Category: abbeynews

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.

Fr Anthony Keane OSB

As Jesus and his disciples left the City of Jericho to go up the
dangerous road to Jerusalem, Bar Timaeus, a blind beggar
sitting on the side of the road, hearing that it was Jesus of
Nazareth that was passing, began to shout and cry out:
Son of David, Jesus, have pity on me.

And many of them scolded him and told him to keep quiet,
But he shouted all the louder: Son of David, have pity on
me… Jesus stopped… Courage they said, get up, He is
calling you…then Jesus said: What do you want me to do for
you? The Blind Man said to Him ‘Rabbuni, let me see
again’. Jesus said to him Go, your faith has saved you.

And at once his sight returned…Now we too, might do well to
ask Jesus, our wisdom and light, that we might see again, for
divine wisdom is indeed more splendid than the sun;
compared with light she takes first place, for light must yield
to night, but against Wisdom, evil cannot prevail.

But who are the jealous spirits that try to prevent us?
It is the enemy, the accuser of our race, which we may, by
God’s grace contemn and ignore, for we read ‘In the
beginning was the Word’.

And who are those who say ‘Courage, get up, He is calling
you’? This is the great gathering of Angels and Saints, whose
feast we celebrate next Friday the First of November. It is the
voice of all those who from our infancy, have looked on us
with love and wished us well. May we listen to their kindly
and beautiful voices.

Fr Patrick Hederman OSB

A farmer was saving his hay in the traditional style. None of your combined harvesters for him. He cut the field with a scythe and then began turning the grass with a fork to dry it in the sun. After lunch he turned the whole field again, and at five O’Clock the rain poured down from heaven and ruined his whole day’s work. He looked up into the sky and roared at the top of his voice: ‘Jesus Christ, crucifixion wasn’t good enough for you!’

Now, if you think of it, that man’s theology was quite advanced. He covered most of the items in the creed that we’ll be singing together as Christians in a few minutes time: he believed in God the father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. He believed in Jesus Christ his only son, Our Lord, who suffered under Pontius Pilate was crucified died and was buried; he believed in the resurrection: that the same Jesus is now seated at the right hand of the Father, in charge of the weather as well as everything else.

The only thing is: he got it all wrong. The trinity, who are trying to lead the universe in the right direction, and who are dependent on each one of us as cooperating partners, have massively big plans for each one of us as for the whole universe, have more to do than make hay while the sun shines.

Take another example nearer to home. On Wednesday 18 th of September last, the Glenstal JCT were playing Crescent in the first round of the Junior Cup. In the dying minutes of the game Glenstal were leading by one point. Crescent were given a free under our posts. Prayers went up from both sides. The kicker missed the kick and Glenstal won the match. Do you think God was responsible for that historic win? And, if so, what were the Crescent team meant to think.

It is consoling, at least to me it is, to hear in today’s Gospel that the very first disciples of Jesus, the Sons of Thunder, James and John, Scrum half and Out-half, you might say, on the first JCT [Jesus Christ Team] were getting it all wrong from the very beginning: ‘When you win the election. Lord, and take charge of your kingdom, can I be the Taoiseach and the brother here has his eye on being Tanaiste?

They didn’t know what they were talking about; they didn’t understand that Jesus Christ came on earth to teach us a whole new notion of politics, a whole new way of doing things, a whole new way of being in charge. And have we learned any better since then?

Listen to the Persian poet, Rumi, who lived in in the 13 th Century in the country we now know of as Iran. He seems to have got the message a bit better and understood his place and his role in the universe:
Then new events said to me,
‘Don’t move.
A sublime generosity is
coming towards you.’
And love said, ‘Stay with me.’
And I said, ‘I will.’
The chess master says nothing,
other than moving the silent chess piece.
That I am part of the ploys
of this great game makes me
amazingly happy.

Fr Henry O’Shea OSB

Many people who had the patience to follow the reporting and
comments on the government’s recent budget, will most likely have
been struck by the undercurrent of what can be called the What’s-in-
it-for-me-syndrome. An understandable syndrome, of course. We
have to live. But how? But why?

In today’s gospel reading, Peter shows a certain air of potential
disillusionment when he begins to point out to Jesus that he and the
other disciples have given up everything to follow him: – in some
cases, a successful fishing business, in most cases, a settled family life, a
certain stability, however humdrum And so on. Peter’s reminder cannot hide an expectation of some reward for his and the disciples’ heroic offering. Jesus interrupts him and reassures him that he and they will be amply rewarded – but at a cost.

Regardless of what form this reward will take, it will nearly always
include persecution in its varied forms. This can be persecution
experienced as actual physical violence, as legalized discrimination, as
public or private ridicule, as being ‘othered’. Persecution, even if not
recognized as such, can also take the form of racking doubts, mental
weariness, of temptations to give up.

Among the experiences that can prompt us to leave all, are
disillusionment when our idols let us down, the evaporation of hope
when our idols are shattered. In our relatively affluent society, most of us have the luxury of being able to choose our idols. But, idols remain idols, whether material, psychological, spiritual or some combination of these. And idols cannot save. Idols always disappoint. What has this to do with our gospel? Am I my own idol? What are my idols? How do I recognize them for what they are? How do I name them? Today’s first reading is from the Book of Wisdom and is a poem or song attributed to King Solomon, who reigned in what is now Israel, about 1000 years before the time of Christ. Solomon, having experienced what, by any standards, was enormous worldly success – but also well aware of his own personal flaws – tries to draw up a balance, tries to express where he stands, what he really values. He identifies wisdom as the greatest gift and treasure one could desire.

