Blue Eyed Ennis

Feed The Hungry Heart

I remember hearing Adrian Snell's music in the 80's, and his name cropped up in conversation recently with some others, along the lines of whatever happened to.... ? so I decided to do a post on him.

Here's one of his songs from the '80's called Feed The Hungry Heart.

I did a little searching and found that Adrian now works as a Music Therapist and Arts Therapy Consultant for children and adults with special needs at Three Ways School, Bath, and regularly visits a school in Korce, Albania.

Three Ways School has 165 children and young people between ages 4 and 19 with a considerable range of special needs - learning difficulties, physical disabilities and behavioural problems. It is an extraordinary community and many of the students are profoundly responsive to sound and music within a therapeutic, relationship building context.
His work and music was featured in a special BBC Radio 4 programme at Three Ways School, Bristol in October last year, called "Fearfully and Wonderfully Made."

Sadly, I missed the programme which is no longer on BBC i-player but this is an edited extract from the BBC website here.

"Adrian's music room at Three Ways is a world away from the concert stage and recording studio, but he says he has no regrets about his transition from international performer to music therapist. 'This has been the most important step in my career as a musician', he says, 'many of us describe music as 'the language of the heart'. 'In the world of special needs, where many of our children are either unable to communicate through the spoken word, or choose not to do so, the idea of music as a language takes on a deeper meaning.'

Adrian said "I find myself asking why are people with special needs so under represented in our churches and Christian communities?

We have failed to offer a theology of inclusion, both practically and spiritually.

One of the great privileges I have as a music therapist is that I am focusing on what our children and young people CAN do, beyond their limitations."

This is his moving promotional video "Fierce Love" showcasing his work with the children. Adrian's new album 'Fierce Love', was inspired by these kids and features the range of instruments he uses as a therapist.

and this is the official music video

Wonderful and powerful lyrics !

You can read more on his life at his website here.

Second Sunday Ordinary Time 2014

Scripture readings for Sunday's Mass are here

Reflections on the Readings from St Louis Centre For Liturgy are here.

Lamb of God Church of Santa Pudenziana, Rome.

John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him and said,
“Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.

Reflection on today's Gospel "With The Fire Of The Spirit" from Iglesia Descalza by

José Antonio Pagola here
(English translation by Rebel Girl)

Reflection from Dan Clendenin - Coming Back For More: Why Go To Church ?

Plenty of fruitful insights from Fr. John Predmore S.J in this reflection from here.

My reflections from the archives

From 2012 here.

From 2011 here.

The Fallow Space

It's often hard to write and some days it is a constant quest whether internally or externally to know what to write about and then how. When I saw this quote from Inward Outward in my inbox yesterday, it was a salutary reminder of how to honour the fallow space - it's too early for the digging and the turning over- the soil is not ready yet, and what will be planted and what will grow are big questions.

Why are these "Lenten" thoughts already breaking through so suddenly into Ordinary Time?

Lent is a tree without blossom, without leaf,

Barer than blackthorn in its winter sleep,

All unadorned. Unlike Christmas which decrees

The setting up, the dressing up of trees,

Lent is a taking down, a stripping bare,

A starkness after all has been withdrawn

Of surplus and superfluous,

leaving no hiding place, only an emptiness

Between black branches, a most precious space

before the leaf, before the time of flowers;

Lest we should only see the leaf, the flower,

Lest we should miss the stars.

Jean M. Watt 20th Century

Let mystery have its place in you;

do not be always turning up your whole soil with the ploughshare of self-examination,

but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring,

and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird;

keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for the unknown God.

Then if a bird sing among your branches, do not be too eager to tame it.

If you are conscious of something new—thought or feeling, wakening in the depths of your being—

do not be in a hurry to let in light upon it, to look at it;

let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten,

hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness.

translated by Mrs. Humphrey Ward
Source: Amiel's Journal. From Inward Outward- A great daily resource

Then this appeared and looks interesting too- Five poet-theologians explore faith and spirituality in this book " Making Nothing Happen."

Click here for the book's Introduction.

Click here for poet Tamar Yoseloff's reflection on W.H. Auden's much quoted line "Making Nothing Happen."

Anthony Wilson has a great post on the vicissitudes of being unable to write in his article " No Poem To Write" from here.

So I need to honour this liminal space, and some of this is reinforced at what I read at i- Benedictines post today when I read that it is the feast of St Antony of the Desert.

My post on St Antony from last year is here.

and there's another interesting one on St Antony from Parabola magazine here titled "Surrounded By Water and Dying of Thirst " from which the image below is taken.

Art Credit: 'Saint Anthony Abbot Tempted by a Heap of Gold', Tempera on panel painting by the Master of the Osservanza Triptych, ca. 1435, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Inspiration comes dripping slow these days.

Image source

An earlier post featured a New Zealand writer, Joy Cowley, and this next part of my post features an Irish writer who also has links to New Zealand. How weird is it when these things come together unbidden ?!

