The first source of the insight was the fact that Sant Bani is a different kind of school. Inspired by their Indian teacher – Kirpal Singh – to offer an education based on spiritual values, a small group of followers of the teacher founded the school in 1970 initially for their own children but soon after for others who wanted this kind of approach. I say ‘based on spiritual values’ to emphasize that there has never been any attempt to promote one religion over another. Rather the aim has been to provide an atmosphere that supports a spiritual perspective and fosters diversity (children come from more than 30 local towns and several countries and from a variety of economic backgrounds – more than 70% of the students receive financial aid) so that the students can get a better idea of how we all can live appropriately on a planet with limited resources. The belief in the importance of each individual – in the words of Kirpal Singh “God resides in every heart” – is the precept that binds the school community together and teaches the children that there is more to life, more to society, and more to nations than simply surviving as economic animals. This kind of teaching, we know, has become increasingly difficult to do (and protect) today, as private schools of all kinds succumb to the dominant paradigm. Recently the principal of the school, Kent Bicknell, developed a relationship with the nation of Bhutan and specifically their Gross National Happinesss (GNH) index, which the country is using to guide all their policies and structures, as a way of making the idea of living appropriately on the earth we all share both real and concrete.

The second source of the insight was the interaction with the young people who came to listen to me speak about my own spiritual journey. I began by asking them to listen for any threads they noticed in the story that would help me understand what has been happening in my life. Their responses were both moving and helpful. I then asked them what they thought these comments suggested: for the school – its purpose and goals – and for society in general in the context of the great challenges we’re all facing. It is critical, they said for the school to teach more than simply how to be successful in the dominant paradigm where success is actually adding to the challenges. In a related way, they added, it is essential that older and younger people learn how to think together in order to address these challenges.

Last night, I watched a film by Tom Shadyac who is famous for blockbuster movies like Ace Ventura and Bruce Almighty. This film, called I Am, however, came out of Tom’s struggle to explore deeper meaning in his life after an accident brought him to the edge of despair. In the film, he interviews scientists, neurologists, psychologists, spiritual leaders, and poets, and concludes that the basic impulse in all life is to cooperate – we are programmed to love, is how he puts it – but that we have created a human society (the dominant paradigm) based on a one-sided science that fosters the delusion that we are separate individuals struggling against each other (and nature) to survive. He noted that in his ‘The Descent of Man’, Darwin used the term ‘survival of the fittest’ only twice to describe the human process, but he used ‘love’ ninety five times. The fact that we have succeeded in our delusioin, Shadyac concludes, is now killing us. Older cultures, he notes, believed that people who took more than they needed – a basic element of success in our culture – were actually mentally (and sometimes criminally) ill. The way to survive our success, he suggests, is to do anything – no matter how small – to foster the cooperation that is based on the fact that we – and everything in the universe – are in fact already completely and infinitely interconnected. The way into the next stage of our journey as part of the greater journey of the universe is to expand our narrow consciousness of separateness into the truer consciousness of connectedness and cooperation.

The Sant Bani experience gave me an insight and a concrete way to do this in my own life at this stage of my journey: the insight was that I could bring together my past and my future by sharing my story; the concrete way was to share this story with young people and use it as a way to help them think about their own journeys. Does that make sense? Have you had similar experiences?

First, by way of explanation, the group that is under scrutiny is the Leadership Council of Women Religious (LCWR) which speaks for 80% of the Catholic sisters in the U.S. They have been accused by the Vatican of not being vocal enough on the church’s teaching and spending too much time on social issues. In effect, the Vatican has accused the nuns of worrying too much about the poor and not enough about abortion and gay marriage.

The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith ordered LCWR on April 18 to reform its statutes, programs and affiliations to conform more closely to the teachings and discipline of the Church. Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain has been appointed the “archbishop delegate” to oversee the organization. In his recent Holy Thursday sermon, Pope Benedict XVI made headlines in a reference to the sisters by stating that “…his concern was for true obedience as opposed to human caprice,” indicating clearly his personal support for the move against the sisters

Since the papal crackdown, however, the sisters have received an outpouring of support. The National Catholic Reporter wrote how ‘Nuns were approached by Catholics at Sunday liturgies across the country with a simple question: ‘What can we do to help?’. It cited one parish where a declaration of support for nuns from the pulpit drew loud applause, and another that was filled with shouts like, “You go, girl!”

