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Fr. Henry O’Shea OSB.

We have tested and tasted too much…- 

Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder. 

But here in the Advent-darkened room 

Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea 

Of penance will charm back the luxury 

Of a child’s soul, we’ll return to 

Doom The knowledge we stole but could not use.

 Walking on the beach, you sometimes find seashells, gnarled and wrinkled by salt, sand and tide. Turning them over, you discover the smoothest mother-of-pearl, a surface shimmering and beautiful. We can take this as an image of the Church and the saints. Pummelled and polished by the tide of time, by the storms of life, the Church waits for the rising tide of God’s timelessness which will engulf all, before casting up on the shore of eternity, miracles of patience and fortitude which remain hidden today.

The first Christian community experienced the tension between the two comings of the Lord, the tension between his earthly life and ministry and his return at the end of time. Believing this second coming to be imminent, they also believed in the necessity of living blameless lives. But, by the time St Luke was writing to-day’s gospel, his listeners were already aware that this second coming would not take place in the immediate future. 

With this realisation came the growing awareness of another dimension. For Luke’s listeners, the Lord’s coming is not for some unknown time in the future, or at least not only for some unknown time in the future. He is already here in the now which is salvation history. At any moment, he may suddenly pass judgement on the inner meaning which we give to our human existence – at every moment, whether we are aware of it or not, he is passing this judgement. In the letters of Saint Paul, there is also present this tension between the already and the not yet.

To-days’s gospel is a favourite text for so-called hellfire preachers, particularly among radical evangelical sects, some even nominally Catholic. They wallow in the apocalyptic signs and disasters, the movements of the sun, moon and stars, the clamour of the oceans, wars and nations in agony. These preachers move on to describe in lurid detail various aspects of human wickedness and sinful behaviour, debauchery and drunkenness featuring prominently in the catalogues of iniquity. The message is ‘repent or burn – in the meantime, this is our bank-account number.’ The effect is frequently to instil in listeners that perfect fear that drives out all love. Again, modern secular entertainment revels in horror, in violence, wars, even star-wars – revels to the point where many become deafened, insensitive, to true evil, to true horror. 

Looking at the first two readings this morning, there is no reek of sulphur, no glimmering of the flames of hell. Jeremiah promises the coming of a time of honesty and integrity, of salvation and confidence. But how the honesty and integrity, the salvation and the confidence that come from the knowledge of being saved come about, are indicated in the second reading from St Paul to the Thessalonians. 

Firstly, it is the Lord who makes us able to love and increases that love. He does this by loving us even before we are born. This is called grace. This grace makes us in our turn able to respond to this love and to allow our hearts to be strengthened, confirmed in holiness and thus able to love the whole human race. But, if grace comes first, our own efforts have to be added to it. St Paul urges us to make more and more progress in the kind of life we are meant to live. An important aspect of this life is remembering, in not forgetting – in remembering the good things God in Christ has done and is doing for us, remembering his promises, particularly in the great promise which is the Eucharist we celebrate, remembering the future he is calling us to. 

Elsewhere in his writings, Saint Paul refers to the Christian communities as the saints. As saved, loved and baptized we may be saints – this is the ’already’, but most of us have a long way to go to make this sanctity a living reality. In most of us, there is much of the ‘not yet’. To-day’s gospel is perfectly right, perfectly realistic, in calling for prayerful watchfulness, in reminding us of the reality and possibility of a coarsening of the heart which makes us forgetful of and eventually incapable of the one thing necessary. Christ has promised to be with us always – and he is. Christ has promised to come in glory at the end of time – and he will. But for many of us that end of time can be to-day, to-morrow, any minute now. For those who recognize its signs, this coming is and will be a liberation, a liberation looked forward to, a liberation lived towards with heads confidently held high.

O, after Christmas we’ll have no need to go searching 

For the difference that sets an old phrase burning- 

We’ll hear it in the whispered argument …

Wherever life pours ordinary plenty. 

Won’t we be rich, my love and I, and… 

God we shall not ask for reason’s payment… 

Nor analyse God’s breath in common statement. 

 

We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages 

Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour- 

And Christ comes with a January flower.

Abbot Columba McCann OSB.

Elections are in the air!  Getting elected President of the USA is quite a feat for anybody.  Think of the power and influence it brings!  But it only lasts for four years.  Then you have the Irish elections.  Who will win seats?  What kind of government?  How long will it last?  People in political office either retire while they are still ahead, or else they eventually get pushed out by their opponents.  

By way of contrast the book of Daniel describes this mysterious figure called the Son of Man, on whom is conferred kingship, and an eternal sovereignty, a sovereignty that will never pass away.  And the gospels apply this to Jesus himself. 

