Step into the cloister to learn more about our monastic life and the importance of prayer, work, hospitality and education in a new video series by the monks of Glenstal Abbey. Watch this space!
Mark Patrick Hederman first met ‘God’ on a hill in County Limerick many decades ago. But where is the divine to be found in the Ireland of today? Order a signed copy of Mark Patrick’s latest book here: https://bit.ly/3fAwXzK
One summer day in Renaissance Rome, Michelangelo was pushing a huge rock down the street to his workshop. A curious onlooker bemused by the sight of this old man labouring behind such an enormous stone asked, “Why are you breaking your back on a worthless piece of rock?” Michelangelo stopped, and while wiping his brow said, “Because there is an angel in that rock that wants to come out.”
At the time of Jesus Pentecost was a Jewish harvest festival fifty days after the first day of Unleavened Bread. It also celebrated the Covenant made on Mt Sinai, where God gave his people the gift of the Law in a great and noisy revelation of wind and fire. The wind and fire in the Acts of the Apostles, which enveloped the community of Christ’s disciples, gathered in the Upper Room, is meant to evoke that scene on Mt Sinai and give it new fullness. The Law written on stone tablets is now written on human hearts, the angel emerges from the stone, if you like, and the Mystery of Easter is complete.
On the day of Pentecost, devout people from every nation under heaven were gathered together in Jerusalem. The People of God who once gathered at the base of Mt Sinai are now enlarged to the point of recognising no boundaries. This new People of God, the Church, are a people that derives from all peoples and on this day of Pentecost the characteristic gift of the Holy Spirit is finally revealed: understanding, “each one heard these men speaking their own language”. The curse of the Tower of Babel, division and confusion, is overcome by understanding.
We must learn in our own lives how to pass from Babel to Pentecost, where no barrier prevents the entry of the Risen Lord and the power and action of the Holy Spirit. The Gospel reinforces this point. The Risen Lord passes through closed doors, enters the place where the disciples are gathered, and greets them twice with the words: “Peace be with you”. Why do we continue to close our doors? Does it make us feel secure? We don’t like our lives being disturbed, even by God! We don’t like the pain and effort involved in releasing that angel from the rock.
The Gospel account gives us an unmistakable reference to the story of creation in the Book of Genesis. The Lord God formed Adam out of the dust of the earth and blew into his nostrils the breath of life. On this day of Pentecost Jesus breaths afresh upon us, giving us the breath of God in a new and greater way. The life of God now lives in us.
On Mt Sinai, there was fire, thunder and a great wind. When Christ breaths forth the Holy Spirit in today’s Gospel it is more akin to the experience of the prophet Elijah on Mt Horeb, than the pyrotechnics of Mt Sinai. On Horeb God was not in the great wind, the earthquake or the fire, but in the gentle breeze. In the Gospel Jesus gently breaths out the Spirit upon the Apostles.
This is how God has chosen to complete the great Mystery of Easter. The Holy Spirit comes in mighty wind, thunder and tongues of flame. The Spirit completes the Law once given on Sinai and breaks down doors and barriers with understanding and peace. But the Holy Spirit also comes as the gentle breath, the breath of life, a life that now lives in you and me. The Spirit has many manifestations, one for every occasion. The essence of Pentecost is to celebrate and make known that the Holy Spirit is Christ alive among the believing community, bringing, as it were, angels out of stones, helping each one of us move from Babel to Pentecost, division to understanding, in our own lives.
Abbot Brendan OSB
Prepare for Pentecost with the monks of Glenstal Abbey as we sing in prayer in our latest video, ‘Sonus Spiritus’. Come, Holy Spirit! 💨🔥🕊️ https://youtu.be/2zJQgqqcsr4
Father Simon returns with a new series of the Mindful Monk and this week considers the Holy Spirit, the ‘Divine Artist’, ahead of Pentecost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVJcFeqvWpU
Dear Friend,
I want to send you greetings and blessings from Glenstal Abbey as we approach the great feast of Pentecost. Our society is slowly reopening after a long and difficult lockdown. We have returned to public worship and the vaccine allows us to hope that we are finally emerging from this COVID cloud. Our pandemic experience has reminded us of the importance of community. It has reminded us of our need for other people and the responsibility we all carry for each other.
Pentecost also reminds us of these things. Pentecost is the feast of unity and of understanding. On the day of Pentecost everyone heard and understood, “Parthians, Medes and Elamites; people from Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya around Cyrene; visitors from Rome – Jews and proselytes alike – Cretans and Arabs.” In these days, we pray that God will send us this gift of understanding, opening our hearts and minds.
We pray especially for the people of India, suffering the worst effects of COVID. We pray for the people of Jerusalem and the Middle East, where violence has again taken hold. We pray for the sometimes forgotten people of Nigeria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan and Ethiopia, Myanmar and Tigray, where war and violence have caused so much human suffering. We also pray to the Holy Spirit for our own country at a difficult time, that wisdom and understanding will prevail. As we conclude the Season of Easter, we give thanks for the hope that the Holy Spirit brings. May we continue to cherish our newfound appreciation of each other in our communities and may our hearts and minds open to receive the Spirit’s gifts.
I wish all of you and your loved ones every blessing
Brendan Coffey OSB
Homily for the Ascension Year B 2021
Over many recent months people have by physically isolated from one another, but thanks to modern technology we have discovered that being physically in the same room with someone is not the only way you can be present to them. You can have a very real contact with someone who is miles away. We can fit a few hundred people in our church here. But over Easter there were thousands of people connected with us online.
