Our first Lenten talk on the theme of Conversion and New Life with Fr. Luke Macnamara OSB is now available to watch again: https://youtu.be/fy6EgXUq6Go
Our first Lenten talk on the theme of Conversion and New Life with Fr. Luke Macnamara OSB is now available to watch again: https://youtu.be/fy6EgXUq6Go
Put aside some time and begin your Lenten journey in prayer with these oak Stations of the Cross carved by the late Brother Benedict Tutty OSB 🙏🏼✝️ The carvings were installed in the Church of the Resurrection in Belfast but their whereabouts are now unknown after the closure of this church ⛪🕯️ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUcyVriwx9k
We must carefully prepare for the night and for our sleep. Father Simon talks about the Biblical concept of night and day and shares his tips for a good night’s sleep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0R6UEnB6gs
In 1882 the Australian cricket team had its very first Test win on English soil at the Oval. The Sporting Times newspaper, in a satirical piece written as an obituary, commented that English cricket had died, “the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia”. Almost immediately people began to speak of regaining the ashes; the ashes of defeat. The following year, after England won two of the three Tests on their tour of Australia, a small urn containing the ashes of a cricket ball was presented to the England team and so what we now know as ‘the Ashes’ was born. That urn remains in the museum at Lords, while a Waterford Crystal representation of the Ashes urn (called the Ashes Trophy) is presented to the winners of each Test series.
The ashes we receive today could not be more different. Our ashes are not the ashes of defeat; they are the ashes of victory. The ashes with which we are signed, come from the burning of palm branches from Palm Sunday of last year. These branches were used to welcome Christ the Saviour into the Holy City of Jerusalem before his passion, death and resurrection. These are our ashes, the ashes of victory.
These same ashes are a wakeup call for the soul. They remind us that those things on which we have come to depend in life, possessions, wealth, security and so on, all eventually end in ashes. No matter how hard we work, we take nothing with us when we die. All of it will fade like dust in the wind.
During this Holy Season of Lent, we try to free ourselves from the illusion of chasing after this dust. We do so by prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Prayer frees us from the mundane, almsgiving places the focus on others and fasting invites us to look inside our own hearts. These treasures are the treasures that last. They are fire, not ashes!
When the heart is attached to what truly endures we rediscover ourselves and are set free, we also discover God and are fulfilled. We may be no more than a speck of dust in the enormity of the universe, but we are dust that is loved by God. The Lord gathered that dust in his hands at the dawn of creation and breathed life into it. This is not the dust of failure; this is the dust of life. We are the dust of the earth into which God has poured his love and his dreams.
Lent is not a time for long rambling discourses. Lent is a time to realise that the ashes of my being are loved by God and with his help I can change my life for the better. As these ashes are imposed on our heads today, let the fire of love be kindled in our hearts. Be reconciled to God, regain your ashes and let them become what they are, the ashes of victory.
Abbot Brendan Coffey OSB
It is almost a year since the first COVID restrictions were introduced in Ireland and we are facing into a second Lent and Holy Week under this COVID cloud. Despite this, and perhaps because of it, our celebration of Lent and Easter this year become even more important. We need the hope and promise of Easter and we need the renewing energy of Holy Lent. Nothing can take this from us and we can engage with our Lenten journey wherever we may be.
For some of us our present circumstances of isolation might mean that this is the very first time we have really heard the call to conversion, the call to turn towards God. For most of us, Ash Wednesday brings with it memories of our failed attempts from past Lenten journeys, our failed resolutions and broken promises. Most of us know very well what T. S. Eliot said, “Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow.” It is here, in the shadow, that we find the ashes of our own lives and the Lord gives us the courage to begin again.
Lent is not a season for navel gazing, or feeling sorry for oneself. Lent is the great season of hope. Lent is no season for cultivating guilt, for it is the season for optimism. Just as the earth itself is starting to rejuvenate out of the ashes of its winter, so Lent is inviting us to become a pilgrim people, on a journey to Holy Easter. This is our hope and our destination.
Lent is about facing up to reality. In the words of St Isaac the Syrian, “The one who knows their own sin is higher than the one who resurrects the dead in their prayers. The one who is granted the gift of seeing themselves is superior to the one who has the gift of seeing angels.”
I wish all of you and your loved ones every blessing in this Holy Season of Lent.
Brendan Coffey OSB
Pray with the monks of Glenstal Abbey and walk in the footsteps of Christ as we share Br. Benedict Tutty’s magnificent Stations of the Cross in a series of videos throughout Lent.
