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Fr Patrick Hederman OSB

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song . . .

Kevin de Bruyne, captain of team Belgium and star of Manchester City,
says the reason why Belgium is not playing today in the final of the World Cup is because their team is too old. They were the golden wonders, tipped to win the last World Cup in 2018, and yet, to date, Belgium is the only national team in the world, that has topped the FIFA rankings without ever having won a World Cup or a continental trophy. Kevin himself is 31 – and Belgium’s oldest players, two of them are all of 35. Just to put this in context, let me tell you that in the community here at Glenstal Abbey we have only one member who is
under 35. The rest, therefore, are losers on this reckoning.

So, what do we do when we reach a certain age and are out of the
running? Well, we could take a leaf out of Cristiano Ronaldo’s book. Having reached the ripe old age of 37, he is tearing up his contract with Manchester United, where he earns only £28.6 Million pounds a year, to negotiate a new contract with Al Nassr in Saudi Arabia which could be worth £172.9 million-a-year. What do you do with such a salary? Well, for a start, Ronaldo has a fleet of 20 limousines including one Lamborghini, two Rolls-Royces and a few Mercedes Benz. I suppose you take three of them for a drive each day for exercise, and keep your two favourites for a spin on Sundays.

Today is the Fourth Sunday in Advent. It has been the longest possible Advent, four full weeks, because Christmas Day falls on a Sunday this year. Our Advent started a week before the World Cup. Anticipating this exciting clash between Advent and the World Cup, I asked a
member of our staff, who in his day played on the Limerick Hurling team: ‘seeing as Ireland has no team in this competition, I said, would you be inclined to support England, for instance, as our nearest neighbours and who have one or two Irish players on board?’ ‘Only if they were playing Tipperary,’ he replied. The World Cup, you have to say, unites people marvellously. It seems as if the world, which now, as of this year, makes up 8 billion people, morphs into two camps: no longer Moses or Methuselah but Messi or Mbappe. Every world
religion might envy the congregation which will gather this afternoon at three O’Clock to await the advent of our new world champions. Around three and a half billion watched the event in 2018. There may be more today.

But we are here this morning to celebrate an even greater excitement. Our Christian calendar asks us to hold onto our hats for another week because the final day of our Advent season is next Sunday, not this one. We have a week to prepare ourselves for one of the greatest events of the Christian calendar. Christmas celebrates the arrival on earth of Jesus Christ who, at the age of 33, won the only world cup really worth winning, whereby every member of Team Humanity, of Team World, if you like, is invited to share in his divinity. This means that whoever you are, wherever you are, no matter what age, colour, race or gender you happen to be, you can live, not simply until you are thirty-five or
thirty-seven, but forever and ever, in the company of the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who created the universe and who hunger for your company until the end of time.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.
Amen.

Abbot Brendan

When I was growing up my family used to visit our relations in the lead up to Christmas every year. We would all pile into the car and head off together. My abiding memory of those journeys are road works. Clare County Council seemed to specialise in December road works. I remember thinking to myself, when this road is finally finished it will be just great. However, it was never finished. Once they repaired one section, another section needed attention. I mention this because John the Baptist was sent to prepare the way. Not a physical road, but a way nonetheless. Today is Gaudete Sunday, meaning rejoice and John the Baptist is the saint of joy – for even in his mother’s womb he leapt for joy. This joyous servant is the one who prepares the way; how does he do this?

John is a most unusual character. I’m not talking about his funny clothes, or the fact that he lived on a diet of locusts and wild honey, or that he was a spiritual road mender. He is unusual, even remarkable, for another reason. John didn’t mind taking second place. He had no problem giving up the limelight. He didn’t have a jealous bone in his body and that is so very unusual.

If we’re honest most of us do not appreciate competition, but John actually encouraged his disciples to leave him for Jesus. When people came, ready to honour John as the messiah, he set them straight. He insisted that he was not the star of the show, only a supporting actor. To use John’s own example, he was like the best man at a wedding. “My joy is now full (he said). He must increase and I must decrease.”

