Just returned from the Edinburgh Fringe where I was doing readings from my book, Reflecting with Paintings, in St Patrick’s church. The shrine church is situated two minutes from the Royal Mile; it is stunning, built in 1771, and is now served by the Redemptorist community, who were very welcoming.

Doing the Fringe was a fun experience, although we didn’t need traffic wardens to control the crowd. When I arrived Fr Joe Doherty explained that there were over 2,400 events and he had been to a Fringe play where there were 8 actors on the stage and 6 people in the audience. My hopes rose that I might get 6 people . . . Apart from the community and associates, the Fringe audience amounted to 84 over the three days, so I was relieved it wasn’t a total flop. My sister Ellen kindly came for two days with three guests – so that bulked out the audience nicely! And she hosted two wonderful dinners in a nearby Italian restaurant.

The real fun was walking around Edinburgh and getting a taste of what was on offer. There were hundreds of young people from all over the world pressing advertising leaflets into your hand, to come to their show – some of which were free. There was a huge variety of street theatre, including a Japanese student eating a banana slowly, though he didn’t manage to hold his audience captive for long. My favourite character was an old man, dressed in a tutu, who mimed to 40s music while “strumming” a string-less banjo, all the time keeping rhythm with a large pink flipper on his left foot! In the evening he was in the same spot selling The Big Issue.

There was an infectious spirit of celebration everywhere you went; people smiled and laughed readily; and when the rain came it didn’t seem to dampen much. A thousand thanks to the community and the audience for their kindness, support and hospitality.

We greet more new days in our life than we greet new people. Days come and go; months pass; years add up. Sometimes one day seems indistinguishable from another; we can look away with a distracted air, waiting for the day when life will surely start for real.

Yet each day is God’s unique gift to us, never to be repeated. When today has ended, it’s gone forever. One of Jesus’ favourite words in the Gospel is “today” – “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9). A new day is such a precious gift, we could ask: “Why has God given me this day?” Otherwise we’d have to confess with Thomas Hardy: Everything glowed and gleamed, but we were looking away.

My niece Dr Susan Ferry, a clinical neuropsychologist, has written a wonderful poem on the preciousness of being yourself for the day. I have her permission to share it with you. Hope you like it!

Live today
Open your mind to the miracle inside.
You are more than the title
others address you by.
You are more than the postcode
your birthday cards are sent to.

You are you.  Do you know what that means?
There is no one else who could be you;
there is no one just like you.
You are meant to be here,
in this time and this place.

Forget about hip size and hair colour.
Forget about being in the “in crowd”.
Forget about five year plans and targets.

Live today as you, so that tomorrow
you will know yourself that little bit better
and like yourself a tiny bit more.

There will be days, maybe months or years,
when voices of doubt take hold of your mind.
There will be times you hate yourself
and know no love inside.
There will be times all you seek
is an eternity of oblivion.

But just for today, live as you are,
with your lumps, your bruises and insecurities.
In order to become who you could be tomorrow,
live today just as you are.
Susan Ferry

We remember losing one or two teeth when we were kids, but the loss was replaced by the prospect of slipping the fall-out under our pillow, so the tooth fairy would reward us with a little dosh for our discarded enamel. A rich exchange.

As an adult, it’s a bit disconcerting to have a tooth fall out during a lecture!

Am in the Kairos Centre in London, a stunning retreat centre that leans in to Richmond Park, and am yapping to a lovely group of priests and sisters on a six-day retreat. Yesterday, ten minutes into the second lecture, I felt a distinct wobble in my mouth, and sent my tongue in search of trouble. I turned to the whiteboard to write something, anything, while my tongue was engaged in this new exploration.

When I turned around to speak, I felt a seismic shift inside my mouth. How do you, unobtrusively, explore the cavity of your mouth while lecturing on the intricacy of Luke’s infancy narrative? I put my hand to my mouth. And my thumb and forefinger came away neatly with a tooth from the middle of the lower set – whatever it is called. A clean, painless rupture . . .

I wasn’t sure what to do, so I instinctively shared my sudden loss – silly to deny the miniature drama – put the expired tooth on the table, and continued lecturing for the remainder of the hour. I was, however, newly distracted when I came to the ancient prophet Simeon – wondering an unscriptural thought – as I tried to imagine how many teeth he had left after all the prophecy. What was the fall out? And what about dear old Anna, the prophetess? How did she look when she smiled broadly?

