Silence and listening

I have just come back from the Benedictine Monastery, 6 miles up the Hilltown road from my house. Not everyone in the world has sage Benedictines living so close at hand. It is a privilege indeed to be able to call in and listen to a form of wisdom that emerges from the depths of

A reflection for Holy Saturday

Baltimore in the state of Maryland is a special American city to me. My wife comes from there. It shares it’s name with a small Irish town outside Cork and in some ways it bears an uncanny, if very American, likeness to Belfast. Post-Industrial, blue collar, serious about sports and home to very real poverty

Being converted (again) …

“Faith is not the clinging to a shrine, but an endless pilgrimage of the heart…” So said the great philosopher, theologian and activist, Rabbi Abraham Heschel. Last week I sat in a room in An Cuan, our centre on the Irish border, full of Muslim faith leaders in Ireland, a bunch of Catholics made up

India: a glimpse of beauty

We drove through bush land, a tiger reserve, through acres of teak trees, then eucalyptus trees, then bushes concealing the tigers of our imaginations. A mother elephant swayed while chewing grass, waving it’s trunk around and unconsciously sheltering her young infant at her side. In the towns and cities meanwhile there is busy-ness, hustle bustle,

Fr Gerry Reynolds: Giving God a voice

In November 2015 a beautiful man passed away. Father Gerry Reynolds was a Redemptorist Catholic priest who had been living and working in the Falls Road area of Belfast since 1983. Those were days of car bombs, ambushes, security checks and a conflict that afflicted Northern Ireland like an unshakeable virus. Into that context of