The general response from the Catholic community is captured in a recent piece by Tom Fox who is the newspaper’s publisher: ‘Some of our bishops,’ he says, ‘are acting like bullies, abusing the authority of their offices in the name of enforcing orthodoxy. Dealing with U.S. women religious, these bishops’ actions appear governed more by a desire to enforce obedience than to develop fidelity in our sisters. Catholics see through this guise. They are upset, fed up with the likes of this behavior. They are speaking out. Soon they will be on the streets making their voices heard. You can count on it.’

Outrage, however, is not confined to Catholic publications. Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times took up the cause in a recent editorial:

 ‘Pope Benedict,’ he writes, ‘all I can say is: You are crazy to mess with nuns… They are among the bravest, toughest and most admirable people in the world. In my travels, I’ve seen heroic nuns defy warlords, pimps and bandits. Even as bishops have disgraced the church by covering up the rape of children, nuns have redeemed it with their humble work on behalf of the neediest.’

At least four petition drives are under way to support the nuns. Kristof quotes from an essay by Mary E. Hunt, a Catholic theologian who is developing a proposal for Catholics to redirect some contributions from local parishes to nuns:

‘How dare they go after 57,000 dedicated women whose median age is well over 70 and who work tirelessly for a more just world? How dare the very men who preside over a church in utter disgrace due to sexual misconduct and cover-ups by bishops try to distract from their own problems by creating new ones for women religious?’

The image that comes to mind for me in the context of the transformation of consciousness which is the larger theme of my reflection here is the strange ‘imaginal cells’ that seem to come out of nowhere when a caterpillar is transforming into a butterfly. The ‘imaginal cells’ are so completely different that they are attacked as a threat by the original cells.  However, they keep showing up and in time begin to find each other and cluster together. Eventually, they become a large community and then they switch gears from simply being a group of like-minded cells into the programming cells of the butterfly. Some start changing into wing cells, some into antenna cells, some into digestive tract cells, and so on.  At this stage they are no longer ‘imaginal cells’ but have become butterfly anatomy cells. Finally the butterfly emerges as a completely new entity from the original caterpillar.  

Is that what is going on in the Catholic Church? Is that what is going on in the world at large in similar ‘imaginal cells’, from the ‘Arab Spring’ to the ‘Occupy’ movement? If this is the case, then these cells need to find each other and cluster together so that they can become the large community that will constitute the programming cells of a new world. This is true goal of the work of consciousness transformation.

What are some of the ‘imaginal cells’ that you know? How can they be helped to find each other?

The Journey of the Universe is a story about creativity that unfolds into life that becomes aware and makes decisions. Creativity, it is clear, is not confined to human beings. In fact, we humans come from all of this – the stars are our ancestors – and participate in its process, like every other form of life, as co-creators of the story. We do this in our unique way through the self-reflective consciousness that has evolved in us. I say ‘in us’ to make the point that the consciousness of humans is truly the consciousness of the Universe. Human beings are, in fact, the Universe in a conscious mode. Through my eyes the stars look back at themselves in wonder. However, there is a flaw in our perception and understanding of this consciousness, which is an illusion of separateness that created the further illusion of control and fostered a sense of superiority. I was thinking, as I drove home yesterday, of the way we sometimes behave when we drive our cars – especially if they are big vehicles – as if we were invincible and entitled somehow. It is this combination of illusions that has allowed us to exploit other expressions of the Universe as if they simply belonged to us. Today, in fact, we live in a world that proclaims, promotes and rewards a form of individuality which is the ultimate expression of these illusions. The result has been amazing discoveries, inventions, and achievements but also amazing destruction. Moreover, to judge from recent reflections on the subject, our technologies – particularly our communication technologies – are furthering the illusions of separateness and control: ‘Connection replaces Conversation,’ and ‘Is Facebook making us Lonely’ are two articles I read last week.

In terms of addressing the negative aspect of our growing capacities, the first order of change is seen in the many forms of charity and good works that our culture is good at, including the amazing accomplishments of our first Conversations for Action program in Bedford which resulted in a Climate Action Plan, two Summits, a wonderful implementation structure, and expanding collaboration with other towns in the region.  Of course, these are wonderful achievements, but just beneath the surface there is still the nagging concern about whether these efforts are meaningful or enough in the face of the magnitude of the issues we learn more about every day. And while it is perfectly right to say that every individual action makes a difference and we must start where we can and hope that others will join us, we also know that this nagging concern is actually a call to take the conversation to a deeper level. For just as we would not simply continue to address a physical symptom that continued to manifest but would also explore its cause, so too we have to explore the deeper causes of our present problems while continuing to address their impact. The challenge, though, is how to address deep-seated illusions that are cultural as well as individual.