I know this is not a critical loss, dear friends – I write this for fun! – but after the lecture I was told by the staff that the previous lecturer, a distinguished Benedictine, had also lost a tooth during his stay. That prompted the beginnings of suspicion. Was this something in the air, in the water? I looked around in the garden. I sat down. Was this because we were on the flight path to Heathrow with a plane flying over every 95 seconds? (I did time them.)

Had a good laugh afterwards when a staff sister shared that when she was visiting her parents in Ireland, she bit into a fruit and lost one of her upper teeth. Her mother immediately commanded her: “Get a taxi!”

“What for?” she asked. “Isn’t the dentist just up the road.”

“You can’t go out looking like that!” her mother said, appalled at the monumental vacancy.

The daughter insisted that she would walk.

“Then don’t even think of smiling at anyone on the way,” her mother said, “particularly not at Mrs McNulty. Sure we wouldn’t want you to let the family down so.”

Funny, isn’t it, how just a lost tooth can raise such problems.

The picture is of Glenveagh Castle, on the shores of Loch Veagh, in County Donegal, Ireland. My sister Mary and I had a really enjoyable visit after I finished the retreat.

I came back to the place of my ancestors, to give a retreat to priests and religious at Ards Friary, in Donegal. A stunning setting, inland from the Atlantic Ocean. Donegal is in the north-west of Ireland, and although it is in the north of Ireland geographically, it belongs in the south politically. It had too many rocks, too many hills, too many bogs, and too many Catholics for the British to be interested in incorporating into the political unit of Northern Ireland. On a map the county looks a bit isolated.

Both my parents came from this wild beautiful landscape, and as children we used to come from Scotland on holidays. We found it a magical land of untamed open spaces, populated by banshees and soft-spoken people and dozy donkeys, where everyone seemed to start visiting one another at 10 o’clock at night.  In the stories that would be told at night, in the aroma of turf fires and in the flame of an oil lamp, we heard how people survived with good humour the hardships of the land.  The beauty of the place was rarely mentioned except by those who had left, mostly in sad songs. And wherever you went there were clay pipes and soda bread and the Sacred Heart.

Mum and Dad would take us over Cruck Hill to visit relatives.  This was a duty, I confess, I hated – like trudging endlessly around the Stations of the Cross.  On the way we would have to stop at the holy well by Lake Columcille and pay our respects to the runaway saint, admiring the little mementoes that people left behind.  The relatives would always welcome us warmly – the Scotch they called us – and heap more cups of tea into our laps as they enquired about the lives of those who got away.  For the summer holidays we remained afloat on a sea of tea-leaves, and everywhere the landscape would dominate, the brooding hills, the rocks, the inlets. It was, as one poet said, a place where the seagulls came to be lonely.

Living on an island always makes it harder to escape but it was my mother who agitated to leave Ireland, and find life elsewhere. She always regarded escape as her main victory in life.  And she was never nostalgic about the life she left behind her, grateful to Scotland for giving her a home and a new place to belong.  My father tagged along, adapting himself to the new project.

Going back, you notice many changes. With the rise of the Celtic tiger new houses have sprawled up everywhere, including row upon row of dreary holiday homes that have all the character of cornflake boxes with holes in them. Now that the tiger is caged and wounded, the building industry has slowed almost to a standstill.

The beauty of the countryside still wins through, protesting what has been done to it in the name of progress. Recently the weather has been Mediterranean, and people share a new worry about the lack of water – a rare worry in a county where the rain regularly comes at you horizontally, making a cap useless!

It’s lovely to be back, meeting family and friends, and I escaped for an evening to attend the golden jubilee celebrations for Canon Willie McMenamen, the PP of the lovely parish of Drumoghill. He is as fresh and dependable as the landscape, a real Donegal man, with a lively sense of humour and a wonderful tribe of a family.  He enshrines the best of priesthood: humble, dedicated, with a special care for those who are sick and housebound. Ad multos annos!  

