Blue Eyed Ennis: Within Our Darkest Night You Kindle The Fire That Never Dies Away

Within Our Darkest Night You Kindle The Fire That Never Dies Away

The first reading from the Scriptures this Sunday tells the tale of Moses seeing and encountering God in The Burning Bush.

Fr. Richard Rohr suggests in his book Falling Upward, that in the first half of life, we focus on the externals; on the law, correct rituals, and correct beliefs. While these are not bad things, they help us in creating containers that will allow us to share in life changing encounters with God, they shouldn’t be the end of the journey.

Instead, as we move into the second half of life, we will find ourselves caught up in the burning presence of God.

“Early stage religion is largely preparing you for the immense gift of this burning, the
authentic experience of God that always "burns" you, yet does not destroy you. though creating a proper stable into which Christ can be born.”

Yes, we can be content with the show, but if we are content with the show then we’ll miss out on the secret blessings of mystical union with God."

Paradoxically, it is during those times of our lives when we may want to push God away from us, because of our anger or grief that God often imperceptibly draws closer. Like Moses, we need to see and pay attention to the burning fire.

Only God can turn our sorrow into joy and our anger into forgiveness and love. It is God alone who can brighten the darkest times in our lives.

This is a beautiful and lesser well known chant from Taize that fits well with the themes this week.

"Within Our Darkest Night You Kindle The Fire That Never Dies Away" by Jacques Berthier, 1991.

The Catholic church is going through some dark nights. Even though hardship may be ever present, God is faithful and God’s grace will be present in difficult times.

Cardinals will meet in a conclave soon to elect a Pope and I hope and pray that the Holy Spirit will rekindle the fire of renewal and healing peace in all of us.

The first reading this Sunday relates how God tells Moses to take off his sandals because he is on Holy Ground.

John Philip Newell writes in this extract from "Walking With Naked Feet"....

"Gerard Manley Hopkins, inspired by the Celtic landscape and culture of north Wales, writes in his one of his greatest poems, 'God's Grandeur,' 'There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.'

It is what Hildegard calls the 'greening power' or the 'moistness' of the Spirit that is deep in the body of the earth and the human soul.

Hopkins invites us to turn our attention to the 'inscape' of things, the inner landscape of creation and the human mystery from which the 'dearest freshness' can spring again.

Yet instead of walking the earth with awareness, with a sensitivity to the Source that is "deep down things,' we have dulled our capacity to feel.

'Nor can foot feel, being shod,' writes Hopkins. We have become heavy footed, covering over and deadening our deepest faculties of perception.

In the story of Moses and the burning bush, in which Living Presence is revealed in the words 'I am who I am' or 'I will be what I will be,' Moses is told to take off his shoes, for the ground on which he is standing is holy.

He is told to uncover the soles of his feet, a place of deep knowing in the human form. Think of walking barefoot in the grass. Think of placing our bare feet into the coolness of a refreshing stream. When we do so, we see in a new way.

Doors of perception are opened in us. Rabbi Nahum, in teaching on this passage from the Torah, likes to say that the important aspect of this story is not that the bush is burning but that Moses notices.

For every bush is burning. Every bush is aflame with the Living Presence. The 'fiery power,' as Hildegard puts it, is hidden in everything that has being."

I chose this beautiful hymn, "The Ground "by Oli Gjielo, taken from the last movement of Ola Gjeilo's "Sunrise Mass." because it conveys the fresh creative energy of the Holy Spirit in the heavens coming down to the earth to "ground us" and give us the peace that only God can provide to our restless hearts.

I suppose it is more allied to a hymn for Pentecost, but given that the Holy Spirit wanders where "she" will and is not constrained by time, it does not matter.

I have a hope too, that the Cardinal electors when sealed in their Vatican Upper Room "take off their shoes", dismantle their "institutional defences" and let the flame of the Holy Spirit settle on their heads and inflame their hearts - God knows we all need guidance and inspiration at this time more than ever.

I also carry the same hope and prayer for us all.

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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

Within Our Darkest Night You Kindle The Fire That Never Dies Away

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