Blue Eyed Ennis: Fifth Sunday Ordinary Time

Fifth Sunday Ordinary Time - Duc In Altum Time !

Image source. Artist - Baboun.

Scripture readings for today's Mass are here.

Various reflections from St Louis University Centre for Liturgy from here

My previous posts on the Latin phrase, "Duc in Altum " used by John Paul II, meaning " Casting Out into the Deep" can be read below.

from 2010 here

2011 here

2012 here

Related posts here

All three scripture readings say something about how the power of God is so often beyond our human powers of perception.

They are graphic illustrations of the failure of rational intellectual analysis when it comes to understanding how God works in our lives.

The three narratives all speak of a powerful liberating encounter with a God who comes right in the thick of failure, and temptations to discouragement or despair, and when the heart feels itself drowning in a host of insurmountable difficulties and broken efforts.

It's about a God who knows the truth about our inadequacies, who knows the circumstances when we fall short, when our own efforts are unsuccessful, a God who fully knows the evil and hostility we are capable of.

They also show why it is His sustaining love and not our failures that defines our lives.

Rembrandt- Miraculous draught of fishes - source

When do I ever realise and admit the utter poverty of my own thoughts and the awesome holiness of God ?

When do I admit the fact that God's love is greater than my self will and propensity for evil ?

When do I take the journey into God to find Jesus in ever new and more beautiful ways; to accept that He is constantly ready to reveal His strength in my weakness, if I trust Him - totally !

I need silence and time for prayer to go deep into my heart to allow myself to be carried into the mystery of God's goodness. I know there are plenty of places in my life that are not in harmony with God's will.

Image source

Taking the disciples out into the deep wasn't just about the fish.

It was about taking them away from the shallows of false piety and stultifying pettiness of socially acceptable religious observance.

It was about taking them away to show them everything that was preventing them from being fruitful in ther lives.

St John of The Cross said " to come to a knowledge you have not, you must come by a way you know not."

It was showing them that by making themselves vulnerable to a plan that was not their own, and how, by spending time with God, they could open up their whole being to new life.

It was a taste of liberation for them from everything that was trapping them.

It was a journey into the depths of God's truth and love to show them how this love was vastly deeper than anything they could fathom.

Image source

These stories show a God who is ready to sustain me whether on an inner or an outer journey, when all my own efforts reach their limits. So often my wilful autonomous nature imagines itself doing something beautiful for God only for me to miss the mark and fall flat on my face.

Useless energy and anxiety to do it my way all amounts to nothing if God's will is not working in me. The readings also show how unfathomable the mystery of God is, and how this Word made flesh often comes to me in surprising ways.

My desiring, seeking, encountering.... all for this miraculous gift, this draft of fish !!

I could spend a whole lifetime pondering those riches and never begin to exhaust the mystery that is there.

James Tissot : Miraculous Draft of Fish

Image source

As Lent approaches next week, Christ invites me to take a journey into the deep, to trust and follow where He leads me, to discover that vast, unexplored, untamed wilderness of my innermost being.

I need to be willing to reach into those most intensely vulnerable places of the heart and the Lenten journey asks me not to run away in anxiety.

I need to trust that this desire to seek and discover God goes hand in hand with discovering and unlocking the deepest truth about my own existence, that reaches beyond and transcends my human faculties.

I need to trust my instincts that God swims with me into these hidden depths to the deepest centre of my humanity. Sometimes He will be with me in the boat, at others He will challenge me to do it on my own or in community.

He will ask me to follow, to take bold steps in faith, He will urge me on in my immature and critical questioning. Like the hymn says at the end of this post, I believe and trust that " His eyes are set upon me, gently smiling, speaking my name."

Somewhere in the deepest experience of Lent, lies a God who believes in me and who is waiting for me.

Image source

This beautiful prayer of St Paul, is a great one to enter Lent and I pray it for myself and for all of us.

"I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you

with power through his Spirit in your inner being,

so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,

may have power, together with all the saints,

to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,

and to know this love that surpasses knowledge,

that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:16-19 (NIV)

Lord You Have Come To the Seashore

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More from Seamus Heaney

“History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime,
The longest-for tidal wave of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea change
On the far side of revenge
Believe in miracles....”

“The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.” ―

“I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.”

and five more......

On his inspiration: 'The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis”

On which animal he'd prefer to be: "I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks."