Last weekend, I attended the Northern Catholic Conference, which was held at Hope University in Liverpool, a stunning green campus near the centre of the city. There were about 600 people there, all enthusiastic to hear Good News. The atmosphere was warm and welcoming and cheerful: it felt like a rock festival celebrating the human spirit! And I got to meet the legendary Fr Jimmy Collins, now 92 years old, an elfin diminutive man of gigantic spirit, who had invited me to lecture on “The Face of Christ in John’s Gospel.”

Before going I prepared by reading the whole of John’s Gospel again, out loud to myself in my room. The community thought I must be unwell, talking away to myself, but I wanted to hear the beauty of this message again. I’d like to share one thing that struck me.

Unlike the other evangelists, John begins his Gospel before creation, before history, before time:

In the beginning was the Word:
the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things came to be,
not one thing had its being but through him.

This Word came into the world and suffered a double rejection: the world that he created did not know him and his own people did not accept him. Effectively, the Word was the stranger from heaven, yet he was the one who had come to reveal the truth about God and befriend humanity because God loved the world.

By the time you read to the end of John’s Gospel you notice the images of Jesus have radically changed. He is now the one who puts a towel around his waist, kneels down on the floor, and washes the feet of his disciples. He calls them friends – because he has let them know everything the Father has revealed to him. He has no secrets from them: everything he knows he shares with them. Nothing he keeps to himself. Nothing. Who he is, he shares in love.

He is the one who cooks breakfast over a charcoal fire, beside the Sea of Galilee, waiting for his hungry fishermen friends to make shore. He is the one who dares ask his friend Peter, who has recently denied him: “Do you love me?” – anxious for that friendship to be renewed.

The transition from the Word who was with God in the beginning, the creator and ancestor of all, to the one who washes his friends’ feet and makes them breakfast, struck me deeply. It emerged from one reading of the Gospel. It still stuns me . . . I hope it strikes you as well.

Stay well, dear friends, and I hope you experience the friendship of the Lord.

Flew down to Perth, the capital city of Western Australia, where the cost of building land is more expensive than in Sydney. Beautiful city, with a wide international ethnic mix. Am here at the invitation of Patricia Rodriques, the formidable principal of Chisholm Catholic College. I have nicknamed her La Contessa – when she walks into a room, everyone knows she is there. I enjoyed giving a course to the whole staff and the staff of the new college, Holy Cross, in Chisholm’s lecture theatre – about 175 people attended. They were a lovely group – youthful, interested, lively, Australian.

Following Chisholm, I travelled north for about one and a half hours to Northam, for a day’s seminar (six hours) with another group of teachers. They regard themselves as country rather than city people, insisting the pace is more laid back and relaxed. (You can catch from the picture above how relaxed they were.)

Got lost when I first walked into the city of Perth. I saw a man standing at the entrance of a café; he was wearing a dressing-gown and slippers. I presumed he belonged, surely local, so I asked him for directions. He looked into the middle distance, pointed to the sky, and said, “Somewhere up there . . .” I remembered to thank him, presuming he was a theologian with the habit of leaving people none the wiser.

I then asked a woman, who kindly said she was going in that direction and invited me to walk with her. “Where are you from?” she asked. I told her, Scotland.
“Where do you live?” she continued, reckoning as an Australian that I didn’t live where I came from. I told her.
Then she asked, “What are you doing in Perth?”
I asked her if she was a member of the Australian intelligence service, and she smiled, but steadfastly continued her interrogation. By the time we arrived at Murray Street Mall, I was emotionally drained.

Just spent a very enjoyable week lecturing in Geraldton, Western Australia – the second largest Catholic diocese in the world, after Siberia. I went at the invitation of Michael Friday, a school principal whom I had met in Hawkstone. The kindly Bishop Justin closed all the Catholic schools and invited the priests and the teachers to attend a course on The Beginning of the Gospels. Some of the teachers travelled over 1,000 kilometres for the course.

They hired the Queen’s Theatre in Geraldton – very spacious and plush – and it was really rewarding to present the Gospels to some 285 people. The teachers who attended were rewarded with credits, and a small handful turned up who had no remote interest in religion – there only to win the credits – spending their time at the back of the theatre on Facebook. Why they did not decently abandon the project puzzled me; what they did on Facebook for six and a half hours puzzled me even more. The vast majority of people were wonderfully attentive and encouraging, and it was a privilege to accompany them.

