It has been a rather long time getting here, but I’d like now formally to acknowledge the opening of The Living Room and to invite you to come and visit me there. The provision of this new place and its ongoing management is a gift from the contemplative Carmelite Order that many of you will already know from Clarendon Street Church.

The Living Room is a beautiful and silent space for rest, reading and reflection and is most conveniently located in the city centre.

The route there is indicated on the map below. Click on the image for larger view.

The Living Room is open from 9am until 3.30pm every weekday.

It is, however, closed on alternate Wednesdays. (That is, for October and November, it is open on Wednesday 21 October, on Wednesday 14 November, and on Wednesay 18 November.)

For more details, please bookmark on The Living Room website which will be in full swing very soon.

What do we mean by love? Where is it? Who knows about it? And how can we find it? Is the search for love best undertaken by being alone under vast skies, or is it better taken in fellowship through common and rewarding purpose? What does love ask of us, and how does it work?

Valentine’s Day is approaching and our culture is going to spend a lot of sound-bites around this four-letter word. The love most likely to be presented will be a high-visibility love. A love which we can watch and discuss like the weather. To a stranger such talk might appear as colloquial and charming; how we talk of southerly winds of attraction, the balmy days of union, and the ensuing seasons of commitment etc. Yet, while our appreciation for this mellifluous forecast might be fleeting or praising, the stranger will see that for this one day in the year, the seduction of love, romantic love in all its capitalist prescriptions, is offered as the only real antidote to the cold pain of human existence.

“Without love, humanity would not last a day.” When Eric Fromm said this in 1957, it was loading a lot on the word then, but it now seems even more exacting given our ecological fragility and thus human vulnerability. And so, if Fromm’s statement is true, then why out of all the myriads of loves that we could explore, have we chosen to celebrate the entertaining kind, the cutesy/easy/sugary love? The love of puppies and cushions? And of beach balls?

Nearly all the good artists take love seriously, certainly the real poets, and unarguably almost all of the mystics. That was my reckoning at least when I first had this conversation with myself late one night on a motorway, heading west, alone and trying to work out the semantics of it all.

NO! I do not LOVE ice-cream, cars, houses, technology!
I LOVE FREEDOM.
And YES, I do not LOVE you because you LOVE me,
I LOVE you because I’ve learnt HOW to love you.

But, what is love? What does it mean? What does it want? I know that if love is the solution to the pain of existence, it is also a big part of that pain too. And as a motorway theologian I argue that if love is also pain ..and God is love … well, then, we’re into something … unsettling. Is God pain – the Cloud of Unknowing? And is embracing that darkness, as St. Teresa of Lisieux says, an act of love? The suffering of agape and the suffering of mystical union should be collapsed no doubt, but one thing remains, love and suffering is, as all the ancient romantic sagas tell us, a truism. Christ sang of it too, albeit from another perspective. For the mystic to step into love, either by choice or charm is for her/him to step outside of community, and like the lone tiger roaming blizzardy deserts, to be ultimately alone is to be often killingly lonely. For acts of salvation, one must proffer good measures of one’s life to keep the bigger picture going. Ordinarily, it is called evolution. One generation’s teeth and hair must fall out, for another generation’s to grow. But what if that proffering has no direct bearing on humanity? What if the search remains separate from the commonplace? Is that love? Does love imply a relation with both life and death, and does love ask that while a part of us is struggling to live, a part of us must also struggle to die?

Is that love?

Or is this an erroneous, misguided and masochistic delusion?

Is love not the drive into the eyeball of life, the demand and the answer of the spirit to live and to celebrate, and to cry out in praise of life; to dance, to drink, to laugh, to love ?

Freud said that civilization is “a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals and after that families, then races, peoples, and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.” Is this the kind of love that has the spiritual bottle to receive life as gift and grace, to run with what has been given, to believe in what’s been done, to cherish what’s been offered, and to testify to it all by loving another?

Isn’t love believing in life?

Isn’t it the profound human wisdom of accepting the difference between you and I, and isn’t the strength and stature needed to hold that tension, ultimately – as Iris Murdoch has defined love – “the very difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Allowing oneself to partake in the delight, drama and stamina it takes to look into another pair of eyes and not flinch, is surely the groove through which life itself flows – reproduction, celebration, creation, forgiveness and service. Are these not the fruits of love? The fruits of salvation, the gifts of the Lamb, offered to those capable of navigating the paradox between giving and receiving, between what is mine and yours, between what is now and not now. Surely this is love? Surely, it is love that we learn to love for love’s sake? For most, accepting we are not the centre of the universe is the one of the greatest gifts that love can offer, and so is the ensuing and enabling freedom it gives for real community and fellowship.

Isn’t that love? Aren’t we loving then?

Or is there still yet another love which creates life (even more life) through the stuff of love itself. A love which transforms life into art, ethics, beauty, justice, abundance? Through and by its own bearing in the world? Many of the parables of spiritual alchemy show how to transform one reality into another through the laws of love. That is, in itself, love.

