Author: Justin

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.

We remember at this time Father Bernard O’Dea OSB – the first Irishman to enter the monastic community at Glenstal Abbey – whose 25^th anniversary takes place later this month.

Born in Inagh, County Clare, on 3rd October 1909, Gerald O’Dea went to school at St Flannan’s College in Ennis. He briefly attended the Patrician Brothers’ School in Mountrath, County Laois.

Matriculated in 1928, he trained as a pharmacist and worked as an apprentice in Dublin. Having been advised and introduced by an Augustinian spiritual director, he entered Glenstal Abbey on 19^th June 1932, receiving the name Bernard. He made profession on 1^st October 1933, the first monastic profession in Glenstal. The following day, he went to our motherhouse of Maredsous Abbey in Belgium for further formation and studies.

Following the study of philosophy there from 1933 to 1935, he studied theology at the Congregation’s scholasticate in the monastery of Mont César in Louvain from 1935 to 1938. He made solemn profession at Glenstal on 1^st October 1936. Returning definitively to Glenstal, he was ordained priest in Thurles on 12^th June 1938. While finishing his theological studies here, he was appointed Subprior and Guestmaster.

When travel to and from Europe became possible once more after the Second World War, Glenstal Abbey’s founding abbot, Dom Celestine Golenvaux, visited the monastery for the month of October 1945. On 8^th December of that year Father Bernard was appointed prior of what was still a dependent foundation. On 6^th February 1948, the monastery achieved independence as a Conventual Priory and Father Bernard was appointed Conventual Prior. He held this office until forced by ill health to resign on 1^st August 1951.

During Father Bernard’s term as Prior, many initiatives were taken. On 9^th October 1948, a university hostel was opened at Balnagowan, a house in Palmerston Park in Dublin. A year later, a good tillage-farm with a substantial house at Ballyvoreen – some five miles from Glenstal – was acquired from the brother of Archbishop Harty. Always interested in horses, Father Bernard encouraged riding in the school and there are photographs of him giving an exhibition of show-jumping on one of the playing-fields. He once said, “give me a horse and I’ll live for ever.” However, when he fell from a horse near the back lodge in his late eighties, community sympathy was limited!

A major decision taken was to build a monastic church, as the temporary chapel of 1932 was proving increasingly inadequate. Dom Sebastian Braun of Maredsous was appointed architect. Father Gregory Barry, an accountant and former Spiritan priest, was appointed director of fundraising. The estimated cost at the time was £75.000.oo –  about €3.6 million in today’s money. In the impoverished Ireland of the period, the only possibility of financing such a major undertaking was to supplement local endeavours, such as a Silver Circle, with foreign assistance. The main focus was on the United States. From February to September 1951, Father Bernard and Father Gregory made a successful tour of that country, exploiting Father Bernard’s network of County Clare exiles, many of them priests. From this period, Father Bernard’s admiration and reverence for the United States, already strong, remained undimmed. He returned to Glenstal for the laying of the foundation-stone on 14^th October 1951. This occasion marked the emergence of the monastery into wider public awareness. The foundation-stone was laid by Archbishop Kinnane of Cashel and the ceremony was attended by the President of Ireland, Mr. Seán T. O’Kelly.

Following his resignation as Prior, Father Bernard took a long holiday on medical advice. In the archives there is a photograph of him skiing in Switzerland. The photograph does not tell the whole story as one such descent ended in a broken leg!

On his return to Ireland, Father Bernard assumed the running of Balnagowan and continued an expanded ministry as a retreat-giver in Ireland and abroad which he maintained until late in life. For a short period, he resumed the role of Guestmaster.

As time went on, he suffered progressively from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) which made it difficult for him to support the Irish winter. In the early 1980s he spent two years with the developing foundation in Nigeria in Ewu-Isan. On his return, he began to spend extended winter-periods in Florida, being hosted by his network of Irish priest-friends. Increasing frailty eventually made such sojourns impossible but Father Bernard was helped somewhat by the purchase of a full-spectrum sun-lamp.

