De La Mennais Brothers: Making Jesus Christ better known and loved by young people

So here is the actual text that I mentioned back on Jan. 3rd, written during the aforementioned train journey: ******************** I feel so blessed to have seen and known true love in the eyes of people, be it fellow Brothers, friends, family. A love that does not seek to possess for oneself, but is rather a giving of self, a love that sets free rather than enslaves... I am, in one way, the sum of my experiences and of those of my forbears, but I am not  a slave to them. I am more than the some of my parts. Since I was a teenager I have sought to know myself better (and through this self-searching developed an interest in psychology) so that I might better serve God and his people. I have sought "to know my darkness and my light, so that I might be whole" (composer Michael Tippett). And all this was necessary. But in reality, it was and is a quest without end here in this life. Such wholeness I now realise can only be found in and through God, by handing over to Him a

It's funny how over the years I have found long train journeys highly conducive to creativity, whether it be writing songs (I wrote 2 in one train journey across France about 8 years ago) or writing spiritual reflections. An example of the latter form of creativity occurred yesterday when I was getting the train from Châteaulin, Finistère (on the extreme west coast of Brittany in west France - think the French Cornwall) to Paris (more about why in a later post). As long as I don't fall asleep for the duration, such journeys provide me with time to think, reflect, read, maybe watch a film on my laptop... and do something I have always enjoyed doing: making links between things - between, for example, a passage in a book I am reading and a theme that is dealt with in a film I have seen, or a song lyric, or an event in my own life, and from this more or less spontaneous integration of ideas from different sources then come up with something of my own. In this case it was a very pe