We know that Jesus had contact with a limited number of people during his earthly life: those whom he physically met. This contact continued, amazingly, after his death when he was seen by his disciples for a significant number of weeks. But the ascension was the moment when that kind of contact came to an end. ‘A cloud took him out of their sight,’ we read. In other words: his visible presence was withdrawn into the mystery of God. Jesus was no longer physically present, in order to be present in a new way, not just to a limited number of people in Palestine, but to everyone in the world.
For us being present via webcam, or zoom, or phone or mobile is a second best compared to physical presence. For Jesus and us it is different. He has withdrawn from human sight in order to be much closer again. His presence now is more like the way a mother is present to the child in her womb, or the way the ocean is present to the fish that swims in it. We are members of his body.
But the presence of Jesus ascended isn’t inert, like a piece of wood resting on a stone. It’s active. St Mark says that as the disciples went out the risen Lord worked with them. The description of his work is fairly dramatic: picking up snakes and drinking poison with no harm, healing the sick, expelling demons. This dramatic kind of work has continued down through the centuries until our present day, in the lives of very exceptional people. The temptation might be to say, ‘Well my faith is certainly not exceptional, so this gospel text doesn’t apply to me.’ Happily, that’s not true.
You only have to think that the most dangerous snakes on this planet are in fact the two-legged ones. Ourselves. And there can be plenty of poison in the human heart – you don’t have to drink it. You are much more likely to spew it out! This is where real unhappiness comes from – it come from inside. And the work of Jesus with us is to heal, protect and nourish. St Paul, writing to his community in Corinth made the point that, whatever about dramatic gifts that win admiration, by far the most important one is love. This is the real healer. This is life. The Lord’s work with us and on us is to make us alive and life-giving.
The Lord can work in extraordinary ways if we give him space to do it. But we have to let him. We are told in the gospels that even in his earthly life Jesus was rendered almost powerless in his home town of Nazareth because so few people really believed in him.
We know the kind of scene on a plane or ship where someone has taken ill, and an announcement is made, ‘Is there a doctor on board?’ Imagine a plane where someone is desperately ill and cabin staff are struggling to help. Imagine that you are a doctor and nobody thinks of asking for help. Imagine how frustrated you would be. How would you get through to them?
Things start changing when we actually invite the Lord to work with us. New possibilities emerge, fears subside, tempers cool, people get creative and find solutions.
And it only takes a second or two. At an auction it often takes just the slightest gesture for a bidder to communicate with the auctioneer. It’s the same with the Lord, the merest gesture, in the fluttering of an eyelash, in a heartbeat, in a single breath, we can issue our invitation. We can make an opening in our world for God to get in and change things.
Through signs of bread and wine, let us enter into a presence that does work wonders, a presence that heals and saves, a body and a life-blood closer to us than our own.
Fr Columba OSB
The Abbey Church reopens for public worship on Monday 10th May with the standard measures of face masks 😷, social distancing ↔️ and hand washing 🧼. Our shop and guest accommodation remain closed until further notice and the hearing of Confessions will resume at a later date. Welcome back!
25 years ago, Irish athletics had a world-class star. Her name was Sonia O’Sullivan.
After all these years, unexpectedly, last Sunday, four other Irish female athletes, Aoife Lynch and Kate Doherty from Dublin, Sarah Quinn from Mayo and Sophie Becker from Wexford, took second place in the World Relays event. This was their first ever international podium finish and that, along with what their teammates achieved, has been dubbed by the media ‘a breakthrough weekend for Irish athletics’. One of the monks here drew my attention to this great success because it took place in Poland, in the stadium, which is just down the road from where I lived for more than 20 years.
Now, although these four did not win the race – naturally the Poles were the winners – to my mind they did something truly remarkable. Not only did they do their very best, but in the words of a member of the Irish men’s relay team, they put Ireland back on the map. I was very struck by what one of them said after the event: ‘We had nothing to lose and everything to gain and we gave it our all’. They gave it their all. What an experience for all of them; a new chapter in their lives opened up.
All this effort was to win a perishable prize. What we Christians aim at in our daily spiritual journey is something infinitely greater.
What way are we to follow? It is Jesus Christ, of course, the way. Some challenging questions remain for each of us: do I give of my all on a daily basis? Am I genuinely committed to making a breakthrough in my Christian life?
Jesus tells us: ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you’. This commandment to love one another, which we think of as a new commandment, isn’t actually new at all. It has been with us since the beginning of time. What is new is that Christ laid down his life for us to overcome the power of Satan and bring a new way of life. And this is the real breakthrough.
Christ’s victory opened up a new chapter in the history of humanity. Christ did all of this to fully restore our fallen nature. His death, his crushing the Devil and his resurrection from the dead are the decisive moments in history. We need to appreciate their importance. We need to imitate Jesus in his death, so that we may have a renewed life in him. Dying to our sins, with Christ, however challenging this may be, is the only way to arrive at a genuine understanding of what Jesus means by ‘love one another as I have loved you’. Our breakthrough is achieved by hard work, leading to a transformed existence where we become victors with Christ.
The Irish athletes were not afraid of hard work and they are now on their way to the Olympics. In our spiritual race we have nothing to lose either. Let’s follow Christ in our race toward the heavenly city. Let’s prove victorious and gain the greatest prize of all.
Rev. Jarek Kurek OSB