Following the lectures, the organisers kindly chartered a small plane, piloted by Paul, and organised a day off for me to fly to the Abrolhos Islands, on the edge of the Continental shelf. The only people allowed to live on the islands are professional fisherman for the rock lobster season of 14 weeks.

The islands are famous for their shipwrecks: the complex spread of reefs that you can see clearly from a small plane would be unnoticeable approaching the mainland at night, particularly if your ship was being hastened by the strong westerly winds.

They are now rewriting the history of Australia because they have discovered that the Batavia, a ship of the Dutch East India Company, was shipwrecked there on her maiden voyage in 1629. Many people died with no food or water, and over 122 people were murdered by the undermerchant of the ship, Jeronimus Cornilius, and his men. Cornilius banished the soldiers to another island, in the hope they would die, but they built a fort to protect themselves – now the first known European building in Australia. The survivors were later rescued; the mutineers were caught and slowly tortured to death. This is new grisly beginning of the European presence in Australia!

The first Easter began in the dark and in the tomb. The Gospel story of John begins at daybreak with someone whom many people had written off as a lost cause – Mary of Magdala. When she reaches the tomb and sees the stone rolled away, she interprets this to mean that Jesus’ body must have been stolen. She finds it easier to believe in the night-time antics of grave robbers than the night-time antics of a God who refuses to let death have the last word. There will be no R.I.P. for Jesus.

When Peter and the Beloved Disciple hear her story they immediately start running for the tomb, and we have a marvellous action picture of the Easter sprint! The Beloved Disciple runs faster than Peter, and when he reaches the tomb he waits for Peter to catch up. The figure of love gets there first and kindly holds back for the figure of authority to arrive and go into the tomb first.

When Peter goes he can make out only the cloths lying around. The Beloved Disciple then goes in and sees the same evidence, but in contrast to Peter, “he sees and believes.” He sees more than the remains of things; he sees with the eyes of faith what this absence means. His is a love that sees through the dark.

One of the marks of John’s Gospel is the special love that Jesus has for one of his disciples, who is unnamed. This disciple is presented as the ideal follower of Jesus, the one who is closest to him at the Last Supper, and the only disciple who stands at the foot of the cross when Jesus dies.

Now, in running to the tomb on Easter morning, the urgency of this disciple’s love gets him there first, and the sensitivity of his love makes him the first to believe. And later, when Jesus stands unrecognised on the shores of the lake, it is the Beloved Disciple who informs Peter, “It is the Lord!” His is a love that sees what others do not see.

If Peter enjoys the primacy of authority, the Beloved Disciple enjoys the primacy of love. This takes nothing away from Peter; it just means that in Paul’s phrase – “if love can persuade” – it can get you to the point quicker.

In the appendix to John’s Gospel Peter will be questioned by Jesus: “Do you love me more than these others do?” The Beloved Disciple, you notice, is not questioned. You watch Peter as the figure of authority is challenged to become the figure of love. In the Christian story, authority without love is not only an empty exercise but a dangerous one.

The Easter story is a timely reminder in the present climate that it is love above all that must characterise our Christian mission and ministry.

Lent is the period of 40 days before Easter, excluding Sundays, when Christians are asked to prepare for the great festival of Easter. It excludes Sundays because these are special days when we celebrate the resurrection of the Lord.

Some people use it as a graced time to keep fit, to try out a new diet and lose the mounting paunch, or to dump some habit that’s beginning to take over their lives. Others see it as an opportunity to get closer to the Lord, to dedicate more time to deepening that friendship, to journey with Jesus and learn again to be his companion on the road.

Personally I see Lent as a special time to hear the call of Jesus again: “Come follow me.” I wrote the book Journeying with Jesus – a Companion’s Guide – as a kind of guidebook for the journey, with seven important stations on the way where we pause with Jesus and take time to reflect on our lives.

The first station is the wilderness where we see Jesus propelled into the wilderness to face a variety of temptations. Will Jesus face the hunger that is part of his mission or take a short-cut and turn stones into bread? Can we in our turn serve the Lord with an undivided heart even when things go wrong in our lives and we feel alone?

The second station is with the woman at the well, where Jesus meets a Samaritan woman who has been hopelessly unlucky in her relationships. We watch as Jesus does not run in the opposite direction but reach out to her in kindness. How do we meet people who are different from us, whose lifestyle we disapprove of, who have made a legion of mistakes?

