WOOD YOU BELIEVE

Book excerpt: A Spirituality of Healing and Integration, offers much needed wisdom for the spiritual landscape we find ourselves in at this time. The inspiring symbolism, intertwined with scripture, story and insights from psychology makes it a compelling read. It outlines succinctly and clearly where we have come from and where we find ourselves as church in Ireland today. But it doesn’t stop there, it navigates us towards a spirituality of the future and offers a direction in which we can be orientating ourselves in religious practice. ‘Life is like a voyage on the sea of history, often dark and stormy, a voyage in which we watch for the stars that indicate the route.’ (Spe Salvi 49) In Vol 6 of Wood You Believe, through scripture and sculpture, story and self-acceptance, Jim Cogley encourages his readers to face the turbulence of today’s faith voyage and drop anchor in the Spirit of God within. Shadow and light, wholeness and imperfection are embraced on the self-abandon voyage leading towards the ‘living water welling up within to eternal life’. (John 4:14) Phrases such as, ‘The Samaritan woman went away with the well’; ‘When we listen something new is born’; ‘Transformation’; ‘Under new management’; ‘Let go, let God’; are like pop-ups that sparkle anew throughout A Spirituality of Healing and Integration leading the reader to ‘Jesus, the true light, the sun that has risen above the shadow of history.’ (Spe Salvi 49) Bishop Eamonn Walsh