Author: Justin

Roimh Lá Eorpach na dTeangacha, déanann an Bráthair Cillian Ó Sé OSB machnamh ar a thuras ó leanbh aonteangach go fear ilteangach…

Rugadh mise ar an 1940 i gCathair Chorcaí. Tógadh mé sa chathair freisin go dtí go raibh mé 20 bhliain d’aois. D’fhreastal mé ar an mbunscoil ba chomhgaraí do theach mo mhuintire. Bhí na ranganna go léir trí Ghaeilge, seachas na ranganna i mBéarla agus Teagasc Críostaí. Ní raibh aon Ghaeilge ag mo thuismitheoirí; dá bhrí sin, ní raibh ar a gcumas aon chabhair a thabhairt dom le m’obair bhaile!  Dalta ciúin a bhí ionam; le an-dhúil agam i léitheoireacht. Nuair a fhág mé an bhunscoil, bhí Gaeilge cuíosach maith agam, ach ní raibh aon tseans agam í a chleactadh taobh amuigh den seomra ranga. Freisin, bhí an Béarla mar ghnáth-theanga chumarsáide sa mheánscoil nua, cé go raibh an t-ádh liom go raibh múinteoir maith agam i gcóir na Gaeilge – fuair mé toradh maith san scrúdú Ardteistiméireachta san ábhar sin. An t-aon teanga iasachta a múineadh sa scoil ná an Laidean. Fuair mé amach gur chabhraigh graiméar na Laidne go mör liom structúr na Gaeilge agus nua-theangacha eile a thuiscint. Freisin, nuair a bhí mé sa Chúigiú Bhliain, fuair mé ranganna príobháideacha sa bhFraincis.

Timpeall an ama sin, chuaigh mé isteach sa Bhuíon Ghaelach, buíon choisithe san bhFórsa Chosanta Áitiúil (FCÁ) ina raibh an traenáil iomlán as Ghaeilge, mar a bhí an gnáth-chumarsáid idir na saighdiúiri. Bhíodh na campaí samhraidh go léir againn sa Ghaeltacht, mar shampla i gCúil Aodha nó sa Mhuiríoch. B’shin í mo chéad seans seal a chaitheamh i dtimpeallacht lán-Ghaeilge.

Agus an Ardteistiméireacht faighte agam, chuaigh mé ar Choláiste na  hOllscoile Corcaigh (UCC) agus fuair mé céim i nEalaíona (BA) le Laidean agus Stair mar phríomhábhair. Ansin fuair mé an an tArd – Teastas i nOideachas mar cháilíocht iarchéime a thug ceart dom múineadh ar mheánscoil. Le linn an an ama sinn go léir bhí mé ag freastal ar ranganna seachtiniúla i nGearmáinis, agus shocraigh mé freastal ar dhianchúrsa sa teanga sin sa Ghearmáin féin a bhí eagraithe ag an Goethe-Institut, institiúd cultúrtha Rialtas na hIar-Ghearmáine. Ag deireadh an chúrsa sin, a mhair 10 seachtain, bhí buntús na teangan im ghreim agam.

Bhí an seal a bhí caite agam san FCA tar éis mo shuim sa saol mileata a neartú, agus i 1963 chiuir mé iarratas isteach ar choimisiún gearr-théarmach i nArm na Breataine. Níor chreid mé i bpolasaí na neodrachta a bhí ag Éirinn, agus shocraigh mé dá bhrí sin mo sheirbhís a dhéanamh i stát a bhí ina bhall de NATO. Chaith mé trí bliana mar leifteanant san RAEC (Royal Army Education Corps) ag múineadh ábhar éagsúla do shaighdiúirí óga i nAlbain. Le linn an ama sin rinne mé dhá mhalartú le hArm na hIar-Ghearmáine (i Hamburg agus Wolfenbuettel) agus ceann amháin le hArm na Fraince (i Le Mans); freisin, bhain mé amach cáilíocht mar Teangaire Mileata sa Ghearmáinis ó Stát-Sheirbhís na Breataine.