It doesn’t look that way when we see him in the gospel story, the prisoner standing there bound hand and foot in front of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor.  Not much of a king.  Unless his way of ruling is quite different, and that is in fact what Jesus himself says.

It reminds me of another election, not so long ago.  When one of the recent popes was elected, he appeared, as usual, on the balcony of St Peter’s in Rome.  One of the cardinals standing beside him was looking off into the distance.  Later on, someone asked him what was going through his mind as he stared off into the distance.  He replied, ‘I was looking across the city of Rome to the Palatine Hill, at the ruins of the palace of the Roman emperors.  I thought to myself:  their day is long over, but here am I standing beside the successor of Peter, the fisherman from Galilee…  Jesus has a sovereignty that shall not pass away.  

We have to admit that, over the centuries, some of his followers have departed from his methods, with disastrous results, using physical force to promote his message. But that is not the Jesus does things.  And he gave the same advice to his disciples when he sent them out on mission:  if they don’t accept you in one village, just go on to the next.  When some disciples walk out on Jesus, he says to Peter, do you want to go too?  Jesus doesn’t rule by force.

But the real question right here is not about Pontius Pilate, the Roman Empire, or world history.  The real question here and now is:  does the sovereignty of Jesus extend to me life?  Is he my mentor?  Is he the main influencer in my life?  Jesus says, ‘All who are on the side of truth listen to my voice.’  He won’t force his message on me.  But he offers me something that won’t topple the way everything else does.

Mentoring, life-coaching is recognised today as so valuable.  What if my life-coach, my mentor were the Son of Man, whose sovereignty  is eternal, who isn’t fazed by failure or setback.  What would it be like if my daily decisions were formed by him, referred to him, guided by him?  I might begin to experience some of his freedom, the kind of freedom he showed even as he stood there before the Roman governor.  Prefer nothing whatsoever to Christ, St Benedict says.  Listen to his voice, St Benedict says.  

Jesus says ‘All who are on the side of truth listen to my voice.’  Elsewhere he says ‘The truth will make you free.’

“And nothing exists except the Child”

Sometimes we might only remember a single word, sentence or scene of a movie. It’s not because the movie overall fails to inspire, but rather because a specific moment powerfully makes a lasting impression upon us.

One such scene for me comes from Of Gods and Men, the true story of a group of French Trappist monks murdered in Algeria during that country’s brutal civil war. The film was released in 2010 to critical acclaim, winning the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.

The movie begins with Algeria plunged into violence and the situation rapidly deteriorating, with the small monastic community at Tibhirine much valued by their Muslim neighbours. Militants have made a threatening visit to the monastery and the monks have begun to discuss whether they ought to leave the country or stay behind, come what may.

On Christmas Eve, the Trappists gather in the chapel and sing:

Voici la nuit,

L’heureuse nuit de Palestine,

Et rien n’existe hormis l’Enfant,

Hormis l’Enfant de vie divine :

En prenant chair de notre chair,

Dieu transformait tous nos déserts,

En Terre d’immortels printemps.

For me, it’s perhaps the most powerful moment of the entire film and the scene most etched into my memory. “This is the night, the happy night of Palestine” goes the chant. Maybe it’s because of my connections to the Holy Land, forged over more than a decade, that this moment strikes a chord. Palestine doesn’t see many happy nights, especially at the present time. This night is different, unlike others, because it’s a happy one in Palestine. How?

“And nothing exists except the Child, except the Child of divine life.” Afraid and uncertain about the future, the chant seems to break through the violence and chaos to speak to the monks in the holy night. Nothing else now exists: not the war raging outside, nor the terror which engulfs the small community, for the Child of divine life has come into the world on Christmas night and reconfigured everything. With their gazes fixed on the Christ Child, nothing more exists in this moment of prayer and song.

“By taking flesh of our flesh, God transformed all our deserts, into a land of immortal springs.” Suddenly, a new perspective has been opened. The situation has been transformed for the monks – as it has for all of us – as God enters into our broken world and takes on our fallen humanity to free it, raise it up and redeem it. A vulnerable Child lands into the chaos of the Algerian civil war – into war everywhere – to bring peace, turning deserts into springs and giving life in abundance. The darkness of the world is put to flight, as the “Child of divine life” comes to teach us divine life and give us a share in it.

It may all seem a little romantic, but this scene seems to have made a lasting impression on me. I’ve often returned to it, especially amidst the war and turmoil which besets our world – and the Middle East in particular – at this present time.

