A Celebration of our Nations

At the initiative of the Nenagh Catholic parish, Nenagh Churches Together are organising a service to celebrate the cultural diversity of our Nenagh community and its varied churches. It will include a procession of the flags of many nations, hymns, music and dance, and readings and prayers - all offered to the glory of God by people drawn from many nations and faith traditions.

The service will take place at 7.30 pm on Thursday 29th April in St Mary's of the Rosary, Church Rd, Nenagh Co Tipperary. It will be followed by refreshments in the Pastoral Centre.

All will be very welcome, from whatever nation, including Ireland!

If you are in the vicinity why not come and join us?

Wishing You Every Blessing for Easter

Going to Emmaus, Robert Zünd, 1877, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us,
while he was talking to us on the road,
while he was opening the scriptures to us?” Luke 24:32

The long road to the kingdom

This article appeared in the April 2010 edition of Newslink, the diocesan magazine of the diocese of Limerick & Killaloe

The Penitents (Los Penitentes)

Ice melting at the foot of a glacier near the south wall of Aconcagua in the Argentine Andes, the highest mountain in the Americas - the Aconcagua glaciers have reduced in area by 20% since 1955 as a result of global warming. Photo by Lucas Hirschegger.

Bravo, Paddy Anglican!

Canon Stephen Neil hit the nail on the head in his article last month when he wrote, ‘The task we face is how to reintegrate (politics, economics, religion and environmental stewardship) and create a sustainable and healthy society for all Creation’. That is a vision of the kingdom of heaven. It’s a big ask, isn’t it? But Christ announces the kingdom is coming and calls us, his followers, to build it.

The four-fold crisis we are living through – political, economic, religious and environmental – is very deep. Building the kingdom will be neither quick nor easy. We the people are confused, demoralised and angry at what has happened to us. Our leaders remain for the most part deep in denial about their responsibility for landing us in the mess. I don’t think much will change until they move beyond denial. For recovery to take place, they will surely have to make way for fresh faces that are not compromised by past misdeeds and errors and can command the respect of the people. But we the people will have to change too, because all of us bear some responsibility.

The psychology is important, I think. Human beings must pass through distinct psychological stages in order to process guilt: initial denial is followed by shame, then penitence in which hearts change, before recovery is possible. How far down this road have we travelled so far?

The Golden Circle
The tent at the Galway races is long gone, but lives on in memory as the enduring symbol of the golden circle of venal politicians, megalomaniac developers and grasping bankers. Bankers anticipating bonuses borrowed short on international markets and lent long to fund developers’ ever more grandiose projects. Both greased the palms of politicians, who in turn obliged with light touch regulation and rezoning, and bought our votes with goodies paid for from windfall stamp duties. The greed of all three worked together to inflate an asset price bubble which was bound to burst. Similar cycles of greed were at work in other countries, but few were as intense as ours. As the rest of the world begins a faltering recovery after the global crash, Ireland remains stuck in recession. Incomes continue to fall, services are being cut further, young families struggle to pay the mortgage on homes worth a fraction of what they paid, youth unemployment balloons and another lost generation emigrates. As I see it, the golden circle is the main cause of our economic woes, though most of us colluded in it.

Many developers have gone bust and lost personal fortunes. Most senior bankers have been forced to resign and one has been questioned by the Gardai. I confess to a certain guilty pleasure, what the Germans call schadenfreude. Some show signs of shame, but most not – and certainly no penitence. They scrabble to keep as much as they can of the personal fortunes they made during the bubble they engineered, even as they look to the rest of us to recapitalise their banks and buy their bad debts through NAMA.

And what of the politicians? Fianna Fáil has led coalition governments since 1997. Brian Cowan was Minister of Finance from 2004 until he became Taoiseach in 2008, presiding over the golden circle at its most manic. He and his party must bear the lion’s share of political responsibility for what has happened. Yet they are in complete denial and shamelessly cling to office – I am lost for words! But let’s not forget who voted them there – we the people did. And they cling on in hope that we will do so again.