Nuair a fhill mé ar Éirinn tar éis mo sheirbhíse mileata, fuair mé cead speisialta ó UCC an scrúdú BA a dhéanamh i nGearmáinis. Fuair mé onóracha den gcéad grád, agus shocraigh mé céim MA a dhéanamh san ábhar céanna i nOllscoil Briostó. Ina dhiaidh sin, fuair mé seans scoilbhliain a chaitheamh san Iorua ag múineadh Béarla agus Gearmáinise i n-iarbhunscoil i ndeisceart na tíre. Theastaigh uaim teanga eile Theotanach a fhoghlaim. Ní raibh focal amháin Ioruaise agam nuair a thosaigh an scoilbhliain. Rinne mé dianchúrsa sa teanga, mar bhí fonn orm a fháil amach an mbeadh ar mo chumas teanga nua a fhoghlaim tré thomadh iomlán a dhéanamh innti gach lá, ag léamh nuachtáin, ag éisteacht leis an raidio, ag caint le muinteoirí agus daltaí, etc. Toisc nach labhairtear an Ioruais go forleathan taobh amuigh den Iorua, bíonn Béarla ar a thoil ag beagnách gach Ioruach, ach d’iarr mé ar mo leath-bhádóirí sa scoil gan Béarla a labhairt liom i gcruinnithe le linn ár ama saoir. Rinneadar amhlaidh, agus bhí áthas orthu gur theastaigh ó eachtrannach a dteanga dúchais a úsáid ina dtír féin. I ndeireadh na scoilbhliana bhí mé an-shásta go raibh ar mo chumas drámaí Ibsen a léamh sa bhunleagan.

Cúpla bliain ina dhiaidh sin, chothuigh an bhliain a chaith mé san Iorua suim ionam scoilbhliain a chaitheamh sa Ghearmáin chun snas a chur ar mo chumas sa teanga sin. Fuair mé post i scoil chónaithe i dtuaisceart na tíre ar an dteorainn leis  an Ísiltír. Bhí lóistín agam ar champas na scoile, agus mé ag múineadh teangacha iasachta: Béarla, Fraincise agus Laidne. Thaitin an obair chomh mór sin liom gur fhan mé naoi mbliana (seachas bliain amháin!) ar an scoil sin, Chaitheadh mé laetheanta saoire gach bliain in Éirinn, agus diaidh ar ndiaidh d’aithin mé go raibh nósanna na Gearmáine ag dul i bhfeidhm chomh mór sin orm go raibh mé ag éirí “Germanior ipsis Germanis” , agus go raibh baol ann go ndéanfainn dearmad iomlán ar mo dhúchas Ghaelach. D’fhill mé ar mo thír dúchais i 1981 agus le 41 bliana thosaigh mé mo shaol mar mhanach. Thóg mé na móideanna solamanta i 1992, inar gheall mé fanúint im mhanach go dtí lá mo bháis. Mar adeir an seanfhocal: “Go bhfaighimís grásta Dé agus bás in Éirinn!” Amen!”

Cillian Ó Sé OSB

Please note changes to the liturgical timetable and opening hours during the monastic community’s annual retreat which takes place from Monday 4^th to Saturday 9^th August:

• Matins and Lauds: Celebrated at 7am from Tuesday 5^th August to Sunday 10^th August.

• Mass: No change to the usual timetable.

• Vespers: No change to the usual timetable.

• Compline: No Compline in the Abbey Church on Monday 4^th, Thursday 7^th and Friday 8^th August.

• Guesthouse: Closed from 3^rd to 11^th August.

• Monastery reception and shop: Open between 10am-4pm from 28^th July to 9^th August.

The concept of a summer spirituality may seem unusual, but the rhythm of the Christian liturgical year can be seen to invite some such phenomenon in our spirituality. The widely acknowledged relationship between the liturgical season of Lent and spring already establishes the beginnings of the connexion between the annual rhythm of nature and liturgical expression.

Easter, as the climax of Lent and spring, bursts upon the northern hemisphere with an eager celebration of light and the promise of early summer. The blossoming trees promise the fruits of a following harvest, through summer and autumn. Meanwhile, the leisurely fifty-day celebration of Eastertide leads up to Pentecost, to mark the release of the energy of the Holy Spirit into time and people; and the splendid feasts which follow, the Holy Trinity, Corpus Christi, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Immaculate Heart of Mary luxuriate in this demonstration of divine graciousness.

All this is reflected in the natural sphere, as spring’s new growth matures with summer, buoyed by the Spirit’s energy of life and the earth produces its good things, in vegetables and soft fruit. All this will climax with the longer lasting fruit of Autumn in the apples and pears, when the feast of Christ the King brings the year to its conclusion. Then the earth will enter into its Winter sleep, when Advent invites us to take stock and to begin again with our wonder at the birth of Life in the Son of God.

Christopher Dillon OSB

Visitors to the Abbey cannot but notice the word ‘PAX’ over the castle archway, an invitation and hope that all may find, experience and dwell in peace in our monastery. A longer version of this Latin motto for the Benedictines is ‘pax inter spinas’, meaning ‘peace among thorns.’