In this season of Advent, perhaps this scene can be a reminder that “nothing exists except the Child” who ought to be the focus of our attention despite the distractions all around. Everything else becomes secondary and is transformed when we put the Child at the centre of this time of year and our entire lives. It is the Child of Bethlehem, born on that happy night of Palestine, whose coming into the world changed everything and continues to do so.

This is Good News for our world: darkness is turned to light, death into life, despair into joy, affliction into hope. As Advent gets underway and leads us to Christmas in this precarious time for our world, what better gift could we hope for?

Justin Robinson OSB

This month the monastic community marks the 25^th anniversary of Abbot Augustine O’Sullivan, who died on 7^th December 1999.

Seamus O’Sullivan was born in Limerick city on 21^st October 1918. He trained and worked as a primary school teacher before entering Glenstal Priory in 1946, receiving the name Augustine. He was professed on 13^th April 1947 and, following studies in the monastery and with the Spiritan Fathers at Kimmage Manor in Dublin, was ordained priest on 15^th June 1952. For the next five years he was involved in many areas of the life of the monastery and school. During this period and later, when his workload permitted, he was a much sought-after retreat master and speaker, in particular for religious sisters.

When Glenstal became an abbey in 1957, Father Augustine was appointed Prior and Novice Master. For the next nine years, by his constant devotion and presence, Prior Augustine maintained the rhythm of monastic life while supporting the young Abbot Joseph Dowdall who was much involved in assuring the role of religious in the Irish Church, not least as the founding president of what was then known as the Conference of Major Religious Superiors.

Elected second Abbot of Glenstal Abbey at Christmas of 1966, following the premature death of Abbot Joseph, Abbot Augustine served the community for fourteen years until his retirement at the end of 1980. These were the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council. With his clear-headed and courageous defence of essential monastic values, Abbot Augustine guided the community calmly through this exciting and sometime turbulent period. He encouraged Glenstal’s contribution to the wider Church by supporting the Annual Ecumenical Conference, which had made a faltering, exploratory, start in 1964. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the older Liturgical Conference, but was sufficiently far-seeing to recognise in 1975 that this conference had, at least for the time being, served its purpose and that it was time to hand over to other fora.

Upon his retirement as abbot in 1980, when he might have sought a quieter life, Abbot Augustine went to the monastery at Ewu in Nigeria he had originated and constantly supported during his time as abbot. He remained at Ewu for the remaining nineteen years of his life, acting as superior for fourteen of these years. On his last visit to Glenstal, scarcely two months before he died, Abbot Augustine did not hide his impatience to return to Ewu, stating that he wanted to be buried there.

Appropriately, his last days were spent in the care of the Medical Missionaries of Mary, with whom he had had close associations in Ireland and Nigeria for many years. He died in Ibadan on 7^th December 1999 and, as he had wished, was buried in Ewu. People from all over Nigeria came to his funeral, witnessing to the peace he had brought into the lives of so many.

May he rest in peace.

Back by popular demand, Glenstal Abbey’s scented candles are now in-stock in our online shop: shorturl.at/jPJqY

Inspired by the botanicals of our walled garden, Father Cuthbert created these fragrant candles with La Bougie in Co. Cork.

Strike a match and lift your mood! 🕯️

Fr Simon Sleeman OSB

Sometimes I wonder about God. Especially on days like this.  Maybe you do too. I wonder about the risk God took using words, language, and story, to tell us his truth.  Words can be so ambiguous and stories unclear.

He could have given us a cosmic fireworks display.

He could have used math, hard data, information, facts, geometry, algebra. Maths is the most precise, unambiguous language we have –  you can dismiss stories as kids stuff, but your sum is either right or wrong.

But No…God revealed himself through story and who am I to question the Holy Spirit’s genre of choice.

The truth is, that we are not a collection of facts or an assemblage of data  –  we are storied people; there is a narrative structure to our lives – a beginning,  middle and an end, characters, plot.

And here we are Sunday after Sunday, getting you to dress up, asking you  to sit on those hard benches, and do our best to tell you the story of God – creator of the universe. The greatest, vastest story ever told. The truth is, we probably don’t tell it very well or don’t even get it ourselves.

If a story is working well, it get’s you  into it…..doesn’t it? You are right in there…in a good novel or murder mystery, turning the pages when you should be turning out the light and going to sleep…

And here is the very weird thing that I have learnt preparing this sermon – God wants us in his story…and he has written the bestselling story of all time to get us into – 73 books with a huge cast of characters and many plots – and with a  beginning, a middle and the End.

Prophets.. major and minor

Gospels and letters

Parables and prophets

Psalms and prayers..