The fact that he has a full stomach and more, does not invalidate his
insight. Roughly 1000 years later, the write of the Letter to the Hebrews, from which our second reading today is taken, suggests one way of identifying our idols. The writer tells us that the word of God is living and actively effective, sharper than a two-edged sword, that can reach into what we regard as the most secret corners of our innermost being, the radical core of our hearts, the being of the real me.

This word of God is the scalpel that dissects, the spotlight that
exposes, the x-ray that penetrates, all our illusions and phantasies, all
our delusions, all our idols. This word of God exposes our idolatries,
not only of worldly riches as we usually understand them, but also the
idolatries of our smug or imagined securities, our imagined swaggering superiorities, be they intellectual, athletic, social – or even spiritual.
It is clear that the man in today’s Gospel who approaches Jesus is not
an evil person. He keeps all the commandments. He is honest, law-
abiding and respectable, probably respected. We are told that Jesus looked at him and loved him. Jesus does not condemn him, nor does he condemn us, but indicates an attachment that is crippling him and can cripple us; his and our many possessions. Jesus offers him and us an alternative that he is, and we are, free to choose. Jesus tells him to
let go, sell up, give to the poor and risk a life of listening to Jesus’ own
living and effective word.

Jesus invites us also to grow up, to get really real, to let the scalpel, the
searchlight, the x-ray of his word, of himself, the word of God made
flesh. He invites to let this really get into our hearts. Jesus admits to his shocked disciples that this relativisation, this scrapping of accepted social norms, even proprieties, might, and even does, appear impossible to the human person. The eye of a needle will always remain small. But it is not impossible to God. It is not impossible if we let him in to the real heart of ourselves. If we let him in, so that, in the words of today’s responsorial psalm: ‘…we may shout for joy and gladness all our days…’

On the solemnity of All Saints the monastic community will present their recently elected abbot Columba McCann OSB to the Archbishop of Cashel and Emly to ask for his blessing.

Archbishop Kieran O’Reilly will ask God to bless and strengthen Abbot Columba as he begins his service as leader of the community of twenty six monks, with the new abbot then receiving a copy of the Rule of Saint Benedict and the symbols of his new office.

The abbatial blessing takes place on Friday 1st November 2024, the solemnity of All Saints, at 3pm in the Abbey Church and may be followed online at www.glenstal.com/abbey/webcam

There will be no 12.10pm Conventual Mass on that day.

Fr Brendan Coffey OSB

Today we have the account of Jesus’ famous prohibition on divorce. The temptation is to skip over it, talk about something else and hope nobody notices, because today’s Gospel makes fairly stark reading and we can easily come away from it thinking that Jesus doesn’t have much sympathy with those of us who make mistakes in life. And yet, that just isn’t true, is it?

He understood us very well indeed, as we see from his conversation with the woman at the well, who had five husbands and the man she was with when she met Jesus was not her husband at all; or when he was confronted by the woman taken in adultery. He was the only one who showed her any compassion. The crowd wanted to stone her to death, but he shamed them all into slinking away by writing in the dirt with his finger, just as God wrote the commandments on the tablets of stone which he gave to Moses. The law is there to give life and set us free, not to place heavy burdens upon us. Jesus understood this better than any of us. So don’t tell me that Jesus doesn’t have sympathy with those of us who make mistakes, because that’s utter nonsense; we know perfectly well that he does.

It is we who do not see and it is we who are so unteachable, just as he said. If you need proof of that, look at the wonderful job we have made of managing the world today! It is we who choose to see in part and we who do not open our eyes to the Divine Light. But from the beginning of Creation he made them male and female. And there we have it; the echo of three seemingly insignificant words. Three words that are of vital importance. In the beginning. They are not just any three words, these are the first three words in the Bible. “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” Jesus is saying to us, go deeper, go back to the beginning. If you really want to understand life’s more difficult questions, go deeper and look at the bigger picture. It’s easier to gloss over everything and find a quick fix. There is no quick fix, some wounds are just too deep. So where do we begin?

What God created was good. Jesus, more than any of us was aware of this, and in seeing that goodness, he also saw the value in marriage and family life which is beyond price, and precisely because he understood this he was also able to respond to the reality of human heartbreak when he confronted it in the woman at the well or the adulterous woman. We can only really do the latter properly, if we can first do the former.

We are very mistaken if we think that life is simple, it is not and neither are Christ’s words about life. To understand him we have to go deeper, we have to go back to the beginning and really try to understand why Jesus so insists on the sanctity and indissolubility of marriage. It is important for each of us to do this and take seriously what he has to say, because unlike most of us, he actually does know what he’s talking about. And so he came and walked among us, as one of us, to show us how to live and how to be alive.

On the solemnity of All Saints the monastic community will present their recently elected abbot Columba McCann OSB to the Archbishop of Cashel and Emly to ask for his blessing.

Archbishop Kieran O’Reilly will ask God to bless and strengthen Abbot Columba as he begins his service as leader of the community of twenty six monks, with the new abbot then receiving a copy of the Rule of Saint Benedict and the symbols of his new office.

The abbatial blessing takes place on Friday 1st November 2024, the solemnity of All Saints, at 3pm in the Abbey Church and may be followed online at www.glenstal.com/abbey/webcam

There will be no 12.10pm Conventual Mass on that day.