The third station is with Jesus on the mountain of transfiguration. After Jesus takes a poll of who the crowds think he is – and the answers he receives are not very flattering – he climbs a mountain to pray to his Father. As part of the prayer he hears his identity announced: “This is my beloved Son!” In the voice of love he is transfigured. What would make us radiant and aglow in our own lives? Whose voice would make all the difference in the world?

The fourth station is along the road of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus’ public ministry could be filmed as a road movie that starts in the wilderness and eventually reaches its destination in Jerusalem. Jesus leaves all behind him – family, home, neighbours – and takes new roads, gathering new friends, and devising new ways of reaching out to people. The journey is not just from one place to the next but from one perspective to the next. In staying close to Jesus we borrow his eyes and learn to look at people and the world in a new way.

At the fifth station we are at table with Jesus at the Last Supper. We watch Jesus trying to be realistic about the time of terror ahead and notice how his disciples cannot enter that conversation but have a seminar about which of them is the greatest. You realise that you can be in the same room as people but on a different planet. If you sensed your death was approaching in a few hours, and you organised a final meal: who would you invite? What would you love to leave behind you?

The sixth station is the crucifixion and death. We notice the absence of key friends; the tourists who pause on their busy schedule; the chief priests howling with delight. You look up at Jesus and wonder what he did wrong to end up here. Could he have done things differently? You notice how he refuses to move out of his agony and disappointment, breathing words of forgiveness. You love this man’s stubborn love to the end. Can you learn anything from the way he dies?

The seventh station is on the road to Emmaus, where we join two bewildered and hurt disciples getting out of Jerusalem. The city is the place where they watched the death of their leader and also the demise of their hopes. They are now ex-disciples of a dead prophet with nowhere to go but away. Then you watch a stranger join them and reveal himself to them in the breaking of the bread. And you realise that you meet the same Jesus in the breaking of the bread when you join the celebration of the Eucharist. And your heart burns with gratitude.

Whatever you do, dear friends, during this special time of grace, I hope you have a happy Lent!

The snow seems to be thawing at last - funny how what was first welcomed as beautiful became tiresome so quickly, making every journey a grim haul.  If you had to dig yourself out, it couldn't have been as bad as these poor folk. Check out the link and enjoy: The Big Dig Out

I was sent the following letter which is the funniest evaluation I have ever received. The writer is happy for me to share it but wishes to remain anonymous on the site.

Dear Fr. Denis,

Thank you so much for the series of talks in Clapham which I miss and have to make do with Andrew Marr.

However I did make the very wise investment in buying your CDs on Jesus and the Gospels which – possibly not your most uplifting compliment – have completely transformed my ironing.

Previously the mistress of “smooth it out and bury it in the basket” now has everything ironed to perfection as I ponder the transfiguration. My husband admitted that 15 years of marriage to a Catholic has had little impact on him, but 15 pairs of immaculately ironed underpants in his drawer is making him think again.

I had a decidedly dodgy professor who tediously reminded his female juniors that the way to a man’s heart was not through his stomach but through his underpants. Perhaps I misjudged the professor as the truth of this remark has now been revealed.

I heard the children whispering, “Ask her now – she’s got her Jesus CDs on.” Clearly and happily the influence of the CDs goes beyond my personal struggles.

All the best for your future adventures and many thanks again.

The season of Advent resets the clocks and calendars of Christian worship as Advent summons us to a new beginning. And as we approach Christmas people worry about all sorts of things: Will the weather hold up? Where to go at Christmas? Will we survive the in-laws who are coming to stay? Will we eat or drink too much, or say the wrong thing? Will we survive Christmas dinner, without someone saying: “I never liked you anyway!” Will it be a dreary old time or a good time?

And, of course, there is the worry about presents, about what to give this one or that one; and you hear people politely checking your pyjama size, or worse, your slipper size for predictable gifts. One woman said she knew she was getting old when one of the kids gave her a set of thermal underwear for her Christmas!

Does Santa still have your address or do you have to buy your own presents? As one observer noted:

Just before last Christmas, I sat in a café inside a fashionable department store, watching the shoppers come and go. Most of them, I thought, had come not to buy things they already wanted. It was as if they had come looking for something to want – something that might fill a nameless need, even if only for a moment.

