors swing open the Risen Jesus enters with his gift of peace.
In that Gospel today you will notice that Thomas, the one who had isolated himself, had the greatest difficulty in coming to believe in the Risen Jesus which suggests quite strongly that community but not isolation is the most fertile soil for faith to come alive and to grow. Thomas was also known as the Twin, whether his twin was alive or not we don’t know but what we do know from medical research is that as many as one in six of us begin our journey into this world with another. Twin and multiple conceptions are much more common than earlier thought and we now also know that a loss of a twin at any stage has profound psychological complications, it’s a burden that someone can carry right through life.
That piece of scripture contains some wonderful teaching on how to come to terms with the bigger issues of life. The big danger is that we simply don’t talk, that we close down and lock ourselves away in isolation. In so many families and individual lives there is a huge legacy of unresolved issues. They talk about everything except what needs to be talked about. Its like the old story of the elephant in the living room that everybody knows is there but nobody mentions for fear of others getting upset. It’s the things we don’t talk about that act as a barrier and sooner rather than later we find ourselves isolated with nothing to talk about. Even the small talk seems to run dry. There are so many families where communication is almost non-existent because somewhere back along the generational line something big was swept under the carpet and not addressed. Isolation is the inevitable legacy of not addressing issues as they arise and so we lose the vital art of communication.
I remember some years years ago being over in Sheffield giving a retreat to the National Conference of bishops, priests and deacons in the UK. There were about seventy taking part. The issue of isolation came up quite a lot and why so many priests live isolated lives and often find themselves struggling like Thomas with deep faith issues. So many of the older men were born just before, during, or after the war years. I sensed a lot of hurt in their lives going back to those early years and basically gave them permission to tell their personal story. It was quite extraordinary the amount of grief they had inherited from the earlier generation who would have been involved in WW1. One man had five of his uncles killed within two days at the Battle of the Somme on just his mothers side alone but had never made any connection between that and why he had been weighted down with a terrible burden of grief all his life.
So many of them told stories of separation from their parents when they had to be evacuated to escape the bombings. For them issues of abandonment and rejection were huge and had continued throughout their lives. Others spoke of the fear and terror they experienced when the air raid sirens went off. Being bundled out of their beds and then the bombs starting to explode. Coming out of the shelters to find that houses of friends, neighbours and relatives had been reduced to a heap of rubble. Huge gaps had suddenly appeared in what had previously been a continuous line of houses. For others it was living in constant fear that a telegram would arrive to signal that their father had been killed in action. Something I had never heard expressed before was the fear of an invasion when the tide was turning in favour of the Germans and how stories of the horrors of the concentration camps had struck terror in the hearts of the British people as they contemplated their fate should they lose.
All these things from so many years ago, why bother with them now you might ask? Yes, they belong to the past provided it has been dealt with. If not, the past is not where we think we have left it. Instead it is right where we are and can be making our life a misery in the here and now. These priests and deacons were generally good men, sincere and devout. They had come a long way on their spiritual journey but what they were discovering was that much of their humanity had been left behind and was desperately trying to catch up. The real transformations of the week were not spiritual conversions, that had happened years ago. The real tears were being shed around untold stories and issues from the past that they never had the opportunity to express before. Often in their family traumas had been buried and not spoken about.
In seminary training there was no understanding of how your past could influence your present. There was little or no opportunity to ever tell your human story, it was believed that in order to be a good priest you said your prayers and kept the rules. Neither was there any understanding whatsoever of the reality that we are all products both of our personal past and of our ancestral past. It was as if all that could be swept under the carpet and the more you prayed the more it stayed locked away. Many of those men were saying that their spiritual life had become stagnant and wondered why they were unable to move forward. The deeper truth that emerged as the week progressed was that the truly spiritual journey is also the human journey and ultimately you cannot ever become spiritual unless you are also prepared to embrace all that it means to human as well. Or in the wisdom of St Irenaus from the early church, The glory of God is man and woman fully alive and the fully human, fully alive person is the one that gives most glory to God.
13/4/26 – Don’t look among the dead for the one who is alive.
There is a rather touching story from the East that has much to say about how we cope with grief and loss. The country was at war and a man lived with his son in a village. While the father was away on his travels the village was bombed and most of the wooden houses caught fire. He returned to find his house destroyed and the charred remains of a body that he believed to be that of his son close by. Heartbroken he had those remains properly cremated and placed in an ornate urn. This he carried with him night and day never letting it out of his sight since it was now his only connection with the son that he loved.
In reality the son was not dead but after the bombing had suffered memory loss and was cared for over several years before he could recall who he was and where he had come from. Returning to the village it was now very different and his father had rebuilt his house on the original site. Knocking on the door the old man enquired who is was. ‘I am your son’ he replied. ‘Go away’, the man said, ‘for the past three years I have had the ashes of my son beside me and now you say you are my son’. ‘I am still your son, please let me in.’ ‘No’ came the reply, ‘you are only an imposter, just be off with you’. We don’t know if the story ended there but it points to the fact that we can be so focused on death that we are unable to recognize the life that is knocking on our door.