Despite indifferent health, he maintained his huge network of friends and a vast correspondence. He was a great believer in what he believed to be the values of the 1916 Rising, and of the superiority of Irish country culture of neighbourliness and self-help as exemplified in the Muintir na Tíre movement, founded in 1937 by his life-long friend, Canon John Hayes of Bansha, County Tipperary. To the end, he remained an inveterate ‘tracer’, that is, a tracer of family lineage. Once successfully identified, the traced would be told. “I have you now,” he would say.

His last years were punctuated by frequent stays in hospital. It was not until the final days of his life that he began to accept that he was not going to recover from the cancer that had been diagnosed. He spent his last ten days in Milford Hospice, continuing to receive friends and well-wishers. Father Andrew Nugent stayed with him round the clock and was present when he finally died in the early morning of 23^rd May 2000.

May he rest in peace.

At the conclusion of the recent Universal Synod in October 2024, Pope Francis quoted Madeleine Delbrêl in saying that “there are places where the Spirit blows, but there is one Spirit who blows in every place.”

As we mourn the passing of Pope Francis we thank God for the particular way in which he himself was a bearer of the Holy Spirit, giving voice to the cry of the poor, to the cry of the earth, calling us to solidarity across nations and cultures, championing the rights of migrants and calling the Church back to the synodal dynamics of her springtime.

He encouraged each of us to play our part, no matter how small.  For Pope Francis, “small is not a handicap; it’s a resource.”

May he rest in the peace of Christ, and may the Holy Spirit continue to guide us on our pilgrim way.

Abbot Columba McCann OSB

Please note the following changes to the liturgical timetable during Holy Week and the Octave of Easter:

Holy Thursday

Morning Prayer: 7am

Midday Prayer: 12.30pm

Solemn Mass of the Lord’s Supper: 7pm

Compline: 9.45pm

Good Friday

Morning Prayer: 7.30am

Midday Prayer: 12.30pm

Solemn Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion: 3pm

Compline: 8.35pm

Holy Saturday

Morning Prayer: 7.30am

Midday Prayer: 12.30pm

Evening Prayer: 6pm

Solemn Vigil of the Lord’s Resurrection: 10pm

Easter Sunday

Solemn Morning Prayer: 8am

Mass (no singing): 10am

Sung Mass: 12 noon

Solemn Vespers: 6pm

Compline: 8.10pm

+ A monk will be available to hear Confessions in the Abbey Church on Good Friday at 11am, 4.30pm and 5.30pm, and on Holy Saturday at 11am, 3pm, 4pm and 5pm.

+ Lauds (Morning Prayer) will take place at 7am from Easter Monday to Sunday 27^th April.

+ There will be no Compline (Night Prayer) in the Abbey Church on Easter Monday.

+ The usual liturgical timetable will resume on Sunday 27^th April.

+ The guesthouse will be closed from Wednesday 16th April to Friday 25th April.

+ The opening hours of the Monastery Reception and Shop will be as follows:

Holy Thursday: 9am-5pm

Good Friday: 9am-3pm

Holy Saturday: 10am-5pm

Easter Sunday: 9am-1pm

Easter Monday: Closed

Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday of Easter Week: 10am-2pm

Friday of Easter Week: 11:30-5pm

Saturday of Easter Week: 9:30am-5pm

The above quotation from Frederick Douglass, the nineteenth century American slave turned abolitionist, testifies to the pleasure and value of reading. For Douglass it was patently true; the ability to decipher words on a page was key to his release and future success as a social reformer. However reading can yield deeper levels of freedom than that.

One can read for pure pleasure. Who has not stopped and savoured the first lines of some works of fiction! ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ (‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen.) And the whole of Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ has given aesthetic pleasure to generations of readers. The same can be said of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ (by Steinbeck), ‘All the Light We Cannot See’ (by Anthony Doerr) and countless other novels. With them a reader thus ‘lives a thousand lives before he dies ….. [whilst] the man who never reads lives only one.’  Such ‘great reads’ introduce one to something deeper than aesthetics, they bring one to another place where one encounters other people and other predicaments. In time one learns to read a novel vertically as well as horizontally, and to understand literature not just as story but to value it for its ‘eternal freight’. This requires being open to literature as a study in depth of human nature from which we are enriched, rather than dismissing it as fanciful and to be replaced by a textbook of biology. But to read literature many of us require a teacher, either a formal one or an informal one and friend.