Not even Agatha Christie, with her 74 books or Shakespeare, have sold as many.

The truth is… God is not interested in us knowing the right things or doing the right things – he doesn’t want to be reduced to a nice idea or fine theology, or us tipping our hats to him at the weekend. He doesn’t want us on the side line, spectators at the match – he wants us on the field and for the full match.

He desperately wants us in his story – a love story.

So we can choose.

We can opt into God’s story, like Abraham, take the plunge, let go of control,  watching for the hints and nudges in the unfolding chapters of a life with God.   

We may opt out, go my own way – prefer the facts, the data, fold my life into a neat bundle of me… Give me the GPS co-ordinates if I am to go anywhere and enough food. Stick with geometry, algebra…

God’s story – a huge, vast love story.

He speaks…… revealing himself,

‘I love you’ he says.

You say, ‘Yes’ …and the plot thickens.

My story – small and cramped.

Facts, data, information. The plot weakens.

I speak

but how will I ever manage to say …‘I love you’…in algebra.

Fr. Henry O’Shea OSB.

Many years ago, when teaching a junior class about Frederick the Great of Prussia, I asked the group if anyone knew the meaning of the word ‘martinet’. One young man, a budding naturalist said, excitedly ‘Yes, yes, I know, it means a female pine-marten.’ The King of Prussia was indeed a martinet but not a pine-marten. Though, maybe he was a pine-marten in a figurative sense. Figurative does not automatically mean that a term is not truly applied.

Until a very few years ago, the words ‘Tick-tock’ meant only the sound of a clock – and even then, not of all clocks. Now TicToc, as part of social media, has become not only predominant in huge sections of the world’s population, but a necessity to the point of addiction.

Arguably, one of the effects of this dominance, as in most of the social media, has been a dumbing down of discourse, a flattening in our use of words, a narrowing down of meaning and possible meanings, a draining of our capacity to understand figures of speech, a limiting of our capacity to see, a contraction of our horizons. All that matter is now. History has been abolished along with joined-up writing.

In the opening sentence of his Rule, St Benedict asks us to ‘open the ears of our hearts’ to what he has to say. But many Tictocers might ask, ‘How can a heart have ears.’   

In today’s gospel, we hear that Jesus is allergic to the scribes with their minute knowledge of the Law and its 613 rules and regulations, swanning around in long robes and basking in public adulation and prominent in the front seats of the synagogues. Martinets. This insidious attitude of the knowers-better is a universal phenomenon, which has always been present, in every culture, in every religious, artistic- business- and political culture. It is particularly corrosive when linked to our relationship with God and to the way we relate to other people, that flows from how we see and treat God.

Christ’s great insight and change of emphasis lie in his placing of what is in the heart above outward conformity to rules, above any ticking of the boxes of conformity, above all superficiality of observation. ‘Heart’ means, that instrument and facility that is and can be in us, in me, that active combination of seeing, knowing, getting-it and loving, that engagement of our minds and our capacities for love.

This is why Jesus uses the example of the widow and her tiny monetary contribution to the treasury, pointing out that as a gift of her heart, this tiny sum vastly outweighs the lavish donations of those who, in their abundance, hardly miss what they give. The widow, gives her heart, which ultimately is all that the Lord is interested in. And she give that heart freely. She is not forced. Because the Lord respects her freedom and does not want to force anyone. 

The second reading tells us how Jesus can dare to upset the apple-carts of the know-alls, of the omnicompetent, the movers-and-shakers. But how can Jesus be such an influencer?

 In the evening office of Vespers in the Churches of the East, there is a beautiful hymn in praise of the Light, sung while the evening candles are being lit. The opening words are:

Hail gladsome light,

Of his pure glory poured,

Who is the eternal Father, heavenly blessed.

Holy of Holies, Jesus Christ, Our Lord.

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that Christ is the definitive appearance of the Father’s revelation of himself. Christ is the only and final sacrifice that perfects and puts an end for all time to all human sacrifices. In abolishing these sacrifices, he has abolished all human altars and temples and is himself the sacrifice, the altar, the temple, the only true priest. He is the definitive Holy of Holies. 

Not only does this Holy of Holies make possible and offers to us an end to sin, but by making us part of himself in Baptism and feeding us with himself in the Eucharist, gives us access to true worship with and in the only Holy of Holies. Our only real future.

The heart is the organ by which we recognise, through which we are inhabited and cling to this Holy of Holies, Christ Jesus himself. ‘Heart’ is a dynamic and energizing giving and receiving of our emotional and intellectual capacities in an eternal learning-curve.  This is the part of us that the Holy of Holies wants for himself – and that forever. 