The Baptist was joyful because he was content to be who he was created to be – one who prepares the way. He calls us to conversion, to become who God created us to be. Most of us, at one time or another, battle a nagging sense inadequacy. We feel we are just not measuring up, mostly to expectations other people have set for us. We become preoccupied with ourselves, seeing others as competitors. Human history is full of tragic examples of this and in our own day we do not have to look very far before we find striking examples of this foolish pride. Even the ancient Greeks knew that hubris or pride was the root of tragedy. John the Baptist chose a different way and it is of him that it was said – a greater has not been seen!

Trying to measure up to the expectations of others is an exhausting enterprise. Freed from the blinding compulsion to dominate allows us to become the person God created, a masterpiece. Even in his prison cell John the Baptist was more interested in hearing about Jesus and what he was doing, than dwelling on his own situation, desperate as it was. What would happen if there were more people like John the Baptist in the world? What would become of the war in Ukraine if the desire to dominate evaporated? What would become of the housing crisis, poverty, global inequality? What would happen if I became more like this? What would happen if I were simply content to say, “He must increase and I must decrease”. What indeed! This is how to prepare the way for a better world. This is how to build a spiritual road, which will not need constant patching year on year because it is established on something, which is true. This is how to prepare the way for a real encounter with the Lord in the mystery of the Nativity. This is the invitation, what is your answer?

In the second in our Advent 2022 series of talks, Father Jarek speaks on ‘Advent of Christ: A Chance for Renewal’ in this recording.

An audio-only version can be listened to here.

Journey with us through Advent by joining us each Sunday of Advent at 4.30pm, in-person or online. More information here.

Fr Christopher Dillon OSB

This season of Advent in which we find ourselves has a prophetic character; and prophets are regularly anti-Establishment, insofar as they call the Establishment and its keepers to account for their ministry or the lack of it. During the past week, we have heard the prophet, Isaiah, excoriate the hypocrisy of the priests and those conducting the sacrificial ritual of the Temple worship, because it bears no relation to their everyday behaviour of corruption and greed.

Today, the same theme is continued under the aegis of the Baptist. When the representatives of the Jewish Establishment appear, in the persons of the Pharisees and Sadducees, John is quick to observe the discrepancy between their apparent readiness for penitential reform and their actual behaviour; “If you are repentant, produce the appropriate fruit, and do not presume to tell yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father’; that is, ‘We are members of the Chosen People’”.

We, here, might all say of ourselves, “We are Mass-going Catholics”. The Baptist responds, “So what?!” Our ploughing through the ritual of our prayers and services counts for nothing, unless our behaviour manifests the goodness, the holiness and the generosity of the Father.
But there is more, much more, to what the Baptist has to communicate to us; he has a profound sense of the unique transcendence of his divine cousin and of the relative littleness of us, mortal human beings. “I am not worthy to carry his sandals”, he says of himself; and of Jesus, “He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” What he meant by that, what he understood by that, is for the scholars to discuss; but it is clear that he appreciated the littleness of human achievement in the context of the grandeur of God and, by association, the insignificance of the Pharisee and Sadducee agenda. Incredible as it may sound to our ears, both Pharisee and Sadducee, whatever the difference in their theology, believed that the merits of Abraham before God were such as to guarantee the favour of God for every Jew, simply because he or she was a descendent of Abraham.
For all of us, here, today, the Baptist is calling us to take account of our real situation, to consider the meaning of our existence in the vastness of God’s creation. We, Christians, could be at risk of presuming too much on the merits of our Baptism; for our faith teaches us that God became human so that we humans might become God. “Not so fast!”, the Baptist interposes, “Show me the fruit of your Baptism”. Through the centuries, the history of the Church as the community of those who believe that Jesus has risen from the Dead, for all its sins and faults, has been uniquely characterised by its care of the poor and
the sick; just think how many religious orders have been founded for precisely that purpose, providing hands and feet to work God’s kindness among his people.

Working God’s kindness among his people, that is the meaning of our
existence; that is the fruit of our conversion, as we make our way through the maze of life, to realise the glorious goal for which God has created us, the goal for which God became a human being in Jesus of Nazareth. Only by this means, only by this work, does our attendance at Mass and our other religious practice have any value, any meaning. Advent is the time to consider these things.