One example of doing so surfaced during the conversation at the library: the various ’12 Step’ type programs. For example, the process of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement is not simply to stop drinking but to change the thinking and feelings that cause the urge to drink. A second important aspect of this approach is the element of support. Addiction is regarded in this approach as an illness that a person has no control over and must therefore seek the support of both a ‘higher power’ and fellow sufferers. ’12 Step’ people often talk of a new consciousness and the new life it brings. In the light of this model, we talked about a simple system of conversations throughout the community that would foster a deepening of consciousness that would address the illusion of separateness and control, etc. while at the same time supporting each other in our efforts to change behaviors that contribute to our present problems.

I’ll continue to explore this approach in future postings but let me conclude here by suggesting that it is related to the understanding of resurrection I discussed recently in a number of ways but specifically in this one: consciousness is not something esoteric or internal or private; rather it determines everything else – how we think and act and live together. Being precedes doing. Who we are shapes what we do. The resurrected consciousness of Jesus transformed his mode of presence in the world. A similarly resurrected consciousness in us would transform our mode of presence in the world in every aspect from the personal to the collective.

I am allowed a moment to introduce the blessing, which everyone has come to expect as an important part of the experience (the runners become amazingly quiet despite their surging adrenalin) in order to frame the experience and connect it to our everyday lives. Yesterday I said something to the effect that one of the reasons that this is more than a race for us is that it allows us to immerse ourselves in the mud, and water and emerging vegetation of spring: to get out of our heads and into our hearts; to let go of the illusions and delusions that dominate our everyday lives – illusions of separateness from the world we share, delusions of ownership over the other forms of life we share it with; to forget ourselves and our anxieties for a while and be free like the children we are at heart. I said that, when we are able to do this, we touch the core of life which is beauty. That’s what our blessing highlights:

Beauty before me as I run
Beauty behind me as I run
Beauty below me as I run
Beauty above me as I run
Beauty beside me as I run
Beauty within me as I run.
I see beauty all around,
In beauty may we walk,
In beauty may we see,
In beauty may we all be.

Beauty is at the core of everything, but we need to be deeply present – immersed – in order to taste it. I concluded that if this experience of beauty were to become a constant awareness it would transform our lives and our world: the way we think and what we do; our habits and our institutions.

Afterwards it struck me that this was the new consciousness I was referring to last week in term s of resurrection: a consciousness that transformed Jesus to the point where it determined the form of his existence in the world.  I concluded that this is the purpose of every human life: to evolve to a deeper consciousness and a deeper level of being.

Later in the day I offered another blessing at an Earth Day community pot-luck gathering in our town of Lewisboro, NY where I built on the first blessing by adding that when we come together like this we experience our wider identity; how we are all one living system. We, in fact, are also essentially the beauty that is at the core of everything. What we bring to this unfolding mystery of beauty is self-reflective consciousness. In other words, just as the trees bring the beauty of branches and leaves, and birds bring the beauty of song, and clouds bring the beauty of rain, we bring the beauty of self-reflective consciousness: not simply for ourselves but for the entire world community. Because we are all one living system – this is our essential identity – our self-consciousness is more fundamentally the self-consciousness of the universe. We are the universe in a self-reflective mode. When I am aware of the wonder of things – the beauty at the core of life – it is the entire universe that experiences this wonder. What a trip. What a journey to be on. What a privileged purpose to have.

This coming Saturday we’ll be screening a film called ‘The Journey of the Universe’ which will deepen our appreciation of this mystery and our place in it. I’ll let you know what emerges.

It is what I was born for –

to look, to listen,

to lose myself

inside this soft world –

to instruct myself

over and over

in joy,

in acclamation.