Sinead Morrisey is Belfast's inaugural poet laureate, and this week was awarded the T. S. Eliot prize for poetry. It is the fourth time that she has been shortlisted for the £15,000 prize, considered to be the most prestigious poetry award in Britain. The prize, presented annually by the Poetry Book Society, was funded by TS Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot. Since her death in 2012, it has been supported by the trustees of the TS Eliot estate.

Click here for a transcript of a far ranging interview with Sinead Morrisey from The Stinging Fly in 2002

Related articles

Bonus Wednesday- Songs and Poem

Breathe In, Breathe Out, Let It Go
by Carrie Newcomer

To live we learn what we love most,

Embrace it all and hold it close.

Breathe it in and breathe it out, let it go.

To live is to love so many things,

Fly on beautiful wax wings.

Breathe it in and breathe it out, let it go.

Breathe it in and breathe it out, let it go, let it go.

Breath in breath out, let it go, let it go.

I held anger like a coal,

Burning hot but did not let go,

With the thought that I could

throw it at someone.

Such a hard lesson to learn,

My own hand was what got burned.

Breathe it in and breathe it out, Let it go

Breathe it in and breathe it out, let it go.

Breathe it in and breathe it out, let it go, let it go.

Breath in breath out, let it go, let it go.

What is won is won,

What is done is done

Let it go

What is real is real,

What we feel we feel

Then let go

I saw one candle in the night,

Become a thousand lights.

Breathe it in and breathe it out, let it go.

Life is fleeting this I know,

Short and draped in marigolds.

Breathe it in and breathe it out, let it go.

Breathe it in and breathe it out, let it go, let it go.

Breath in breath out, let it go, let it go.

Holy As The Day Is Spent

Holy is the dish and drain
The soap and sink, and the cup and plate
And the warm wool socks, and the cold white tile
Shower heads and good dry towels
And frying eggs sound like psalms
With bits of salt measured in my palm
And It's all a part of a sacrament
As holy as a day is spent

Holy is the busy street
And cars that boom with passion's beat
And the check out girl, counting change
And the hands that shook my hands today
And hymns of geese fly overhead
And spread their wings like their parents did
Blessed be the dog who runs in her sleep
To chase some wild and elusive thing

Holy is the familiar room
And the quiet moments in the afternoon
And folding sheets like folding hands
To pray as only laundry can
I'm letting go of all my fear
Like autumn leaves made of earth and air
For the summer came and the summer went
As holy as a day is spent

Holy is the place I stand
To give whatever small good I can
And the empty page, and the open book
Redemption everywhere I look
Unknowingly we slow our pace
In the shade of unexpected grace
And with grateful smiles and sad lament
As holy as a day is spent
And morning light sings 'providence'
As holy as a day is spent

Just a Little Difference

Ah—a resting place,
where we come to understand
it is not required of us
to wrestle constantly and passionately
with our God—
nor pursue relentlessly
all God's decrees as we understand them,
but only that we listen and wonder
and hope and pray,
that we might, perhaps,
make just a little difference,
one quiet grey day.

Edwina Gateley poem from here.

From There Was No Path So I Trod One

Wednesday Poem

Image source

A Tree Fallen Across the Road

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood
Throws down in front of us is not to bar
Our passage to our journey’s end for good,
But just to ask us who we think we are
Insisting always on our own way so.
She likes to halt us in our runner tracks,
And make us get down in a foot of snow
Debating what to do without an axe.

Robert Frost

A Pilgrim Tale and a Poem on Surrender

Today, I was delighted to come across a very talented New Zealand author by the name of Joy Cowley and I found her writings on spirituality particularly interesting.

I've pinched the text below from the You Tube site that accompanies the video below..

" By anyone's standards, Joy Cowley is a remarkable person. Born into a very ordinary background, she's become one of New Zealand's most celebrated authors. She's written more than 600 books for adults and children - including 500 reading books for children who are either learning early reading skills or who have reading difficulties. And that's one of her passions, helping people of all ages to read and to discover whether they, like her, have a talent for storytelling.

One of Joy's most recent projects has been to tell the story of Tarore, a young Maori girl murdered in the early nineteenth century, but whose love for the Gospel lived on long after her death. Tarore lived near Matamata in the Waikato, and it was there near the girls gravesite that Joy spoke to Allan Lee."

I've chosen two samples of her work: a long story and a poem.

Click here for her wonderful story called The Pilgrim.

You can click here to read it in pdf format.

and below is her poem," Surrender."

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

God, I come before you
as empty as a paper cup,
waiting to be filled
with the wine of your presence.

Somewhere back along the road a bit,
I dropped all those things
I was going to offer you,
the doing, the giving, the praying.

I'll pick them up again later,
but right now,
it's just you and me, God,
and there's not much of me.

It's a good feeling
to be this empty, this open
to the amazing stillness of you,
not knowing how to name you
or the life you pour into me.

God, right now I feel so small
and yet so vast.
I can't say where I end
and you begin.

Joy Cowley from the book 'Psalms from Down Under'

If you thirst for more, click here for Joy's website.

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

Feed The Hungry Heart

Second Sunday Ordinary Time 2014

The Fallow Space

Bonus Wednesday- Songs and Poem

Wednesday Poem

A Pilgrim Tale and a Poem on Surrender

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