Much like Saint Benedict himself, we are living in a thorny time. The prickly days of our founder saw him seek refuge from the decadence of Rome and the collapse of its Empire, whilst in our time we find ourselves haunted by the memory of pandemic, appalled by scenes of intercommunal violence on our island, dismayed by political instability across the ocean, and concerned by the bloody conflicts raging in Europe and the Middle East.

The temptation – especially for monks – is to pull up the drawbridge and keep the problems of the world at the gate. It’s not just the chaos of the world that we sometimes wish to flee from, but also growing trends such as secularism, moral relativism and hostility to the Christian faith. In such a scenario, some advise detachment from the world and rejection of our popular culture, with the American conservative writer Rod Dreher going as far to ask:

‘could it be that the best way to fight the flood is to stop fighting the flood? That is, to quit piling up sandbags and to build an ark in which to shelter until the water recedes and we can put our feet on dry land again?’ [1]

Dreher goes on to propose small communities exile themselves from the popular culture in order to construct their own counterculture of shared Christian life, values, and worship.

Appealing as it might sound, such a course of action isn’t an option for those of us who are called to be a leaven of the Gospel in the world around us. Benedictine life was forged in the chaos of the Roman Empire’s collapse, and whilst it was countercultural it was never meant to be escapist. Indeed, according to Cardinal Basil Hume OSB, there has always been a tension on the question of whether the monk ‘is a person who withdraws into the desert to pray and be alone with God, or is he someone who goes out into the marketplace to mingle with and serve the people?’ [2]

Monastic life isn’t a call to isolation, but rather to presence: a stable, faithful presence in the midst of the world’s suffering, questions, and hopes. The monastery is not so much an ark set adrift from society, but a lighthouse rooted on the shore — lit not for our own sake, but to guide others through storm and darkness, and to serve the world around by our prayer and work.

It may be for this very reason that Abbot Columba McCann OSB recognised: ‘the worst days of the pandemic brought home to us just how interconnected we are on our planet, even at a spiritual level. Part of our task as monks today is to keep rediscovering what it is we bring to the Church and the world, and what God wishes to bring to others through us.’ [3]

Living in the Middle East these past four years, I’ve come to witness first-hand the thorns of this region and the need to seek, establish and share peace between these prickles. Monasteries have always sought to be places of peace, order, and communion that ripple outward, and thus it seems our task as Benedictines today might be to take seriously the intention of our motto, ‘pax inter spinas’, and dwell among the thorns of our time, offering a witness of peace to a world badly needing it.

The ‘PAX’ we seek is peace with God, with ourselves, with our brethren, and with the world around us. Amidst the thorns of his life, and the thorns of his community and the world outside, the monk seeks peace and radiates it according to the instruction of Saint Benedict: ‘let peace be your quest and aim.’ [4]

We all live amidst thorns of one sort or another, and Saint Benedict has provided us with a model so that we may dwell in peace among them. To live ‘pax inter spinas’ is to refuse to despair, to persist in love, and to trust that even in the most tangled and bloodied places of our world, peace can take root.

May all who pass under the archway into our Abbey find peace, and have the courage to carry that peace beyond our walls.

Saint Benedict, pray for us.

Justin Robinson OSB

[1] Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option (New York: Sentinel, 2017), 12.

[2] Basil Hume, Searching for God (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979), 9.

[3] Columba McCann, “Abbot Columba receives abbatial blessing.” Glenstal Abbey, November 2024. https://glenstal.com/abbot-columba-receives-abbatial-blessing/. Accessed 22 June 2025.

[4] Saint Benedict in Timothy Fry, ed. The Rule of St. Benedict in English (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1982), 16.

There was nobody more surprised than I was by the success of the Glenstal Book of Prayer nearly a quarter of a century ago. I was flicking through the Ampleforth Prayer Book in our tiny monastery shop when FatherPeter Gilfedder, then in charge, chided me, “It’s time we had our own prayer book, and isn’t it time you did something useful?”

I took the bait, and a committee went to work to produce the Glenstal Book of Prayer in jig time. It arrived in July 2001, which is apparently the worst month for publishing a book. Yet within a week it was keeping company with John Grisham on the Bestseller List. In another week it had passed him out, reaching the top. The phone was constantly ringing, multiple interviews with radio stations followed and when ABC Australia (their equivalent of the BBC) arrived on our doorstep – drawn by a best selling prayer book in Ireland – I knew something dramatic had happened!