And so the hunt goes on for something that will satisfy the huge hunger inside us.

Time moves on; perhaps this Advent is a good moment to pause, to look back and to look forward – to look back at a year that is closing and look ahead to the year that is beginning.

Advent is a time to pause. The writer Gertrud Nelson makes an interesting suggestion when she writes:

Pre-Christian peoples who lived far north and who suffered the loss of life and light with the disappearance of the sun had a way of wooing back life and hope. Their solution was to bring all ordinary action and daily routine to a halt. They gave into the nature of winter, came away from the fields. And put away their tools. They removed the wheels from their carts and wagons, decorated them with greens and lights and brought them in to hang on their halls. They brought the wheels indoors as a sign of a different time, a time to stop and turn inward. Slowly, slowly they wooed the sun god back. Imagine what would happen if we were to follow that practice and remove – just one – say the right front tyre from our cars and use this for our Advent wreath. Indeed, things would stop. Having to stay put, we would lose the opportunity to escape or deny our feelings because our cars could not bring us away to the circus in town.

Interesting thought, that . . . We pause for a few moments, leaving our cars intact with four wheels and a spare.

When you pause and look back at this year, do you think the world is a safer place than it was this time last year?

Do you think our world has progressed much? Do you think you are a better person? How have you grown this year? What good things have happened to you? What bad experiences have you endured?

Have you lost anyone close to you this year? Has anyone close to you died, or has someone you loved moved away, out of your life? Or have you moved on from them? Is there a new absence in your life?

Have you made new friends? Has it been a good year for your family? Have you stayed close to them? Do they know you love them?

Do you feel better about yourself now than you did last year? Are you still excited about your vocation, your life, your work? Or are you content in retirement, watching the seasons change and listening to the birds sing? How have you changed?

And when you look ahead to the coming year, how do you feel? Are you looking forward to this new year? Is there anything you are afraid of? Is there something you are dreading? What are looking forward to? Anything?

Dear friends, we are a community of memory that looks back; we are a community of Spirit that looks forward. It’s important, though not easy, to look back with kindness, and not be trapped in the past. It’s essential like the four old people at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel to look forward stubbornly in hope.

This year is closing down and a new year beckons. Let us hand over the past to God for his healing blessing. Let us ask the Lord to face the future with us because we do not want to face it alone.

Let us pray for each other, and for all those far away, the ones we love and cherish: that each one might know the promise of the Lord that brings the Gospel to a close:

“Know this, I will be with you even unto the end of the world.”

November 17th 2009 A disappointing day at hospital When I got to Basingstoke hospital earlier today I was really excited: the registrar looked at the inflammation on my side following the kidney operation and said that they could operate on that at the same time as the other hernias, which would diminish the pain and the inflammation. Great, I thought.

Then I saw the nurse, who took my temperature and blood pressure, asked 73 questions and filled in 4 pages of forms.

Then I got into a smock, slippers and dressing-gown and got tagged on each arm.

Then I saw the anaesthetist who asked me 30 questions and ticked boxes in another two pages. She said she would see me in about twenty minutes to knock me out. Thus cheered, I went out and sat in the waiting room.

Then the matron came calling my name, hustling me into the nearest office. I felt privileged and said, “A real matron! We see you only on telly.”

She smiled and asked: "How forgiving are you feeling, Father?"

She explained that there was no bed for me, and that there were a large number of emergency cases. I said fine: things happen, thinking I would be back tomorrow. But she explained that they should be able to do the operation sometime before Christmas . . .

My sister Ellen, who had flown down from Scotland, had waited to hear I was in the operating theatre, but she saw me sooner than intended – dressed and ready to leave. We had tea and sympathy and buns.

Hope your day is going better.

Personal prayer is simple; it is also challenging: being ourselves before God while allowing God to be God. Two different “presences” come together to forge a relationship of mutual caring.

Intimacy can frighten us at the best of times, and we can be shy of being ourselves in prayer as we can with those we trust. We’re ever alert to signs of disapproval, wariness, shuffling. Should we adjust or carry on?

Prayer is a meeting between two lovers, each longing to be closer to one another. It’s a coming together, to talk and to listen, to understand and, hopefully, to grasp the beauty and complexity of each other. If we want to be known for who we are, nervous about being misrepresented, it’s a safe bet that God wants the same.

