Michael Harding

I didn't mean to talk about Love. But I remember a writer telling me one time that you cant write unless you're in love. And I remember what Saint Augustine said; Love is not two people gazing at each other, but both together gazing out into the universe.So it's a huge word. and hard to make it mean something. and it slipped into the podcast unexpectedly. I hope you enjoy it. And thank you for being here. That's something that matters to me and I appreciate your company more than I can say. So I'll say this; love is like holding hands.

Today, I want to talk about the subversive freedom of faith. It is an idea I have been working on for two or three years, and I am finally finding the courage to share it with you. When I started this podcast six years ago, I was reluctant to discuss religion. I didn't want to get caught in the past or be associated with something seen as old-fashioned. Yet, I knew there was something deep in my heart that I needed to share—something I hadn't fully explored in my books or newspaper columns. It was a secret I had always carried that sustained me through both good times and bad: my faith.Over the past six years, I began reflecting on Buddhist and Christian practices through the podcast, and I have loved every minute of it. However, the world and Ireland have changed since then. There is a polarity and division in public discourse now that feels entirely unexpected. Nobody could have imagined this level of anger and ideological division. When you boil it down, these conflicts may seem to be about surface-level emotional issues, but the root cause is always an ideological viewpoint. I don't mean one particular side; I don't hold a position on any current public debate, except to say that ideology and arguments about ideas will get you nowhere.A couple of nights ago, I was at a dinner table conversation where we were asked what really changed our lives. For me, life changed around the age of 40 when I truly began to understand the word forgiveness. I arrived at this understanding through Buddhist practice. Recently, I spoke on the podcast about Santideva, a great philosopher in the Buddhist tradition—an Indian philosopher, I believe, though I am no scholar. From him, I learned a practical way to address internal anger and approach forgiveness.Forgiveness brings a distinct lightness. When someone offends you, forgiving them allows you to let go rather than holding onto the wound, hurt, or sense of injustice. If you don't forgive, it is almost impossible to avoid becoming angry or harboring hatred. When you choose hatred, you are essentially drinking poison and hoping it will kill your enemy. You are consumed by it, and it does you no good. It becomes a heavy, unbearable suitcase that you carry around every single second of the day.Loving your enemy lightens your load. If I forgive someone, I am the one who benefits. Forgiveness does not stop you from seeking justice or restitution, but it provides the very lightness of spirit required to pursue justice effectively. If you pursue justice while consumed by negative, disturbing emotions like hatred, it will exhaust you.This week, another quality has been on my mind: gratitude. A few days ago, I was driving to Cavan on a beautiful day. I had just returned from a relaxing week-long holiday in Spain and was heading to the Farnham Estate Hotel for lunch. Driving through the Cavan landscape, past Lough Oughter and Killeen, I felt profoundly grateful to be alive. I grew up there, and looking at the lakes and rivers brought back the beautiful feelings I had as a young boy cycling through the area.Gratitude is a blessing that keeps you healthy. Consider it this way: if you live a completely secular life and believe religion is entirely irrelevant or old-fashioned, you focus instead on politics, justice, and earning a living. When things go well, who do you thank? You might be grateful to your spouse or your children for their support, but that is a secondary form of gratitude. They didn't give you your life or your achievements. Ultimately, a secular mindset suggests you achieved everything yourself, meaning you should only be thankful to yourself. To me, that seems like a very lonely place to be.

There are mornings when I wake before the light has reached the fields. The kettle begins its low murmur in the kitchen, and the silence in the house feels less like an absence than a presence waiting to be acknowledged. At my age I have stopped expecting revelation. I no longer imagine that God is waiting around the next corner with a trumpet or a commandment. Instead, I have come to believe that faith begins much more quietly. It begins with a small opening.Not a certainty.Not an argument.An opening.I think that is what prayer has always been for me. Not speaking to God so much as becoming available to God. There is a difference. One is an activity. The other is a disposition. One is something I do; the other is something I allow.When I was young, I imagined faith meant believing the right things. If only I could hold the correct doctrines firmly enough, God would surely reward my diligence. But life has a way of wearing away certainty. Love does it. Grief does it. Illness does it. Watching people you admire fail does it. Growing older certainly does it.Eventually you discover that faith is not built from certainty at all. It is built from consent. It is the quiet consent to remain open, even when you do not understand.

We all know what forgiveness means in Christian terms. But there is another way to approach this. In the writings of Santideva a great buddhist master there is a way of looking at suffering that can be powerful and liberating. Personally nothing has changed my life more than contemplating this teaching. So for that reason I'm doing this as a clear attempt at explaining the teaching. it's contained in the text called The Bodhicarayavatara. There is nothing more important that this text. And I'm making an enthusiastic attempt to open a door for you into this space, but you could also find lots of stuff on the internet, on you tube, and in books about it. Just one practise. One way of looking at anger management and your life will change if you practice it. so said Santideva. enjoy.

