I Am Said I (Huruma)

Sunset in the dust-rise Of the cattle coming slow Across the desert plain Before the herdsman With his son and mother Bound From the stream returning Past the silence of the grinding mill Turned off A whisper in the air To the fire Those dotted fires Spread out and rising To the falling of the night Pink to purple haze Then dark… This evokes a longing It  has wedded me My heart to them forever At home and quiet This unified motion of grace The smile upon their face

She leaned forward From the back seat To speak of the singular Beauty of the sky Her right hand resting On my left shoulder Our eyes meeting In the mirror For the last time For the last time We walked the Prom And never said goodbye Or anything significant As a last saying That I might cling to As some kind of assurance

Moxie Brend Van Deurzen and I met for the first time in a hostel in Los Arcos – about 120km into our 800km pilgrim walk to Santiago de Compostella in Spain – on a very wet Saturday. We became kindred souls in the course of the journey. Over a year later he decided to come to see me and to see Dublin. As happens with the young, as happened on the Camino, as was happening now – he drew me out of myself, taking me to places, to experiences that are new. Temple Bar is one of the places he was keen to see so we went there in search of the TradFest, which began on January 22. We came across Moxie, a young band of students from Limerick and Sligo, who play traditional Irish music with a contemporary edge. A wonderful sound! There’s a freshness, a vibrancy in the way young people play music because they have not yet become cautious and what they create is a very joyful blend of the old in the new, the traditional in the present. It strikes me that life in the Spirit is very mu...

The stillness of a staring horse  Residue of Autumn rust On near-bare trees November mourners Gaze at the opposite Shore of the quiet lake Pondering what was witnessed There by God's creation The lonely ending A wounded beautiful life Pushed beyond the edge Of no return Into the deep emptiness Denied the right to love And see and touch To hear and hold  His one Beloved Child And in the cold Dark stillness of the dawn We are left with unanswerable  Questions, unspeakable Loss But this I know That God is close To the broken hearted And always sends his Angel To attend to the Gethsemane Of our lives

The warm curve Of brown ploughed Soil in Spring Conceals the way Of its coming Into being Sharp shining steel Incisive cuts Sod upturned exposed To air and rain And seed and grain The need of it The way of all ploughing The ploughing of the heart The pain of it And oh the lovely Harvest

In the film 'The Color Purple' two young women are walking through a field of purple flowers and one says to the other that it must make God mad when we pass the colour purple by with taking notice of it. Jesus and the mystics call us to be attentive to the reality of nature around us - to admire it, its Creator and to learn lessons for life by observing it. Think of the flowers of the field...the birds of the air...the seed planted in the earth...the tiny mustard seed that produces a shrub that gives shelter.  In the mystery of creation we are called to discover the wisdom of the Gospel in which we discover the greatness of the little, strength for the weak, light out of darkness, life out of death, relevance for the irrelevant. The hope of the tree that is cut. Wood has hope - when it's cut it grows green again! Galapo, Tanzania, where I worked for a few years, is situated on the side of a mountain overlooking a vast plain below. It is a beautiful and f...

Susan Boyle sings a song specially written for her - "Who I Was Born To Be" - the central line being "I am who I was born to be..." Everyone remembers her arrival on the stage of Britain's Got Talent . She might have said silently to the audience, as John the Baptist said to his audience, "I am not who you think I am..." because what the audience was thinking was that she was nothing. They wrote her off, sneered at the sight of her ever before she started to sing. There was confusion about John the Baptist's identity from the beginning, about who he was. The expectation among his relatives at his birth was that he would be named after his father according to tradition but both his parents knew that God had another name and identity in store for him. He would be John and not Zechariah. When he emerged into public ministry as a man there was confusion again. He was so impressive, so inspiring that the people thought he must be ...

Jesus and his disciples left for the villages round Caesarea Philippi. On the way he put this question to his disciples, ‘Who do people say I am?’ And they told him. ‘John the Baptist,’ they said ‘others Elijah; others again, one of the prophets.’ ‘But you,’ he asked ‘who do you say I am?’ Peter spoke up and said to him, ‘You are the Christ.’ (Mark 8:27-35 Sunday 24) Today,  the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows I celebrated the funeral Mass and burial of Nora, a 77 year old parishioner whom I had never met. Before coming to the parish all my funerals were people I knew well but now it's different and I have to go looking for information, not for me to eulogize but to get a sense of who is this person who has been created in the image of God; the person who has lived this particular life. I didn't get much information in the normal sense because every time someone began to speak of Nora they cried. Coming away after two hours with her husband and eldest grandson ...

