Spiritual Life column

Here is my Spiritual Life column from today's Ilford Recorder:

'Bill Fay sings that “There are miracles / Everywhere you go.” What we might not then expect is for the song to continue, “I see fathers / Hold a little child's hand.” What Bill Fay celebrates in this song entitled ‘Cosmic Concerto (Life Is People)’ is the wonder of everyday life if we can but see it - seeds being sown by the wind to grow into trees; grandmas and grandpas blowing kisses into a pram; the infinite variation in the space of a human face.

Each moment we are alive is unique and unrepeatable. As another songwriter, Victoria Williams, puts it: “This moment will never come again / I know it because it has never been before.”

Simon Small has written that “Our minds find paying full attention to now very difficult. This is because our minds live in time. Our thoughts are preoccupied with past and future, and the present moment is missed.”

Jean Pierre de Caussade spoke about the Sacrament of the Present Moment. He meant by this God present in what is ordinary and mundane; there in life's daily routine. Simon Small has also written that “to pay profound attention to reality is prayer because to enter the depths of this moment is to encounter God.”

Regardless of whether we see God in the miracle of human existence, we can perhaps agree that, even though life also contains great suffering, there is real wonder, beauty and mystery to be found in everyday life.'

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Iona - Today.