Such an understanding gives our purpose in life so much more meaning and dignity than anything else I can think of. I want A Deeper Green to describe this process toward a deeper consciousness by retracing my own life-journey. My story demonstrates how all of us have experienced this deeper consciousness, if only in glimpses that leave a sense that there is much more going on in the so-called everyday world. I’m reading a book this week on the creative process – Imagine, by Jonah Lehrer – that describes how inspiration happens and how we can collaborate with what I believe is actually a deeper level of reality that already exists in everything and in us as a deeper self. In a similar way, I’ve always felt that if we learned how listen better we would hear so much more and would be able to work much better with life in a way that is normal and natural and not confined to the few geniuses or saints. These, in fact, simply do more deliberately, more passionately, and more persistently what we can all do: like staying with a problem, for example, until we are defeated and then continuing to stay with it but in a different way – vulnerable, open – that allows an insight to emerge. To practice this kind of persistent presence to things would be to move from occasional heightened awareness to a constant/continuous deeper consciousness of the world and myself in it. And this great purpose is given to everyone, from the brightest to the most ordinary and from the richest to the poorest.

The Easter stories which have always intrigued me seem to suggest that Jesus rose, as it were, to such a consciousness, to the point where it determined the form of his existence in the world. Even a summary reading of the resurrection stories suggests such a transformation to a new order of being, no longer confined by the material or physical (including death), and a new form of existence that was not immediately recognized even by his closest friends. The stories, in fact, are also about their awakening/awareness – their resurrection – about what is going on in life and the realization that this is the goal of every life: to evolve to a deeper consciousness and a deeper level of being; to a higher frequency, perhaps, that is not confined to material forms as we know them.

This seems to me to be a worthwhile purpose for a human life that is not simply spiritual in the sense of an esoteric or private world, or even explicitly about addressing the challenges of everyday living through some kind of self-sacrifice. Rather it is about achieving this deepened level of consciousness and the new order of being it will inform that will lead spontaneously, naturally, and organically to the transformation of all our issues, problems, relationships, and processes: from sustainability to peace and from personal well being to justice for all forms of life.

It’s good to be back.

What connecting like this does for us is to deepen our self awareness: we recognize ourselves in another. This is the foundation for true community. It is in this kind of community that life happens – is born, emerges – as it does everywhere throughout the living world. In gravity, photosynthesis, germination – all forms of this intimate connection – life emerges and the world unfolds. In our human world, the longing that is one of the basic driving forces in every life, is realized through belonging (which is the other basic driving force). Through this be-longing we participate in the emergence of life: we become and life becomes.

A fellow traveler in the world of priesthood in Africa used to say: ‘company brings the dogs to church.’ At first I thought he was being cynical – and he probably was expressing a little skepticism about different levels of commitment – but later I saw that there is a profound truth in his statement. For the desire – the need – to belong comes from our deepest longing to be(come) ourselves: our truest selves; what we might validly call our highest self; what some would call our divine self. This is the longing for God that the famous searcher, St. Augustine described when he said:

‘You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.’

Of course we are made for this highest, truest self that nothing else will satisfy, in spite of the many seductions that seem to answer the need for a while. But we only find this self – this God – through each other, in belonging. Another word is love, even if this word too – like so many other profound words – has lost a lot of its significance through trivialized over-use. This is the company that brings all of us – dogs included – to the communion of love that real church symbolizes.

This leads me to a second thought, this one about priesthood. The community of true belonging makes us whole – holy. A priest is one who makes community like this. (S)he) does so by sharing his/her own personal experience and inviting others into it so that they can recognize themselves in it and be reminded thereby of their own real hopes, their deepest desires. This is their higher self, their divine identity. We are made whole, our true self – we become holy – by joining the human and the divine in us. A priest helps this to happen through the sacrifice of her/his own life where the word sacrifice is understood in its basic meaning which is ‘to make holy.’ S(he) does this on the altar of everyday things where the divine is always encountered by sharing the deeply vulnerable personal self that others will recognize themselves in. I say ‘vulnerable’ because this kind of sharing risks misunderstanding, judgment and even rejection. This vulnerability is present in all such sharing: even the seed essentially dies in order for new life to germinate.

By sharing as I did my own personal experience I made it the altar of sacrifice – the process of being made holy – for all of us. In this place we connected and in the communion that followed we discovered shared understanding in the form of insights, memories, inspirations – reminders of the common ground on which we all stand, glimpses of the deep – divine – self we all share.

Any of us can be this priest. Ultimately, we are all priests for each other. The Christian Church speaks of ‘the priesthood of all believers’ which readily translates into this miracle of communion that we can perform for each other, every day. Other traditions have their own form of the same principle of life’s unfolding: perhaps you could share about these if you know. In any case, let me know if these thoughts make any sense to you.