Fr Columba McCann OSB

What’s happening in our world? Where are we heading? – with war, talk about nuclear weapons, global warming, dictatorships, or the next best thing? It’s hard to know exactly how it is all going to play out from day to day, and there can be surprises, both pleasant an unpleasant; but our Christian faith is that, in the end, literally the end, all will be well. Christ will come again. And when the Son of Man comes, all that oppresses and disfigures our human world will be finally swept away, like the story of Noah and the flood.

There is a lot that we would love to see swept away out of our world: hatred, war, talk of nuclear weapons, abuse of the weak by the strong, starvation, corruption, dishonesty. The hopes for a different kind of world have never died, the hopes for what the Bible calls ‘the new heavens and the new earth’, or ‘the kingdom of God’. The prophet Isaiah dreamed about such a world. He envisaged a time when people would no longer prepare for war, when weapons would be destroyed and their technology re-harnessed towards feeding the hungry. He foresaw people of all nations streaming towards the temple of Jerusalem in order to worship and learn the ways of God.

With the coming of Christ, with his death and resurrection, a new temple was built. That temple is Jesus himself. Millions of people have streamed to him, have learnt to walk in his ways, and in him have worshipped God. Countless people have been an oasis of peace in their own family, their own neighbourhood through their Christian faith. Men and women too many to number have literally fed the hungry in the name of Christ. The mountain of the temple of the Lord, Isaiah says, will tower about the mountains. What would it be like if the person of Christ were to tower over everything else in my life? If the person of Christ, the words of Christ, the power of Christ, the love of Christ were to tower over every other aspect of my life? ‘Prefer nothing whatsoever to Christ,’ St Benedict says. That’s why we are here. This is
what we yearn for deep down. And Advent is a time to make space for him. The amazing thing is that the kingdom of God is pouring out into the world right here where we gather. Whenever, wherever we gather for the Holy Eucharist we are standing in God’s throne room, gathered around the Lamb of God, once slain, who lives for ever. The wonder, the forgiveness, the unity, the adoration, the love into which we are invited can spill out into the world through us, if we receive it and treasure it above everything else. If things as simple as bread and
wine can become the living presence of Christ among us, it’s a promise of what could happen to the whole world.

The human world was always intended by God to be luminous with his presence. It will happen finally when Christ comes again, but it’s planted here among us now in the Mass. What happens under the radar here will finally come out into the open. And Christ’s coming will be felt either like the intrusion of a burglar, or the return well-loved master, depending on what each of us have been up to in the meantime. His advice is that we remain awake, alert. Whenever the Pope appears at a big event in the Vatican, like a papal audience for example, you will normally see some of the Swiss guards standing discreetly nearby. Maybe you’ve even been there yourself. I’m told that their uniforms were designed by Michelangelo. A bit like the guards at
Buckingham Palace, their outfits attract tourists and cameras and end up on postcards. But if you were to run forward from the crowd and try to get between one of those guards and the pope, I think you would meet far more than a colourful costume. You would come up against a professional who is calm but vigilant. You would be deflected in seconds. Being one of the guards to the pope must be an unusual and interesting job, but every Christian is called to a far more exalted post: we are to take our place before God, and direct our gaze calmly
and consistently towards Christ. And like good soldiers we can, with vigilant ease, deflect anything that gets between us and God. One might ask: What about working, doing the shopping, looking after family, putting food on the table? All of that is doing God’s work. Far from getting between us and God, these things unite us to him. But our privilege is to stand in God’s presence and keep our attention there, staying awake to something wonderful, like sentries in his throne room.

St Paul mentions the kinds of things we need to deflect, the things that do get between us and God: jealousy, wrangling, the kind of self-indulgence that is harmful to ourselves and others. So we need
to be calmly vigilant, our eyes open to what is around us and within us.
One day, as we watch, we shall see the Son of Man face to face, either at the end of our lives, or the end of the world, whichever comes first. As we move inevitably towards this meeting, we can prepare by allowing him already to tower over everything else, everyone else in our lives. We can enjoy the privilege of having our attention always towards the Son of God, and like a professional, calmly deflect anything that gets between us and him.