Is love not the genius of the imagination in figuring how to cook raw materials so that they turn into something else? Or, as Mozart said: “neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go into the making of a genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.” So is love the only antidote to blandness, despair, violence, anger and ugliness? Is love the genius of creating an antidote to a problem? For example, Christ transforming a mob calling for an accused woman’s blood into a dignified crowd by their addressing their own conscience, is testimony to love’s efficacy.

Is it that that love asks?

I know the four letters of love are the deeply grooved conduits between us and our universe.

For the most part I think we are all just trying to reach love, like sailors navigating home. Visibility is moderate, and the correlation between capitalism and our own sense of self makes it often difficult to see. Is it possible in a consumerist culture to celebrate love when it doesn’t follow the laws of economics? We know that love, real love has a boomerang effect in the sense that the more I give away, the more I have. Is this why love in a consumerist economy is trivialized and sugared because as Gandhi wrote, only the truly courageous can love? Can we say that of love, or is that unloving?!

I hope this day finds you straining with the reigns of 2007 in your hands, staring out from the golden chariot of adventure, poised and programmed to whip the thoroughbreds of desire and submission into headlong race of what is going to be the greatest, the truest, the most daring, the deepest, the most talked about, the most transforming, the most ambitious year ever seen since the beginging of time – yowza, yowza, yowza – com’on down folks, and roll on up to the greatest year to be ever lived -yozza, yozza, yozza…

MEANWHILE, for all of us still taking the little blue tablets, I’d like to welcome you to what has got to be the second most depressing (weatherwise) day of the year. Where I am today,you couldn’t take a photograph without a flash: people are walking up and down outside my window like victims (you choose) with high cheekbones, and hollow cheeks, watery, far away eyes and damp hair. They’re walking as if on the last leg of a wintery lap, going, well…who could care?
It’s a funny time to plant a new year’s celebration when we all know, even, the god’s, I mean dogs, in the streets know that we’re still in the season of dying. We can see that mother earth is still in her funeral weeds, that to laugh would be an affront to the entire northen hemisphere, and that today, for 12 hours at least we get to see what it’s like to be the other side of the grave…

OKAY, OKAY… for those of us still taking the little yellow tablets, I’d like to wish you all a peaceful and happy new year, with all kinds of happy surprises and hardy adventures, with all kinds of health and peace and good fortunes. Luckily, the world is still turning, we’re still alive, and God knows still able to hope on the new year to come. For all of us who are very interested in hope, and thus life, freedom, trust etc., I wish you a truely ripe 2007, a pluckable year,hanging on a lowered bow, itself hoping to be chosen amongst all the fruits in the garden for appraisal…’for many a flower were born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness upon the desert air’. Wake up and smell the coffee, as 6th form capitalists say, and if there is a clarion call for the year, is it to awaken more, better, deeper and smell the coffee..? Heck, smell all the coffees in the world. It’s a big world, ain’t it? Somewhere, someone, or maybe its everywhere, everyone says life this or that, but, there’s always the little rabbit-hole, there’s always ‘the other’ humanbeing; there’s always the little red tablets which tells us the plane and the rocket have transformed space, its up to us wake up and transform everything else. Ho ho ho ho…

Today, being marked by the most depressing drizzle in Ireland so far this year, is, also, and way more excitingly, the launch of my new state-of-the-spirit weblog!

Ye are all welcome, one and all!

Ideally, any brush with spirituality should be permission enough to come off the main thoroughfare, and for the sake of and in the name of sanity, I’m going to underline that motivation and see what happens.

Again, if you’re reading this now, you’re very welcome.

Maybe because it’s winter, maybe because of the high and screeching winds we’ve heard for at least two weeks in Ireland, maybe because of tilting angle of the cosmos, but something in my spirit has stirred and is sensing life and seeing a landscape which now lies way beyond the binding capitalism of contemporary Ireland. (In Ireland at the moment we’re being corralled into a corporate collectivity to a point of suffocation, and going is our childish instinct for simplicity and randomness to make way for this maturing economy)

For me nevertheless, there is still an underlying and instinct for something I am only beginning to sense. There is the sounds of the eternal world: the wind, the wave, the hollow droppings in a forest, the silence of the sky, etc.,

For scores of people in time this attuning has always been a drive, a training which has kept their eyes strained on the horizon, their ears opened to the winds, their senses referring to the stars.

They’re referred to generally as mystics.

Not hippies running from the brutal regimes of capitalism, but visionaries whose spirit has, if for short times only found a way home.

I’d like to invite you to come further with me, and in the next few blogs read some of their testimonies. Through the writings of shamans, poets, saints, martyrs, healers, artists, legislators, hobos etc., I’d like to pull up the horizon a little closer and glimpse with you over the edge of the world. I’d like to offer you then, instincts and visions of freedom through various mystical writings.

So, if you like, lets hang out with the big boys and girls, and let’s chew on some their classic texts like strong tobacco.

Howsaboutit?

I’d like to absorb some of the great accounts, which contemporary culture revers but remains suspicious. I’d like to explore, what with all their courage, strength and vision, history’s seers offered.

If you’re still reading this now, thank you for your time. And of course, you’re still most welcome to join me soon, when we’ll kickoff by throwing the ropes back onto the pier and set out for the curving horizon.

Yippee!!xx