John 6:1-15 The Feeding... It's worth paying attention to the movements & gestures of Jesus. What He does is as significant as what He says. His actions speak. At the beginning of Matthew 5 leading into the Sermon on the Mount Jesus goes up on to the hill, sits down and gathers the disciples to himself. Then He begins to speak. The hill or mountain is the sacred place where God reveals Himself; the seated position for teaching ("ex cathedra") signifies that the teaching is of central importance; the gathering of the disciples around Him indicates that they have been called out of the crowd for a particular relationship of intimacy with Jesus who is the centre of their attention, their lives. A similar movement takes place at the beginning of John 6 where Jesus presents himself as the new Passover, bread for the hunger of humanity. The miracle of the loaves and fish, the rejection of earthly power, the escape to the solitude of the hills, the waling ...

Jogging Around the Swamp  (Sunday 6 of Easter) Everyone wants to be picked, chosen by someone for something. We want to be included and not excluded. A small child wants to be picked to share in a game, another wants to be picked to play in a team and when we are picked we want to show that we have credibility, that we can play the game well. I started secondary school in the old Bish in Nuns Island. It was surrounded by fine black wrought iron railings with spikes on top. Mr. Dunleavy was teaching us volleyball in the yard and picked me to serve. So I served. Off to the right went the ball, landing on a spike and it burst! He gave me another one and to my horror off it went again in the direction of the railings, landed on a spike and burst! Such humiliation. I was dismissed with disdain. A hopeless case.  It was  beyond me to  master a game that involved a ball and was relieved when relegated to jogging around the Swamp in the Claddagh. Much of human pi...

I struggle from time to time with self-doubt, self esteem. Dissatisfied with myself, striving to be better. And there are moments of grace when this struggle ceases. I love sitting in the empty church here in Shankill - gazing at the tabernacle, connecting with Jesus who is hidden behind the golden door. In another church, another time while gazing at the tabernacle I got a lovely sense of contentment with who I am. As if God were saying to me "cherish who you are". It became a lovely time of prayer during which I thought how nice my name is, especially hearing it spoken by someone who loves me - "Eamonn" and then "Monson", my family, the Pallottines. I love the name of Mervue where I grew up, Galway my home town and, when I lived abroad, I loved the sound of Ireland. All of these resonate within me. I am formed and shaped by them, they express who I am, my identity. And it seemed like a magnetic force was pulling me to the tabernacle, drawin...

A couple of years ago Vicka, one of the M edjugorje  visionaries came to Dublin to speak at an event in the RDS. I went along because she is one of the reasons why I believe in what is taking place Medjugorje. I trust her sincerity, the radiance of her face. Her talk was followed by Mass and during the distribution of Holy Communion people surged forward towards where she was sitting on the stage, hundreds of hands stretching forward to touch her. To my surprise she herself came forward to touch the outstretched hands. My surprise was not that she responded to the need of the crowd but that all this was taking place immediately after receiving Jesus himself, while Communion was still being distributed. It showed that people didn't really understand what they had just received, who they had just received. I know, understand the need to touch, to be touched in order to be healed but in that moment I thought 'however gifted, impressive Vicka is, she is not Jesus. In...

You get what you ask for but not when you expect or in the way that you imagine.  A young-ish black haired man in a tracksuit ran down the platform and just managed to get on the train before the doors closed and it pulled away. He sat opposite me, one seat further down, and he was clearly in distress about something. I prayed for him silently and wondered to God if there was anything I could do for him. There wasn't! But I'm always wondering. Later, at 10.00 p.m. on that pleasant night in May when I had it in mind to go the bed early, the door bell rang. We don't usually answer  at this hour but when it rang I opened the door on instinct. A slim fair-haired man was swaying back and forth with an unmistakable smell of drink off him. He wasn't badly bruised or anything but he had the look of having been beaten. There was blood above his left eyebrow. His clothes were dirty. "I promise I haven't been drinking" he began, his speech refined, even ...