You are invited to journey with us throughout Advent in our series of Sunday afternoon ‘Beginning Anew’ talks.

The talks take place at 4.30pm in the Monastery Library and will be followed by refreshments with Vespers at 6pm. Suggested donation is 20 euros, and the talks will also be live streamed on our webcam (click the ‘Talks’ tab) and available as recordings later.

Speakers include:

• Luke Macnamara OSB, who studied in Paris and Rome, and lectures in Scripture at the the national seminary of Ireland in Maynooth.
• Jarek Kurek OSB, who studied theology in Krakow and Oxford and was ordained to the priesthood in 2022.
• Henry O’Shea OSB, who studied in Würzburg and works with the Oblates and Associates of Glenstal Abbey.
• Columba McCann OSB, who studied theology in Clonliffe and liturgy in Rome and now serves as the monastery’s novice master.

For further details contact: events@glenstal.com or call 061-621005.

Fr Senan Furlong OSB

Tom Honeyman, a medical doctor and art connoisseur, was appointed Director of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glascow in 1939. Thirteen years later, there was uproar when he purchased a religious painting for the gallery, paying £8,200 for it – a sum considered in 1952 to be an outrageous waste of hard-earned taxpayers’ money. The painting in
question was Christ of St John of the Cross. The artist was the Catalan surrealist, Salvador Dalí. Opinions and tastes change over time, and today the work is perhaps the most celebrated and reproduced religious painting of the 20th century. A poll conducted in 2006 ranked it Scotland’s favourite painting, and an offer of £80 million by the Spanish government was turned down.

Dalí based his painting on a pen and ink sketch of the crucified Christ by the 16th century Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross. The painting depicts Christ on the cross in a darkened sky floating over a tranquil dawn-lit bay complete with a boat and fishermen. What is unusual is the dramatically different interpretation that Dalí gave the crucified
Christ from the Spanish mystic. For St John of the Cross, the crucified Christ was a focus for compassion, a tortured and murdered man. Dalí aimed instead for an image of perfection and transcendence — there’s no blood, no nails, no crown of thorns. St John’s drawing is frenetic, a vision of the agonizing death on the cross. Dalí’s painting is serene,
a celebration of life and the triumph over death.

Today’s readings for the Solemnity of Christ the King present us with these two seemingly opposite views. The passage from the letter to the Colossians is a magnificent hymn of praise and thanksgiving to the Cosmic Christ. The battle has been won and a great exchange has been effected. God has delivered us from the power of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, who is the foundational unity holding all things in being. This is Dalí’s inspiring vision: Christ, ‘the nucleus of the atom’, the very unity of the universe.
It is ironic that on this day when we are called to reflect on the power and authority of our infinite God, the gospel passage takes us to the scene of the crucifixion. This form of punishment didn’t just kill a person. It dehumanised, degraded and debased. And here is our King, not ruling from a majestic throne but hanging from a cross, too weak to save himself from death. His crown is a crown of thorns. He has no armies at his command.

The only soldiers in attendance are his executioners. He is an appalling sight, without beauty or majesty, a thing despised and rejected. This is the vision contemplated by St John of the Cross. Can he who is mocked as ‘King of the Jews’ be the King of the Universe? Can the
apparent weakness of this dying man be the power of God giving new life to the world? Both St John of the Cross and Dalí have us view Christ and the cross directly from above. It is a heavenly perspective; it is that of God the Father, in the one case looking down on the sacrifice of his Son, in the other embracing and blessing everything beneath. Both breath the Resurrection. That doesn’t take away from the horror of Jesus giving himself up to death, but it does show that in this ultimate solidarity with humankind, God reveals himself as the God of love, who opens up hope and a future through the most negative side of history.

And what about us? Jesus hangs on the cross between two criminals. One mocks while the other owns his wrongdoing and looks to Jesus. In his powerlessness and pain, his eyes are opened and he sees right beside him the fount of mercy, forgiveness and redemption. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” His plea acknowledges that Jesus is King. He sees that salvation is to be with Jesus. On this Solemnity of Christ the King may we discover in this crucified, powerless, thorn-crowned King, the only person who can truly say, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.”