In our prayer the challenge is to be real, truthful, heartfelt, unaffected. There is little point in dressing up before the one who knows us better than we could ever know ourselves. And when we pray regularly at least God can’t pretend he doesn’t know us.

In personal prayer we approach the God of all mercies without make-up or disguise, without mask or pretence, hoping to find an expression for who we are and what we’re facing in life. Personal prayer is not performance; it is the language of real life.

Take an example from Saint Paul: the apostle pleads with God in prayer to take away his newly discovered weaknesses, which seriously embarrass him as a perfectionist. For someone who has never once disobeyed the law, been a Pharisee to outclass all other Pharisees, this new discovery is seriously disturbing. But God’s declared response reveals to Paul that this will never happen: his request is refused, and he will have to learn to live with weaknesses all the days of his life.

You then watch Paul make a dramatic shift, suddenly explaining to his now bewildered readers: “I will be very happy to make my weaknesses my special boast, so that the power of Christ may stay over me.” How about that for a spectacular change of perspective? How about that for the power of prayer?

Paul doesn’t try to hide from God, although previous to this he’d always suspected that God had no truck with weakness, only with flawless performance. In the light of prayer Paul has now moved beyond that view and shares an utter stunning revelation: not only that weaknesses are no obstacle to God’s love but that God’s glory can shine through them. Indeed it might be true to say that God is a lot more skilled at accepting our weakness than we are.

Personal prayer is neither a litany of alleluias nor a shopping-list of petitions: prayer is much more nuanced and can take many forms. As in the great book of the Psalms, prayer can be a scream or an endless groan, a grievance for some hurt; it might be an angry complaint or an accusation; it could be a thank-you note for a loved one or for a special grace that has been granted; it could be delicious praise, shyly made.

The great tradition of the Psalms teaches us that we should pray always, no matter what. Whatever mood or condition we are in, whatever is happening in our life, we keep in touch with the God who is slow to anger and rich in graciousness. Nothing about us is excluded from prayer.

One of the great privileges of being a priest is to listen to people who come “just for a chat” – which often turns into a struggle to be real about themselves, their relationships, their aspirations. They come not to discuss projects or plans or business – thank God for that! – but to find a voice for what in happening in their lives and what they think is really going on.

After sitting down and carefully adjusting something that doesn’t need adjusting, they begin by commenting on the fitfulness of the weather or the colour of the curtains – anything except what they have come to talk about. That’s okay: we all need time to gather our confidence and point ourselves in the right direction. You wait for a gentle break in the nervous flow of small talk to ask Jesus’ risky question: “What do you want me to do for you?”

The story then begins cautiously, often in a roundabout way, as the person heads for the destination. You pay attention to the pauses, the rephrasing, the uncertainty, the adjustments, the sudden breaths. You taste the awkward silences. The body language tells its own story. At times you might wonder what kind of God they believe in and how they got to this point. You resist interrupting, clarifying, filling in. You try your best to stay focused without thinking about Brother Anthony’s soup. You cannot help but admire their heroic effort to be frank and the resolve to get it all out.

You try to give this person your best thinking while respecting ambiguity and confusion. You refuse to write their script or pretend that you have some exclusive hotline to God that will guarantee a quick fix to their problems. You stay humble before such huge honesty and try to honour it, yes, with your own. You remind yourself that you are supposed to proclaim Good News, not just orthodoxy, so you make a real effort to ask the right questions, understand the issues, broaden the canvas, and, together, seek a way forward.

These times are very close to prayer.

And I know, dear reader, that soon I will be in that other chair when I visit my ancient wise mentor. And he will ask me, after the usual entrance rites and a double gin and small tonic: “So tell me, Denis, what’s going on?” And then it will be my turn to tell the story, find delicate words, pause, rephrase, correct, try, with as much honesty as I can muster, to relate the truth about myself. Not easy. But we all need someone with whom to be real before God, as a practice for prayer.

Prayer, of course, is not just about ourselves, transfixed by our own agenda in a free counselling session with God. We are expected to have a place in our prayer and in our lives for the poor, the lonely, the outcast, the forgotten. Prayer is not only being open to God about ourselves but bothering God about the peripheral people. Prayer pushes us out, beyond ourselves.