Blogging With Purpose

Spirituality grounds us and informs our daily experience of acting and reacting in relation to people, circumstances and things. For spirituality pervades the whole of life, affecting all life’s stages of development, and so is to be regarded rather as an inner energy than as a set of formalised practices.  Nor can true spirituality be imposed from without.  Rather it ...

Today, May 31st 2023, we place the Church’s entire synodal process especially the work of the 16th ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops (which will take place in Rome this October) under the protection of Mary, Mother of the Church, mother of all those who are companions and disciples of her son – ‘Our Lady of the Way’. ...

On Thursday 25 May ahead of the 2023 celebration of the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation (on 1 September) Pope Francis chose the theme “Let Justice and Peace Flow,” inspired by the words of the prophet Amos: “Let justice flow on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.” This Message by Pope Francis is a ...

Julian of Norwich was an English anchoress of the Middle Ages who received a series of visions or “shewings” of the Passion of Christ in 1373. Her writings on the subject, now known as the Revelations of Divine Love, are thought to be the earliest surviving English-language works by a woman. Pope Francis sent a message on Friday 12 May, ...

Wednesday, April 26th, 2023 is the 239th anniversary of Nano Nagle’s death (1784).  Each year it is a landmark moment for our lives as Presentation people, when we take time out to give thanks for Nano’s life and for her inspiration, as a determined and committed advocate for social change alongside compassionate care, with a resolute conviction that she was ...

Easter is our life journey.  An opportunity to realise with ever greater certainty, that we are indeed Easter people. Our Lenten journey culminating on Easter Sunday, is never just one annual  journey made, and then dispensed with.  We are continually unwrapping the manifestation of Easter in our lives as we move from cross to resurrection; from suffering to joy made ...

Today, all of us are rediscovering our fragility. We are rediscovering that inhabiting the Earth as a common home requires much more of us.  It requires solidarity in accessing the goods of creation as a “common good”, and solidarity in applying the fruits of research and technology to make our “Home” healthier and more liveable for all. In this, we ...

The first work attributed to Patrick is a short open letter, directed against a British chieftain, Coroticus, and his armed followers, in which Patrick excoriates and excommunicates them for having slaughtered some and kidnapped and enslaved others of his newly baptized Irish converts to Christianity’. The second work is a far more informative source (essentially Patrick’s biography): Patrick’s Confessio. Described ...

As we open our hearts and minds to Spring, to all the possibility and to the emergence of all that light calls forth, by participation, we also open ourselves wider to all of creation that takes in both its breathtaking beauty and its abject suffering. Some time ago I read the original piece written  by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D entitled: ...

We reach the final day of the octave of prayer for Christian Unity (18 to 25 January 2023). The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (WPCU) is celebrated, as an ecumenical initiative in which Christians from all over the world belonging to different traditions and confessions, gather spiritually in prayer for the unity of the Church.  The theme of this ...