In the Ireland of that time, there was something in the zeitgeist that needed a prayer book. The church was reeling from scandal, losing its grip and a raw, untended, spiritual felt-sense coincided with a ripening nostalgia for an ‘old time’ prayer book. This coincidence of need and nostalgia fuelled a buying frenzy.  The book sold out and the publishers couldn’t keep pace. They ran out of books. Easons were furious – they demanded extra copies… now!

Almost a quarter of a century later, the nostalgia of 2001 has gone and now a prayer book is more likely to be considered a novelty item and prayer a vague, unfamiliar practice from a distant past. And here we go… a new edition of The Glenstal Prayerbook and with a publisher hoping for a second bonanza.

People’s attention is harder won and the competition stiffer than in 2001 – technology’s ubiquity, consumerism, and the all encompassing entertainment industry dulls our ancient spirit-hunger. The God-shaped hole is now filled with ‘stuff’ as we try to quench our nagging ‘not enoughness’ but it simply doesn’t suffice.

But we keep up appearances – it cost a fortune to get us here – and it’s way too late to jump ship with family, career, mortgage. Behind the scenes, we are busily backfilling that God-shaped hole with all kinds of spiritual bric a brac from around the world and from varied spiritual traditions. Amazon keeps the ‘stuff’ rolling in, as we do our best to spend our way out of spirit-poverty. Once again, a sort of famine stalks our land.

Our world has become “a kind of spiritual kindergarten,” says Edwin Arlington Robinson, “where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.” And in this kindergarten we spend our new found wealth developing our minds and minding our bodies in education, health, fitness – things we can measure.

Responsibility is handed over to institutions with their roll call of experts: vast universities, schools, extra-curricular courses, night courses busily at work on our minds – hospitals, primary care centres, fitness centres, sports facilities and diet centres cater for our reappropriated bodies. On the south side of Limerick, we have the ever expanding, yet always inadequate, University Hospital (UHL), while north of the Shannon, there is the huge University of Limerick campus. Cathedrals and churches, still prominent in our cities, towns and villages, are ghosts of their former selves, standing as ancient monuments to a bygone era.

The one time spirit-carers cast aside, the Spirit drops out. Those who feel a need for a spiritual life cobble together a spiritual practice; check into a yoga class, do some breath work or adopt a spiritual practice from India or elsewhere, whereas going to church or using a prayer book is not on the menu. One could argue that we are paying for this ‘dropping out’ of spirit with pervasive and growing mental health issues. The Spirit hasn’t gone anywhere and won’t be ignored – it hits back and in ways we don’t understand. “What is wrong with us,” we ask. We never had it so good for goodness sake. Cars and homes, undreamed of comfort and entertainment 24/7, holidays in the sun, weekend breaks to wherever we like. And in 2025, “I don’t want anyone telling me how to run my life, spiritual or otherwise!”

“Not much room for a prayer book here,” you may be thinking… It won’t make us feel any less lonesome inside. All a publisher can reasonably expect is a brief shelf life for a new prayer book and likely as not, John Grisham will be, once more, speeding up the bestseller chart.

And yet here we are with The Glenstal Prayerbook. Why? Because in the end we have to deal with God if we want to be who we are as human beings. The alternative, idolatry, is the oldest sin in the business – the worshipping of lifeless, tempting idols, found on our screens, in our homes and living rooms doesn’t do it. And the devil sits back and laughs – he never had it so easy! “Our world is populated with atomised ‘godlets,’”writes George Buttrick, and everyone is having a great time, on Facebook at least. But behind the scenes misery and emptiness lurks, anxiety and depression ferment. Being ‘gods’ gutters in on itself and fails us. Living out of our cramped and expensively ‘put together’ self, loneliness has become epidemic and our spirit is gasping for air, cut off from its source…

And so we must return to keeping company with God, and so we pray. A prayer book can help us. Herbert Butterfield, an Oxford historian says that prayer is more important in shaping history than war and diplomacy and more significant than technology and art. He worries about the disappearance of monks in the Protestant tradition. “If I desired to say perhaps one thing that might be remembered for a while, I would say that sometimes I wonder, at dead of night, whether, during the next fifty years, Protestantism many not be at a disadvantage because a few centuries ago, it decided to get rid of monks. Since it followed that policy, a greater responsibility falls on us to give something of ourselves to contemplation and silence and listening to the still small voice.’”

The new Glenstal Prayerbook is to help us keep company with God – to help us to pray, to help us to listen to the still, small voice calling us to life, speaking to and from the God-shaped hole, below the noise and hullabaloo of our taut, stretched and often edgy selves.