EXULTATION is the going

Of an inland soul to sea,—

Past the houses, past the headlands,

Into deep eternity!

 

Bred as we, among the mountains,

Can the sailor understand

The divine intoxication

Of the first league out from land? [1]

However for all the pleasure and companionship literature gives, and the voice it gives to man’s ultimate concerns, it is insufficient in responding to our search for meaning. The Bible indeed can be read for its literary quality alone: the Book of Esther for its epic plot, Second Isaiah and the Psalms for the beauty of their language, Sirac and Proverbs for their critical thinking, but to the believer these texts have another dimension; they resonate with something ‘other’, from beyond the horizon of everyday experience. These books have a character which is both human and divine. But while the reading the Bible is full of promise it is not easy to plumb its depths. At the most basic level the Jewish Rabbi, for example, does not see the Bible a narrative whole, in contrast to the Christian view. For him it is not a story of disaster in the Garden of Eden leading on to ultimate rescue, but a cryptic text (where no detail is unimportant) that offers guidance for life. For Christians it is a collection of books that does form a single whole and is unified by the New Testament.  In this it testifies to Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God. To recognise this, and much more, one is best off when accompanied by a guide who can reveal its depth of meaning.

Christian tradition from earliest times has guided readers on four possible levels of meaning in scripture: first is the literal interpretation or what the author meant. This may not always be obvious as we run the risk of reading elements of our own cultural mindset into that of ancient times. As Origen said, taking the text on face value, as some people do, can be a sign of stupidity. (Whoever heard a snake speaking in Hebrew, as related in Genesis 3!). A second level of meaning is ethical; make the comparison between the Law of Moses and the teaching of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount! A third level of scripture, termed ‘allegorical’, consists in taking people, places and things of scripture as pointing to realities on a higher plane in a symbolic world. The story of the good Samaritan has been read as representing Christ’s mission of salvation to all humanity. And finally, ‘anagogical’ interpretation detects mystical signs of the after life in biblical events and statements. In each level of interpretation Jesus Christ is shown to be the fulfliment of the Old Testament. A most ironic of all biblical passages is when Jesus, in the synagogue on the sabbath, having read from the scroll of Isaiah announces that “this text is being fulfilled today  even while you are listening.” (Lk 4:16-22).

Monks have long approached the biblical literature along these lines though under the rubric of ‘Meditatio – Contemplatio – Oratio’. It is known as ‘Lectio Divina’. What could be better than to ruminate on the inspired scriptures so as to extract its divine essence, infused as it is through human words! For this kind of literature we may need a pedagogue! There are very many. Scripture commentaries come in varied user-friendly editions. Cf. footnotes for a few. [2]

Benedictine monks, at least during the season of Lent, ‘each receive a book from the library which they shall read through consecutively’. [3] If you too need guidance and encouragement in reading the Bible it may help to use a commentary or join a guided-reading group. It may set you on your path to freedom as a child of God, forever!

John O’Callaghan OSB

[1] Emily Dickinson

[2] ‘A History of the Bible’, by John Barton; Penguin Books 2020; ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ by Pope Benedict; Bloomsbury 2007; ‘The People’s Bible Commentary’ published by the Bible Reading Fellowship, Oxford;  ‘Letter of HH Pope Francis on the Role of Literature in Formation’ ..

[3] Rule of Benedict; Chapter 48

We celebrate the forests of the world for their many gifts: hydrological services, timber, shelter and food. But perhaps their greatest gifts to human kind are magnificence, splendour and wisdom.

Of all the animals of the earth, we – though we have to say it ourselves – are the most elegant, well balanced and upright. Among the plants, our elder brothers the trees may make a similar claim. It is therefore natural for us to feel a co-naturality with the trees, a certain haptic exhilaration at their height as they prayerfully stand tall and extend their limbs to the heavens. A man born blind when first he saw exclaimed: “I see men like trees walking.”

