wild west

One of the big advantages of having food sorted for the day is that I can wander away from the city centre and today that meant being immersed in nature once again. I've chosen two photos today. The main pic is the Liffey, at the very western edge of the city and the secondary pic is one example of the wildlife I encountered. But getting there wasn't originally part of today's plan.

It's been one of the best days of the pilgrimage so far and that is due in large part to the first event of today, a visit to St Catherine's Church of Ireland parish. I was hugely impressed by the sense of community and the friendliness of the place. I could feel God's presence very powerfully. 

St Catherine's is an evangelical parish and thus has a very different style of worship from the one I am used to. Saying that though, some of the most powerful elements, for example the time taken at the beginning to consciously bring ourselves before God and the focus on gratitude, celebrating the good things we receive, strongly resonate with my own Ignatian spirituality.

The service was very well done and at the end I spoke to Sharon, the woman who had invited me, and then to the Pastor and after that I felt no need to speak to any other members of the congregation to ask where God was in their life, because it had been so obvious over the course of the service - God was present in their prayer, in their families and friendships and in their sense of gratitude and trust and faith.

And that decision to depart, which I did question at the time, opened up the rest of the day. I had planned to spend the afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art again but, because I left St Catherine's when I did, the museum wasn't yet open due to a service in the grounds to mark Ireland's National Day of Remembrance. And so I decided, while waiting for the service to finish, to head down to the nearby Garden of Remembrance, which turned out to be a beautiful oasis right by the Liffey. And, from there, I decided to walk a little along the banks of the river and in doing so I entered what must be one of the most outstandingly beautiful parts of the city. Over the course of the afternoon, I saw three different types of fish in the clear waters, the most enormous dragonflies, the heron (pictured), another type of heron-like bird which swooped into the water in front of me and bobbed up, fish in mouth. 

I could write pages about today (I haven't even mentioned the the Folk Mass tonight or the visit to the shrine at Inchicore) but as I look back, the thing that strikes me is the way it unfolded - through chance and coincidence and what seemed like random choices to produce a day rich beyond anticipation.