This is why the widow of Sidon and the widow at the treasury are, literally, an eternity removed from the misguided know-alls who see only as those men and women see, for whom outward appearances and instant thrills are all that matter.

 

Hail gladsome light,

Of his pure glory poured,

Who is the eternal Father, heavenly blessed.

Holy of Holies, Jesus Christ, Our Lord.

 

  

 

      

Fr. William Fennelly OSB

Today’s readings devote a lot of attention to the act of listening. In that first reading from Deuteronomy we heard Moses address the stern injunction to his people. “ Listen the, Israel, keep and observe what will make you prosper and give you increase. For Israel the source of their power and increase was the covenant and their whole history had been the story of their living faithfully and in rupture with this core element of their identity as a people. But before the covenant can begin to give life to God’s chosen people they must listen. And Moses goes on “Sh’ma Yis’ra’eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.” Listen, Israel the Lord is our God and the Lord is one. The greatest dogmatic affirmation of the Jewish tradition is predicated on the necessity and by the necessity of listening. There is more at work here that the cry of an orator trying vainly to hold his audience’s attention. There is something more profound in question here. Jesus picks up on this in the gospel text from St Mark with his paraphrase when he says the most important commandment is “Listen Israel… you must love the Lord with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength”. Listening is the first thing that the Moses required of the people of Israel and Jesus as the fufilment of the Old Testament echoes this call. It is the same call that St Benedict uses to address his monks in the first words of his rule for monks “ausculta meii filii praecepti magistrii,” Listen my son to the precepts of the master. In other words be quiet, still your own torrent of words, turn your own inner cinema off, so that you can hear. Be attentive. This call has lost none of its relevance for us gathered here this evening. The challenge of removing distractions or trying to stop multitasking when something of consequence is being said or is taking place is no less difficult for us than it was for the people of Israel following Moses, or for those listening to Jesus and even for Benedict’s monks. Listening invites us into an act of imaginative empathy with the person who is speaking to us. We must be patient while we wait for them to speak and to stop speaking. And we must suspend our own personal judgment and prejudices so that we can actually be attentive to what’s being said. And indeed this rule applies not just to the act of listening but also to discernment or evaluating our lives. The text of our lives requires and the events that happen in them require a certain patient acesis in order to be understood or appreciated. It takes time to figure out what things mean and it takes patience to enable meaning to unfold, to manifest itself. When Jesus was transfigured on Mount Tabor he did not change but Peter, James and John when they gazed on him saw that he was filled with a radiance that they had not seen before.

Jesus says that once we have listened then the central act and truth in the life is love of God and love of neighbour. This is more important that any temple offering or material success or personal investment. But we do not dispense with liturgy just because the Temple is no longer the central element of Christian worship. The catholic imagination is deeply sacramental in that there is a very keen sense that all comes from God. And somehow everything bears an imprint of its divine origin. To speak of a sacramental vision means that we use words to speak of realities that are beyond words. Language cannot exhaust the depths of this reality. Food and drink will soon be used to express, to experience our unity with Christ and through him with each other. The whole of life is touched by this divine origin and so our Christian faith is not a merely spiritual or ethereal thing but it works itself out in our daily lives. And love is crucial here. The Latin anthem “Ubi caritas et amor deus ibi est” says it well where love is there is God.

Listening to the text of our lives and the word of God requires a patient and determined attention and the call is to live out this attention in a loving attention to the God we met in the neigbour, in the other, in our lives now.

The recently-elected abbot of Glenstal Abbey received his abbatial blessing at a ceremony presided over by Kieran O’Reilly, Archbishop of Cashel and Emly, on Friday 1^st November.

Born and raised in Dublin, Abbot Columba McCann OSB served as a priest of the Dublin Archdiocese before entering the monastery more than two decades ago.

The seventh abbot of Glenstal Abbey was elected by the community of twenty eight Benedictine monks earlier this year. The monastery was founded nearly a century ago and serves as a place of prayer, work, education and hospitality.

Held on the Solemnity of All Saints, the liturgy called for God’s blessing, strength and guidance upon the new abbot as he begins his role as father, teacher, and model for the monastic community.

Speaking as his eight year term of office gets underway, Abbot Columba commented: “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.”

The ceremony was attended by a congregation of more than two hundred guests, with the Mass concelebrated by Brendan Leahy, Bishop of Limerick, in the presence of ecumenical representatives including the Church of Ireland’s Bishop of Tuam, Limerick and Killaloe Michael Burrows, Dean of Limerick and Ardfert Niall Sloane and the Methodist Church’s Gillian Kingston.