On fame: "The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself. The prizes can’t help you at all.”

On becoming a poet: "My quest for precision and definition, while it may lead backward, is conducted in the living speech of a landscape and a language that I was born with. If you like, I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading."

On authority "At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. "

Easter Hope All Year Round

Celestial spirit that doth roll
The heart's sepulchral stone away,
Be this our resurrection day,
The singing Easter of the soul -
O gentle Master of the Wise,
Teach us to say: "I will arise." ~
Richard Le Gallienne

"The great gift of Easter is hope - Christian hope which makes us have that confidence in God, in his ultimate triumph, and in his goodness and love, which nothing can shake."
-- Basil C. Hume

Celtic Christianity may offer us a lifeline in the form of an approach to faith which is rooted in the imagination...[Celts] excelled at expressing their faith in symbols, metaphors and images, both visual and poetic.
They had the ability to invest the ordinary and commonplace with sacramental significance, to find glimpses of God’s glory throughout creation and to paint pictures in words, signs and music that acted as icons opening windows on heaven and pathways to eternity
Ian Bradley The Celtic Way

Favourite Quotes from Pope Francis

“Thanks to magnanimity, we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are. That means being able to do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God and to others. That means being able to appreciate the small things inside large horizons, those of the kingdom of God.

This offers parameters to assume a correct position for discernment, in order to hear the things of God from God’s ‘point of view.’ … However the risk in seeking and finding God in all things, then, is the willingness to explain too much, to say with human certainty and arrogance: ‘God is here.’ We will find only a god that fits our measure. The correct attitude is that of St. Augustine: seek God to find him, and find God to keep searching for God forever.”

-- Pope Francis

Carlo Caretto's Love Letter to His Church

How much I much criticise you my church and yet how much I love you !

You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe you more than I owe anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence.

You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in the world have I seen anything more obscurantist, more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful.

Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face – and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your arms!

No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you.
Then too – where should I go? To build another church?

But I cannot build another church without the same defects, for they are my own defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ’s church. No, I am old enough. I know better!"

Did the Woman Say ?

Great Quotes

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.
The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.
And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

Mary Oliver

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"There is an Indian proverb or axiom that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional, and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but, unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person."

~Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms, 1989

“And

"
"You can get all A's and still flunk life."

"Lost in the mystery of finding myself alive."

Walker Percy

"The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom”

A tough life needs a tough language-and that's what poetry is. That's what literature offers- a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Jeanette Winterson

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “All right, then, have it your way.”

- C.S. Lewis

The independent hearts of Celtic descendents everywhere still yearn for the solitary place, still rejoice in the goodness of creation, still see the Lord beside them as they walk, still see Him in the face of friend and stranger. The gospel light with its eastern fire still gleams. The truth still lingers in the heart.
Pat Robson – The Celtic Heart

People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help?

They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture. They have been deprived of the sense that there is something else in life, some purpose that has come with them into the world."

-- James Hillman

Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government only when it deserves it.
--Mark Twain

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
--George Orwell

We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice: - we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
-- George Orwell

Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your own experience or convictions.
--Dag Hammarskjöld

If you want to build a ship don't herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

For what are we, without hope in our hearts, that someday we'll drink from God's blessed waters?"
-Bruce Springsteen

"Sometimes grace works like waterwings when you feel you are sinking."
-Anne Lamott

"A prayer may be a wordless inner longing, a sudden outpouring of love, a yearning within the soul to be for a moment united within the infinite and the good, a humbleness that needs no abasement or speech to express it, a cry in the darkness for help when all seems lost, a song, a poem, a kind deed, a reaching for beauty, or the strong, quiet inner reaffirmation of faith. A prayer in fact can be anything that is created by God that turns to God."

Paul Gallico

"God does not die when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason."

Dag Hammarskjold

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”

― Paul Hawken

The greatest religious challenge of our age is to hold together social action and spiritual disciplines. This is not just a theological necessity, dictated by the need to integrate all of life around the reality of the living God. It is a matter of sheer survival. The evils we confront are so massive, so inhuman, so impervious to appeals and dead to compassion, that those who struggle against them face the real possibility of being overwhelmed by them.”

~ Theologian Walter Wink

One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours?
I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.

~ Khalil Gibran

Blue Eyed Ennis

Fifth Sunday Ordinary Time - Duc In Altum Time !

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