I got absorbed this week in reflections about the need for religion. up until now I've been saying for many years that faith and ritual help me personally through each day. they bring joy into my life like nothing else can. they bring meaning into my life and a sense of satisfaction and a sense of worth. And I've been saying this is all just my view. But to be honest it becomes more clear as the years go on that young people need this wisdom more than anyone. `It's not about evangelising for a particular religion but it's about discovering the right way for you to express your own beautiful faith and to find a way to be joyful in the realisation that we belong in the world, we are not strangers to each other, and there is a transcendent mystery that wraps us up like a child in it's mothers arms. So that's what was going on in my head last week, and maybe because the sun was shining so much I mixed up the podcasts and dropped a pervious episode. So apologies for the delay and here it is, the episode for July 11th of 2026. Blessings. Michael

Living Beneath the SurfaceOne of the things that continually amazes me is how easily we mistake the surface of life for life itself. We spend our days moving from one appointment to the next, watching the weather, checking our diaries, answering messages, thinking about what needs to be done. Our attention is almost always drawn outward, absorbed by whatever happens to be demanding it in the moment.Yet the moment we become still, we discover another world beneath the surface.Many people imagine that meditation is simply about becoming present to the present moment. In my experience, something quite different happens. The first thing we encounter is not peace but movement. Beneath the ordinary business of the day lies a constant river of memories, anxieties, resentments, desires and fears. We discover just how much is already happening within us.Perhaps this is one reason our culture finds silence so difficult. Constant activity protects us from meeting ourselves. We remain on the surface because we are afraid of what lies underneath.There are good reasons to descend into that inner world. Therapy, at its best, helps us understand its landscape. It gives us language for our wounds and teaches us how our hidden emotions shape the lives we lead. At moments of crisis it can be an extraordinary gift.Prayer, however, asks something different.Rather than analysing every emotion that arises, it invites us to remain quietly present. We acknowledge the thoughts and feelings as they pass, but we do not chase them. We simply stay.I find it helpful to rest my attention on something simple: a candle, an icon, perhaps even an ordinary object resting on the table. The object itself is not important. It is simply an anchor, something gentle that keeps the mind from being carried away by every passing thought.As the turmoil gradually settles, awareness begins to return to the body. We notice the quiet rhythm of breathing, not as something we are forcing, but as something already being given. Breath comes and goes of its own accord. We receive it far more than we create it.Slowly another awareness emerges. We begin to sense that we belong within something larger than ourselves. The boundaries between "me" and the world soften. Whether sitting in a garden, on a train, or in a crowded city, there comes a quiet recognition that existence itself is carrying us.It is difficult to describe this without reaching for poetry.I sometimes think of a single note in a piece of music. Every note is born out of silence and returns to silence. Without the silence there would be no music at all.Perhaps we are something like that.Our lives arise from a deeper stillness, sound their brief note, and disappear again into the silence from which they came. We are not separate from that silence; we belong to it.At some point, almost imperceptibly, meditation crosses another threshold. What began as an exercise in attention becomes something else entirely. The silence no longer feels empty. It feels inhabited.The loneliness that so often accompanies ordinary consciousness begins to dissolve. In its place comes a quiet certainty of belonging—not merely belonging to the world, but belonging within a presence that has been waiting patiently all along.I have come to think of this as the place where meditation gives way to prayer.Prayer is no longer something we are doing. It is the discovery that we are already being held.The astonishing thing is that this place is never far away. It waits beneath every ordinary day, beneath every anxious thought, beneath every distraction. We do not create it. We simply become still enough to notice that it has been waiting for us all along.The silence is not something we enter.It is something that has always been waiting to receive us.

Beauty and the Silence that is waiting for youOn Tuesdays I'm a Buddhist - with Michael HardingJul 3 at 6:00 PMNewEdit The heart of it is silence. The silence that exists between one note and another. Every single note in the concerto, every piano note must arise out of silence And each single note must fall away into silence. And thereby is the mystery of silence in the beauty of the music that comes out of it And then I began to see my own breath as a music, my own voice, my own body as a kind of a dance This thing that I thought I was, I thought this is me, but it's not me. It's simply a leaf that grew. It's, it's simply a note that comes out of the silence. I come out of silence I belong deeply in silence. And when I just focus on an icon or a candle and I become still and I move down deep inside myself, I move deep through the ocean of disturbing emotion, the jealousies, the anger, the hatred, the longing, the lust. ......... I just go deeper and deeper by being still. Eventually I come to my body. Eventually I come to my breath And then the threshold appears before me. The sense that something is drawing me even deeper into silence, into a sense that I belong here. I am not alone here I am embraced as if in my mother's arms And that's the core of beauty.

So I feel this one is a personal achievement. Because there are for me two pillars on my faith as a Christian. One is the death of Jesus, violent and dark, and like something out of a war movie, and the other is the list of Beatitudes or blessings that are delivered with the soft yet strong grace of a buddha. These are the two pillars. They are the one thing. And they are both hugely mirrored in Buddhist philosophy. So what I'm doing here is in two parts. The first returns again to Camus as a modern touchstone for a meditation on the Cross and I have put the text in here as follows because it distills so much of my thought. The second half of the podcast probes those blessings, Beatitudes, from a personal point of view. I hope you enjoy and thank you so much for supporting the podcast. If you have not yet gone to Patreon.com to subscribe to the Michael Harding podcast please do so now, because it helps keep the podcast on the air. The following full text is only available on Patreon to subscribers. Thank you