Over the coming weeks we will share the late Br. Benedict’s liturgical works of art from our Abbey Church, from Tully in Co. Galway and from Belfast in Northern Ireland. Each video will include prayers and organ accompaniment by monks of Glenstal to help viewers enter into this traditional Lenten devotion.
Visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel at: www.youtube.com/GlenstalAbbeyMonks
HOMILY – 14 TH FEBRUARY 2021
ST. MARK 1:40-45 – JESUS CURES THE LEPER
Today is the last Sunday before Lent – known as Quinquagesima Sunday. Quinquagesima is the Latin for fifty. So, if you go to your calendar and count back from Easter Sunday to today, you will get exactly 50 days – Quinquagesima. Today is also Temperance Sunday. Many of us when we hear the word “temperance” well often associate it with giving up things – like alcohol. As Benedictines we know from the rule of Saint Benedict that temperance does not have a negative connotation – rather Saint Benedict sees temperance as life-affirming, positive and a balanced approach to life.
Today’s gospel from Saint Mark is one of my favourite passages in the entire Bible. It is beautifully written. It is concise, clear, and you are in no doubt as to what it is all about. There is a clear meaning to this story and because it is so well narrated there is nothing much that someone like me can add to it. I am not going to waste your time by repeating this wonderful account from Mark.
I suspect that Mark reveals a certain characteristic of Jesus in this story that is not directly evident in the Gospels – Jesus’ humour. Leprosy has a number of characteristics in common with COVID. Leprosy is an airborne infection and the best way to protect against it is to cover your face. Over the past year or so we have learned only too well about the value of face coverings. There was no cure for leprosy in the time of Jesus and so if you caught the disease you were sentenced to a lifetime of quarantine – total isolation from others. Thankfully today 95% of the world’s population is immune to leprosy or Hansons disease as it is now known. Thankfully, also like COVID, there is a vaccine to counteract the Hansons disease.
We had a senior student in our school who had gone through his time here very much under the radar. He was academically bright but he hardly participated in many extra-curricular activities – legal or illegal! He wasn’t particularly unpopular, he just kept to himself and most of the time he was content with his lot. He didn’t bother anyone and nobody bothered him. A likeable young man. Coming up to the mock exams a third year who was cramming for his junior cert mocks approached him and asked him for help with his maths and science. The older boy agreed. There was only one condition – nobody was to know about this. Amazingly, when the results came out, the third year’s grades were considerably higher than predicted. A bit of an investigation went on and when no foul play was discovered the third year sang like a parrot – “the sixth year helped me”. Needless to say the sixth year wasn’t happy he had been outed. He couldn’t go anywhere in the school without cramming students asking him for help in maths and science.
I can imagine Jesus with a wry smile telling the leper not to tell anyone but knowing full well that the leper had to go public in order to be let out of the life sentence of quarantine he had been subjected to. The tables are now turned between Jesus and the leper. Before he was cleansed, the leper wasn’t allowed into towns or villages and he had to live in the wilderness. Now the leper is free to go into all the towns he wants – but because of his notoriety, Jesus cannot go to populated places any more. And now it is Jesus who has to live outside the towns – in the wilderness. We can learn so much from Mark’s story of Jesus and the leper. The leper wasn’t afraid to go down on his knees before Jesus. He didn’t ask to be “cured”. He asked to be “cleansed”. Let us never be ashamed to ask to be cleansed in the sure and certain knowledge that this is what Jesus wants for all of us no matter our shortcomings and failings. Lastly, today is Saint Valentine’s Day and we extend our best wishes to lovebirds and romantics of all ages and wherever you are. Happy Valentine’s Day. The relics of Saint Valentine are in the charge of the Carmelites in their church in Whitefriar
Street in Dublin. This past week we monks learned a lesson from the story of Saint Benedict and his sister Saint Scholastica. The lesson we learned is that “love conquers all” – “amor vincit omnia”. We can also learn from The Beatles: “all you need is love. Love is all you need”
Fr Denis Hooper OSB
This lockdown is a difficult and challenging time for us all. Father Simon shares some of his own difficulties alongside some of the opportunities this time presents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQwDyCfGz5Y&t=330s
Fr Simon OSB 5 Feb 2021
Dr. Tony Bates talks with Father Simon last year about his move from city to country and the animals he’s now gathered around him. An interesting insight into the healing power of nature 🌊⛰️🌳🌻
Sunday, Sunday, 31st January 2021
Fourth Sunday of Year (B)
Dt 18:15-20, 1 Cor 7:32-25, Mk 1:21-18
Today’s gospel has Jesus preaching in Capernaum in Galilee. This was a politically contested part of the world where the Jewish world met the Greek and Roman worlds and several of the major trade routes from Egypt to Babylon passed through the area too. So it’s a frontier area where identities clashed and political power caused considerable instability, and this is the town which Matthew calls Jesus’ city (Matt 9:1). There’s an amazing set of archaeological remains of a synagogue in Capernaum which shows influences from several cultures – Roman, Greek and Syrian elements – living alongside each other in a jumble that shows the pliability of the local people’s cultural world, and this is where Jesus preaches more than anywhere. And yet this city rejected him. They didn’t drive him out or threaten him; they just didn’t accept his message; they were just indifferent.
