Reflections

Neville O' Donohue

At the labyrinth close to the Visitors Centre

 

We gather around this labyrinth to begin our reflection and prayer to more clearly focus the question: Where are we in our journey?   The church is in deep difficulty.  We have heard many stories in recent months that tell us that where we thought we were was not where we said it was.  The narratives that told us who were, we now know, were limited histories.  These narratives and stories overlooked many.  They overlooked much.  They have left us in a landscape strewn with abandoned shoes; where we sense people are missing because they have stopped walking with us; a vista where no horizon seems promising.  Where are we then? 

 

I feel we are wandering.  If I am right in my assessment it is necessary to address in what spirit are we doing so?  Let us wander, if we must, in faith.  ‘Being . . . alone, lost, struggling for meaning, and looking bad, is also a place; lost is a place too' where God can be present.[1]  We think of our ancestors in faith, the people of Israel.  They wandered in the desert but were fed.  They backtracked and stumbled but wells still gushed forth from rock.  They worshipped false and golden images, not tigers as in our case but of calves. Despite these things God was with them.  They were on an exodus; they had in other words a ‘path out '; out of slavery and out of wandering. They thought they were alone, but God was there with them.   

 

Our faith in God offers us shelter in the here and now, maybe a tent is the most useful image.  But we have no road maps on this journey.  We cannot open the Book of Revelation, chapter 15 and say: "Hey guys, five plagues down and one to go." [2]  We can learn to hear God now - calling us in creation; calling us in the whisper of the breeze, calling to us from our deep tradition, calling us through the new Moses, Jesus Christ; but there are no road maps.  It is a journey of faith.   God is present even if we are not sure where we are.  I leave you with a question as we walk on: Regardless of what we did or did not do in the past are we willing to trust that God is with us in our journey now? 

  

 

II            On the Green Road in view of Trinity Church and above St. Kevin's Well

 

‘Should we keep going?  Maybe we ought to stop to think about what has happened?  Has anything changed?'  Questions like these were probably familiar to the disciples of Jesus after the resurrection.  Had anything changed?   Some of the disciples left Jerusalem hope-less while others went back fishing as we heard in last Sunday's gospel.   Peter, the Beloved Disciple and others had caught nothing after a night's labour and then the shore side stranger suggested they fish to starboard.  When a huge catch followed the Beloved Disciple recognises what has occurred and cries: ‘It is the Lord'.  That insight, ‘It is the Lord', changes everything.  Fleeing Jerusalem, or fishing or hiding behind locked doors in fear, is changed.  ‘It is the Lord' proclaims that reality is now resurrected. 

 

And so we, his contemporary disciples, walk Easter paths. Our goal: the freedom to be one with God in Christ.  Our reason for everything: the resurrection. We are no longer simply on a ‘path out' an exodus, but we are on a spiral upwards.  This movement upwards transforms a flat and deadened circular life to lead us upwards and outwards to a place of life in the mystery of God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit.[3]

 

We don't keep going relentlessly on as though nothing has changed.  God is not only our creator but God entered our humanity and rose to life after we did away with him. The Word made flesh died and rose for us, and sent the Holy Spirit to us so that we are not strangers to God.  God transcendent and powerful; God intimate and close.  Tonight we seek to attune ourselves to the call to deepen our awareness that all has changed in the resurrection and that God has revealed God's inner life.  We acknowledge the significance for ourselves of these truths from the depth of our tradition as we pause here across from Trinity Church.

 

Our call, our vocation is a deepening call; a call to hear how we are being not only called out of wandering but also called upward to relate to the full revelation of God; Father Son and Holy Spirit.  We now affirm this relationship as we recall our baptism; the sacrament that makes immediate the death and resurrection of Jesus in the lives of each.  Our two sisters will now draw water from the Well of St. Kevin that is below where we stand and I invited you to approach in pairs the water they draw and to cross one another.   

 

 

III          Inside St. Saviour's Church

 

The organisers arranged the location of this the fourth Glendalough prayer on the eve of Vocations Sunday to culminate here.  This was consciously done.  This foundation of the 12th century sought to renew the earlier monastic foundation that reached its golden age two centuries before.[4] The Canons of St. Augustine of the order of Aroasia[5] were helped to locate here by St. Laurence O'Toole after he had finished his tenure as abbot of Glendalough and been elected bishop of Dublin; the first ‘Celt' to hold the position. Laurence probably lived with another group of this community in Dublin.  These canons and this place are testimony to efforts to renew the church at a time of change in Ireland. 

 

To answer the call to be church we might turn to 1 Peter starting at 2:5 ‘like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices, . . . . [to] proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.' 

 

Renewing the church on the basis of the gospel will have its challenges and in my view we need to live in freedom to address some of the following issues. Being called to be church is not to be straight jacketed but it does require faithful solidarity.  Being called to be church must not be predominately shaped by sociological factors as often in the past when we tolerated different religious congregations for different strata of society.  Being called to be church means that we will not accept factionalism; those focused on worship and those working for the marginalized belong to the one church .  Being called to be church means that we need to be able to have conversations that are more careful then many of the shrill clarities in the media. Being called to be church means we are not naïve in attributing all the entries to religious life and priesthood in the past to the Holy Spirit nor naïve in attributing the decline in vocations now to the Holy Spirit.  Being called to be church means that we will not simply seek to renew what we do but we will seek to re-form the church by doing new things in new ways.  Being called by God is not simply an issue of confessing Jesus and accepting the church as it now exists.  Having faith in Jesus challenges us to change our lives.  Having faith in Jesus challenges us to renew and re-form our church. 

 

We move then from these reflections to prayer and we begin that prayer by evoking the saints of heaven by praying a Litany of the Saints.  We ask them to intercede for us, the church triumphant aiding the church embryonic.  We pray that we will be a people who hear God calling - calling us to recognise God with us; calling us upward to life in the Sprit as the sons and daughters of Christ and calling us to be living stones in a renewed and reformed church.  We are people called by God. 

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[1] Attributed to Ronald Rolheiser OMI.  See "Insights for Living Authentically in ‘Middle Time'" by Lynn M. Levo CSJ, p. 16, in Walking the Way, Conference Papers, CORI, 2010.

[2] Timothy Radcliffe OP ‘Religious Life After 11^th September: What Signs Do We Offer?' p. 164, Passion for Christ Passion for Humanity: Acts of the Congress on Consecrated Life, St. Paul Communications, 2005

[3]  Mark Patrick Hederman OSB, "Living the Resurrection" p. 28, in Walking the Way, Conference Papers, CORI, 2010

[4] Glendalough: A Celtic Pilgrimage, Michael Rodgers and Marcus Losack, The Columba Press, 1996, p. 120 -123

[5] An Ecclesiastical history of Ireland, Vol. 4, by John Lanigan, 1822, p. 178/179.  Read on line on April 22^nd 2010 at www.books.google.ie