My bee-keeping has led me into a love of flowers and gardening.
The magic and mystery of the little bee lies in its ability to tell the others where the next source of nectar lies, the industry of the hive where each has a role, either as a honey collector, a nurse, a guard, a queen or a drone and the way they work as a unity to preserve the colony.
I am still in as much awe today as I was when I started as a student at Maynooth College in 1970.
My love of painting watercolours also has me rooted to this beautiful world as I try to capture in paint the glory I see around me.
Just as a lightning rod can earth a building these hobbies have earthed me to the wonder and splendour of this world which Pope Francis in his latest encyclical describes as a place where all of us, humans, animals, insects, plants, water, rocks and soil share a common home.
The Earth with its beauty and pleasures can take our breath away. It can have us believe that this world is all that is.
Who needs anything else? Is not life here on Earth enough? Besides what proof is there for anything beyond?
The fact is that even as we are drawn to the world and the pleasures it offers we are also caught in the embrace of the divine, that other reality which offers another kind of life. This reality too needs to be honoured – it cannot be ignored.
Fr. Roland Rolheiser says: ‘Sometimes it’s felt as a warm cocoon in which we sense ultimate shelter and sometimes we feel its judgement... Sometimes it blesses our fixation on earthly life and its pleasures and sometimes it frightens us.’
I have found myself in the grip of this reality too. At an early age it has led to my being so enthralled by this person Jesus Christ I decided to give my life to him as a priest.
This call of the divine, this awareness that the earth does not satisfy our deepest longing, we can try to push away by distraction or denial, but it stays, creating always a powerful tension inside us:
We are children of both Heaven and Earth: both God and the world have a right to our attention.
That’s how it’s meant to be.
God made us physical, flesh, Earth-oriented with virtually every instinct inside us reaching for the things of this earth.
We shouldn’t then expect that God wants us to shun this Earth, deny its genuine beauty to fix our eyes only on the things of heaven.
God did not build this world as a place where our obedience and piety are to be tested against the lure of earthly pleasure to see if we are worthy of Heaven.
And so I find myself torn between these two worlds with seemingly conflicting loyalties, caught between the love of this world and the love of God. And this is how it should be.
As I come in contact with the divine I am constantly reminded of his love for me.
Yet there is always a tension for I can still be lost in wonder as I open my beehive or a beautiful landscape takes my breath away. What I am saying could be summed up in this paradox: the earth gives me roots, the divine gives me wings.