The other day I had a Stress Test to check out my heart since I did undergo angioplasty fifteen years ago and have a family history of heart disease. I hadn’t done such a test for over three years in spite of these obvious risk factors, partly because I’ve kept quite fit through running and partly because my blood tests – cholesterol, etc. – have always been good. I was very confident, therefore – as was the cardiologist – that the test result would be as before, so we joked as I strode the treadmill about how long it would take to push my heart rate to maximum. This goal was actually achieved with relative ease, adding to the optimism I felt. However during the so-called recovery period, the EKG showed abnormal readings which suggested to my suddenly disappointed cardiologist that I should have an angiogram and probable angioplasty this coming Tuesday.

I realize that this is a very common procedure these days and that the technology has even developed a lot since I last had it. However I still feel a little apprehensive at how suddenly things can change and how little control over the important things we actually have. At the same time I feel more gratitude than anxiety at the discovery of the problem because it offers the opportunity to open up the flow in my heart and metaphorically the flow in my life.

There have been a lot of positive and encouraging responses to my recent blog postings on a new cosmology which suggests the need for a new (more comprehensive) spirituality and a new priesthood to serve this. This health challenge is like a response to my Blog from the universe encouraging me to open up my heart a little more: to be the change I want to see, in fact, as Gandhi put it. I was reminded of this the following day when I dipped into some literature belonging to my wife Ann who is a therapist that echoes a similar principle: in this case, it is the therapist who has to be and do what she wants her patient to be and do (Dan Siegel: The Mindful Therapist): to be more present and more resonant with the patient; to be more responsive than reactive which, unfortunately, is the normal way we relate to others, especially when there is a blockage in a relationship and the flow between us is compromised.

Our world could benefit from opening up its heart which, as a major organ of perception and cognition, can be exceptionally accurate and detailed in its information gathering capacities, and therefore critical to our health and our future. A new cosmology suggests that we need to relate differently to the world we live in and share with others. A new spirituality is about learning to be more present and resonant with each other, more responsive than reactive to the things we encounter.  But for that to happen blockages have to be removed, including the most pervasive blockage which, in our modern culture, is the illusion of control, and the fears (particularly around mortality) that are at the root of the illusion. The opening of our world has to begin with each of us.  Hafiz, a fourteenth century Persian poet, reflects the spirit of this opening:

How

Did the rose

Ever open its heart

And give to this world

All its

Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light

Against its

Being.

Otherwise

We all remain

Too

Frightened.

I’m being given a special opportunity this week to be the priest of this new cosmology and spirituality. I invite you to join me in the process – with a little moral support and prayerful energy if you like. I’ll keep you posted.

The realization that everything is one interconnected reality means that we are not separate  from other things, that there is no ‘out there,’ that what we call nature includes us. The implications are enormous, of course, for if we are this universe then how should we live; how should we live with other people – our neighbors who apparently are ourselves. One teacher has suggested that we love our neighbors as ourselves; he added that our neighbor is everyone (today we could add everything). So what does all that mean? Well, for starters, it means that we should treat everything as if it were our own body – which in a sense it is. I wrote a paper a little while ago on morality as ‘enlightened self-interest,’ suggesting that, since everything we do we do out of self interest (think about it), morality should focus on fostering the awareness of what constitutes this self. We get glimpses of this when we realize we would do anything for someone we love: a partner, a child, a friend. When we fall in love we fall into this other person; they become my self.

Joe made a very interesting point when he talked about how difficult it can be to promote a new cosmology – a new way of seeing the world – because people resist it, realizing (instinctively perhaps) that a new cosmology means a new everything: new values, new morality, new laws, new institutions, new leadership, new relationships. He talked about a comparable period when Galileo experienced resistance from the leaders of society to the new cosmology that he was promoting, and that, incidentally, we take as obvious and natural today, namely that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. He described Galileo only four hundred years ago trying to convince leaders in both the scientific and church communities to look through his telescope and see for themselves how the planets moved and not simply around the earth. But they refused, perhaps realizing the enormous implications of such a shift in understanding: Bible, authority of church, morality, etc.

It struck me that this is the real issue of today: a new cosmology. When people talk of a shift in consciousness it is this very concrete new awareness that they are referring to. For it is this awareness that will finally change everything; in fact it is only this that will bring the changes we know we need to make in order to make the world a better, more livable place for everyone: more sustainable, more just. And of course, we resist it: like the leaders of Galileo’s day we refuse to look at the data that is already there, sensing that it will shift everything.

