Description
Living the Mystery
Life is a mystery quite beyond the comprehension
of our normal ways of understanding. Having lived
as a Benedictine monk for over fifty years, Mark Patrick Hederman has learned how to engage with mystery. In this book he sets out to explain how to bring a new sense of the sacred into your life.
Despite clamorous reports to the contrary, he argues that religion is alive and well in our world. Those who say that it is dying or dead, that secularisation has taken over, are imposing their own ‘dogmas’ on an unsuspecting and gullible public. In this fascinating book he contends that most of us are religious and can’t help being religious. Being human means being ‘religious’, otherwise we would die of despair.
The idea that science and religion are opposing forces is false, but he maintains that the arts are the only way we can convey the sacred to today’s disbelieving world. A mytho-poetic language could provide a ‘middle voice,’ a ‘third language’ that bridges that gap between science and religion in our society.
Crimson and Gold
By the mid-twentieth century, County Limerick stood as an outlier – a Protestant enclave in a Catholic country. Between the warring factions, horses were the only common denominator. Crimson and Gold examines a rare circumstance and sets the stage for a theological juxtaposition.
Since the moment he met ‘God’ in the 1950’s on Knockfierna [Hill of Truth], Mark Patrick Hederman has spent a lifetime trying to square this epiphany with the theology he has been privileged to study from the age of 20.
Now, as a Benedictine Monk of Glenstal Abbey, Hederman continues to explore how we as Irish Roman Catholics can hone in on the most precious aspects of our faith and cancel the surrounding noise. More pressingly, the author invites us to ask where ‘God’ is to be in the Ireland of today.