Trees manifest fidelity, constancy, endurance, and a generously creative response to adversity. In the press of competition they adapt, or, if all else fails,  give way in a spirit of advaita or non-duality, as if saying to their all too near neighbour: “it is all the one; whether you live or I live, the forest survives.” And so saying, give as nourishment of their very bodies for their friends.

Their fidelity is manifest at this time of year when the coming of Spring is only a vague rumour, completely unsupported  and even denied by swirling cold winds, frosts and snows… Yet they know its coming is as certain as the dawn and faithfully, with rising sap and swelling buds, prepare to welcome it.

Their constancy in an uncertain world is delightfully reassuring. Touch wood! Oak is always oak even after years of neglect and being ignored. “Like the stars when called by name, answering ‘Here we are!’” (Baruch 3:34).

Terrible predictions of terrors to come are all about us. Nature is all poisoned and destroyed. Nature will survive but with terrifying carelessness will cut off those who misbehave and poison the poisonous. The ever-moving present is like a tsunami crashing through time. We are like dolphins playing in the wave. We can do little to alter its course, but we can exult in its speed and power.

Let the sea and all within it thunder. Let us, with the trees of the wood, rejoice at the on-going revelation of the symphony of creation, at the coming of the Lord, for He comes to rule the earth. With justice He will rule the world, He will judge the peoples with truth!

Anthony Keane OSB

We live in a time when the whole world is beginning to understand that our lives will have to be ‘at all times Lenten in character’ if we are to survive as a planet. There is a climate crisis which could destroy our world and a purification of the ecosystem is required, something like the traditional way of unclogging our spiritual ecosystem by prayer, fasting and almsgiving.

Since large-scale industrialization began around a century and a half ago, the levels of greenhouse gases have increased so that there is now an asphyxiating glut of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. Our oversupply of such emissions is creating a hole in the delicate mantilla which presently shades us from the sun, and we are wrecking the greenhouse which allows us to survive. We have become ‘oilaholics’ and the disease is contagious. Our addiction threatens to destroy the roof over our heads, so a programme of ecological transformation is needed fast.

Our spiritual ecosystem was routinely purified by prayer, fasting and almsgiving. These were the three-pronged approaches to Lent. Prayer puts us in touch with the ultimate source of divine energy in our lives, the Holy Spirit, breathing in our hearts; fasting allowed us to cut down on external energy consumption, to concentrate on being rather than having. It’s different for each one of us, and should mean giving up whatever is debilitating and switching to the alternative energy which will raise us from the dead.

Almsgiving provides an outlet for this newly sourced energy, allowing it to radiate into the atmosphere around us. Almsgiving is being generous as God is generous. And if you are guilt-ridden or spendthrift; if your weakness is not being able to say no to anyone, then your godlike generosity is to develop the backbone which can resist those grasping tentacles, cut off the prying tendrils and tell the creepy-crawlies to get lost. Lent is a time for getting rid of at least some of the crazy-makers in your life, those whom you allow to enslave you, importune you, take you for granted, bully you. Those who push you around, keep you under their thumb, act as travel agent for your guilt trips. Resurrection is not about being feak and weeble, an inexhaustible wimp, a pushover when it comes to those looking for a hand-out.

Too often the emphasis has been on mortification as an end in itself. Or it has come across as a rejection of the body, of the passions, of the sap of life, as if these were antipathetic to true Christian living. Asceticism is not a punitive discipline but rather like learning how to play a musical instrument or training ourselves in a worthwhile craft. It should not be miserable exercise of the will over a reluctant and frightened part of myself. Lent is about doing to death, mortifying, at least some of the things that prevent us from being. It is about renouncing at least one thing that weighs me down, holds me back and prevents me from rising from the dead. It is not a macho manifesto of the mind over the body. Christianity is not about self-conquest, it is about self-surrender. Surrender of the total person, body and soul, to the guidance of the Spirit.

Lent is the runway towards Easter, preparation for the fullest kind of life: its sign is joy, its source is love. It should make us more ready, more fit, more willing, more in shape, to rise with Christ from the tomb at Eastertide to be alive with him forever. As the poet Rilke says, ‘we shall have been marvellously prepared for divine relationship.’ In the end, this divine connection must surely transform us and our connection to one another and the world around.

Mark Patrick Hederman OSB