As I drove home from Joe’s talk I said to my friend Peggie, given how much we have come to know in recent years and how the growth of knowledge is accelerating, what will we know a hundred, even fifty years from now. And how natural will it all seem. And how ignorant and naïve we will appear to our great grandchildren. Perhaps the most creative thing we can do now in order to make our world a more sustainable place for everyone and everything is to encourage each other to look around us and also let in the new knowledge we now have; take a peek through the telescope and get the new cosmology by falling in love with the mystery of it all.

The second thought in your responses was about the need today for spiritual guides – priests who would be beacons, lighthouses – to help us discover our true selves, as individuals certainly, but also as organizations and communities. Such priests should be people who have understanding born of experience, skills born of practice, and compassion born of relationships: teachers who can speak about these things in the language of the present times; guides whose task is simply to help us understand our place in the universe.

A third thought related these first two by saying that this particular role of priest is not simply a function given by an institution but an ‘archetype’ or calling present from the beginning that shapes and guides a life. Many of you were generous enough to say that I have been such a priest from the beginning (at least for you), and that I have also learned the language of today in order to be a priest in ways that can help people live this essential spirituality of discovering and celebrating their true selves. Certainly we all need such help in order to reclaim our humanity in a world that is increasingly soul-less on the one hand, and increasingly hungry for this soul on the other; increasingly connected on the surface and increasingly isolated inside. That priesthood also extends beyond our own species, for all beings and all things have their unique gift to give to the mystery of the unfolding universe.

Finally, one of you said that something big is happening in my life and the end of that happening is not yet visible. That statement probably captures where I am right now and that the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado described so perfectly:

Wayfarer, the only way
is your footsteps, there is no other….

You also mentioned courage, suggesting that I had passed the courage part many years ago, referring probably to my decision to leave the institution of priesthood. In fact, I’m now looking for courage of a different kind, for it is one thing to step away from a role or function – or a relationship for that matter – that is no longer serving, but another to claim who you are especially in a way that might suggest that you know better than a two thousand year old institution.

I can take comfort however from someone whose feast we celebrate in Ireland in these first days of February: Brigid whose challenge was about claiming an archetype that clearly impelled her life – priesthood – even though this might have implied arrogance or even madness. According to an old tradition, during the rite when Bishop Mel of Ardagh was professing Brigid as a nun, “a mysterious manifestation of the Holy Spirit” (sic) caused him to inadvertently read over her the episcopal consecration, thereby ordaining her a bishop. Against the protests of the other bishops, Mel was convinced that this had happened according to the will of God and insisted that the consecration should stand. Now the story may be simply apocryphal and one of the ways that traditions use to highlight the importance of a person like Brigid who was undoubtedly perceived by the people as a spiritual leader in every sense. At the same time, Brigid was clearly a priest of a new order at that time: one that maintained traditions – she and her sisters were the keepers of the ‘eternal flame’ like the vestal virgins of ancient times; but she was also the formal leader of a ‘co-ed’ (monks and nuns) Christian monastery in the sixth century, something completely unheard of at that time (or since for that matter).

In a conversation the other day, a colleague was emphasizing the importance of knowing one’s tradition: I agreed but suggested that this did not mean simply maintaining traditional ways and knowledge and certainly not literally imposing these on today’s world in a fundamentalist way. Another colleague reflected that surely we should be able to figure out for ourselves how to live in the world today. He certainly wasn’t dismissing the wisdom of the past but rather the need for us to take responsibility for our lives and our world the way the people who handed on the wisdom of these traditions did. I think that spiritual practices, forms and even beliefs – all elements of religion – need to be experienced, discovered and affirmed by each generation just the way justice and freedom has to be affirmed for each new age. In fact, to be truly faithful is to do precisely this which inevitably involves questioning and examining our assumptions, both individual and collective. To do anything less is actually to be unfaithful to the spirit of our traditions.

Brigid is celebrated on what is also the first day of Spring in Ireland and is seen, therefore, as a symbol of hope and new life. We could all do with a little of the hope she reflects. She is also a symbol of courage in the way that she claimed priesthood as her calling in a world that was changing (that is always changing). I could do with a little of that courage myself right now.