So how does today’s gospel fit into this scene? Hearing this story about the possessed man brings a shiver to some of us, and a wry smile for others. For some, it is the uncomfortable fringe of religion; an unsettling esoterism. Is this is where faith meets the eerie and the weird? For others, this is part of the historical dross that comes with Christianity having arisen before the modern psychiatry: it is just one more bit that needs to be dumped. For most people I suspect it’s just another thing that doesn’t seem important one way or the other: another bit of religion that just slips over us. But I think that this story has important things to say to us. The man possessed isn’t possessed by just one demon but by several. And I think if we’re honest we can all identify with that, we all have several demons. The idea of calling these demons out into the clear light of day, modern psychology tells us, will remove their power over the sufferer. Jesus has the authority to call these out and he also has the power to remove their power. The work of identifying our own demons and bringing them to light simply and honestly is part of our life’s work just as the business of understanding this Christ of faith we have met and followed is a life’s work.
All around the world at the moment there are street protests from Washington to Moscow, Amsterdam to Tunis, from Santiago to Lagos and to Warsaw. People all around the world feel themselves out of step with their governments and societies in a way that doesn’t seem capable of being expressed through more conventional and less confrontational means of debate. It’s like a great bubbling up of discontent that had heretofore been kept under wraps. The lockdowns associated with the pandemic mean that we may have similar feelings of tectonic pressures shifting within us ourselves, and things bubble up that may surprise and upset us, not to mind in our societies and communities. Joseph Biden the American president in his recent inauguration noted “Many centuries ago, Saint Augustine, a saint in my church, wrote that a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love, defined by the common objects of their love”. There’s a part of the Catholic identity that’s happy to be affirmed in such a public fashion on so large a stage, a bit like cheering for the Catholic greyhound in the derby. Be that as it may, St Augustine’s point and Mr Biden’s paraphrase is worth noting. The bishop of Hippo noted “If one should say, ‘a people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their desire,’ then it follows that to observe the character of a people we must examine the objects of its love.” (St. Augustine, City of God 19.24) For Augustine there can be really only two loves: the love of self and the love of God. If one of those is a candidate for the common bond of our modern societies, it is not I fear perhaps the latter. But Biden to be fair to him is asking what does unite us, for the good reason that our ability to live together in peace seems so very fraught and strained. Our ability to share common lives and loves to bind our societies and communities seems imperiled. Biden answered that question suggesting opportunity, security, truth, respect and dignity were the core values that unite. Of course one speech isn’t going to unite a country but it’s a start. Analogously St Mark’s sees Jesus call up the rival contestatory spirits and expel so much of that which is contrary to the love God.
In a world as fractured as ours appears to be, the steady work of Christians has to involve opening ourselves to God’s power to transform and call out that which is contrary to his graceful love at work in us, and our Church. This is the work of a lifetime for sure. But it is also a work to which we can merely be indifferent like the people of Capernaum.Reading Pope Francis’s recent letter “Let Us Dream.” He writes that times of crisis reveal our hearts–how big, how small. Normal times are like a formal dinner. We can put on nice clothes. Hide our faces behind prepared expressions. Say the right things. The crisis lays us naked. Unprepared. The Pope says the general rule of a crisis is that you do not exit unchanged. The crisis will change you especially if you attempt to remain the same. So when we’re trying we are trying to figure out the pandemic and the political rersentments broiling across the world we should set ourselves the task of coming out better or we’ll find that without consciously willing it, we are much worse than we thought we were to begin with.