We need to listen and answer God, we need to unblock the God-shaped hole and  then, and only then, will we find peace and life – life and more life. And with our spirit nurtured, we can still rise from the dead, back from the brink…

Get your copy of The Glenstal Prayerbook here.

Simon Sleeman OSB

The annual Summer Retreat will take place on Wednesday 25th and Thursday 26th June, and we invite you to join us!

This day-long retreat gives an opportunity for prayer, reflection and renewal in the midst of the busy summer season and has been a feature of the Glenstal calendar for many decades. The theme of this year’s retreat is ‘Teach Us to Pray’ and the retreat talks will be given by members of the monastic community.

Please email events@glenstal.com or telephone 061 621005 for more information.

Just published! Get your hands on a copy of The Glenstal Prayerbook right here: http://shorturl.at/jYZkj

We’re pleased to share the latest edition of the Glenstal Abbey Chronicle, which may be viewed here.

Last month we had a conference on Jungian psychology at Glenstal Abbey. I spoke to the fifty strong group and was surprised to get a question on bees at the end of my talk, which was about Projection in Jungian psychology. The person asking the question confessed to being a beekeeper, and she wanted to know what I had learned from my fifty years working with the bees at Glenstal.

I was surprised by her question. My response surprised me. I said I no longer thought of myself a beekeeper – that this was somehow a misnomer. Yes, I have bees but ‘no’ I am not  ‘beekeeping’.  This term suggests a kind of ownership or possession of the bees with which I no longer feel comfortable.

The term belies the wider issue of how we live and relate to the world of creation, of which we are a part. We speak of ‘nature’ and the ‘environment’ and of ‘going out into nature’ as if it were object ‘out there’, at a distance – as if we could live outside creation. This is not only wrong, but crazy thinking and leads to all sorts of abuse of the very world of which we are an integral part. If it is ‘out there’ we can do what we like with it, spend our lives tormenting it into doing whatever we want. ‘Nature’ is hitting back. Bees are in peril.

I told my questioner that I am searching for a new term to describe my relationship with bees – ‘tending them,’ ‘minding them’  but above all getting away from the idea that I own them or am keeping them or even managing them. I told her the most appropriate gesture for me in the apiary is to take a step back and see the mystery before me.  I need to recover my ‘right size’, my appropriate stance before the bees in my hives.

I admitted that it had taken me until I was almost fifty to ‘see’ a bee. Until that moment, I viewed bees functionally – bee colonies were for production. I wasn’t quite as crass as that but I didn’t see them. I never marvelled at their magnificence. My aggressive, utilitarian approach dulled my perception and allowed me free reign to interfere, manipulate, and disrupt the bees. I was managing them using every management technique, every new beekeeping tip I could glean from magazines, journals and books.

Then one day everything changed. I ‘saw’ a bee. It landed at one of my hives, its pollen basket packed with golden, yellow pollen. It had only just made the alighting board weighed down as it was with its heavy load of life giving protein. There it was – a bee. Astonished at my discovery, I stared while the bee recovered enough strength to go inside the hive and hand over its load. The bee was too exhausted to mind my intrusive gawking. It was as if scales fell from my eyes. That moment taught me about the ‘tyranny of our conceptual frameworks’ – taught me that I needed to shatter the perceptual framework through which I viewed the world and start again and begin looking at the bees with loving rather than greedy eyes.

As I look back now on that, ‘moment of innocence’, seeing a bee for the first time, I recognise it as a ‘moment of reverence’ before the mystery. Living on this planet for 50 million years longer than we have, how can we be threatening their very existence?  It woke me up to the destructive power of an irreverent mind-set and  how it infects my relationship with the world in which I live.

We need to recover our organ of reverence before the wonders of creation – take a step back and look with astonishment at what is happening in and around us. This is not asking people to be naive but to recognise that our relationship with creation is dangerously out of joint – it threatens our very existence and that of the bees. We need to recover a stance that will allow us and the bees to survive on this beautiful and mysterious planet.

James Freeman Clark, an Easterner who traveled to the Western United States of America in the nineteenth century, wrote in his book on Self-Culture, ‘when I lived in the West, there came a phrenologist to the town, and examining the heads of all the clergymen in the place, found us all deficient in the organ of reverence. More than that, we all admitted that the fact was so, that we were not, any of us, especially gifted, with natural piety or love of worship. Then he said, ‘You have all  mistaken your calling. You ought not to be ministers.’[1]

I might add, ought not to be ‘beekeepers’ either.

Simon Sleeman OSB

[1] James Freeman Clark in Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England (New York: Modern Library, 1936), 268.