Time for a ‘Velvet Reformation’?
As we all know, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has been in ever deepening crisis since the Murphy report was published last year. It was bad enough to learn over many years how some priests and religious abused children both sexually and physically. But the Murphy report revealed that this evil was compounded by a culture of secrecy and cover up at the highest level, which allowed the perpetrators to continue their abuse. Bishops criticised in the report tried at first to deny they had done anything wrong, though four have since resigned. In March it was revealed that Cardinal Sean Brady himself swore two abused children to secrecy 35 years ago.

Faithful Roman Catholic laity and priests are as shocked as the rest of us. They feel angry and betrayed by their leadership. Perhaps part of their anger is with themselves, because very many in their heart of hearts must know that they colluded in the evil by not shouting stop. Fr Enda McDonagh, former professor of Moral Theology at Maynooth, has proposed a 12-step recovery programme, involving laity in the process of healing the church. Pope Benedict has just issued his long awaited pastoral letter - in it he points to grave errors of judgment and failures of leadership by his brother bishops. Garry O’Sullivan the editor of the Irish Catholic newspaper has called for a ‘Velvet Reformation’ in which the entire hierarchy is replaced.

It is too early to know how all this will play out, but it does appear that the outrage of laity and lower clergy is forcing the hierarchy out of denial to admit shame for the damaging culture they presided over. It is a good sign, but time will tell whether they can move on to true penitence, a prerequisite for renewal, which will probably require wholesale changes in personnel and a shift of power from clergy to laity.

We Anglicans may feel tempted to thank God that we are not like them. But that would be to behave like the Pharisee who thanked God publicly that he was not like other men – Jesus you will remember preferred the private contrition of the humble publican. We should remember that there are skeletons in our cupboard too, and that many of us used the excuse that it was none of our business to keep silence when we heard rumours of what was happening. Rather we should show solidarity and come to the aid of faithful Roman Catholics in ecumenical prayer as they struggle to reform their church.

Who is responsible for Global Warming?
The fourth part of the crisis is the failure of environmental stewardship. Its most dangerous symptom is global warming, largely caused by increasing emissions of green house gases from burning fossil fuels, destroying forests, and intensifying farming. To reverse it will require coordinated action by people in every country.

Global leaders meeting in Copenhagen last December disappointingly failed to reach the international agreements that are necessary. Despite its fine words our government has also failed to hold back Irish emissions as it promised, among the highest in the world per capita.

Perhaps the main reason for these failures is that responsibility for emissions does not lie so much with governments as with the personal choices and decisions of countless individuals around the world, particularly those in rich countries – people like you and me. Very many of us remain in obstinate denial that there is a problem at all. Even those of us who admit that there is a problem do not yet feel real shame for our bad choices and decisions. Until we do we will be denied the gift of penitence, ‘to live simply that others may simply live’.

The road to the Kingdom will be long and we have barely started down it.

Spring watch - frog spawn

Common frog (Rana temporaria) with spawn

Yesterday, St Patrick's day, the sun smiled on Susannah and me, as we proudly wore shamrock to church, and later were feasted by a kind friend Mary in honour of Clodagh's birthday! So many people around the world slap shamrock on everything in sight before celebrating Irishness in a wild binge to 'drown' it. It's quite extraordinary really - but I wonder how many recall the significance of that small trefoil leaf: used by Patrick as a metaphor for the Trinity - three leaflets in one leaf symbolising three persons in one God.

I searched the wild flower meadow for wild shamrock, but could find none due to the exceptionally cold and late season. However Susannah brought some from the greengrocer in a small pot - at least it was Irish grown, no doubt in some poly-tunnel, not imported from the Netherlands as it so often is. The cold, late season also means it is far too early to plant the potatoes which are chitting in the greenhouse - 1st early Duke of York, 2nd early Charlotte and main-crop Pink Fir Apple.

However, at long last the daffodils in the Labyrinth are pushing up their flowering heads -they came as volunteers with topsoil when the extension was built, so are scattered in pleasing natural clumps.

And yesterday the first frog-spawn appeared in the pond on the patio - now that's a real sign of Spring! I neglected the pond last year, so it was frightfully overgrown. But the sight of the spawn galvinised me into action to clear out the surplus pond weeds. I carefully left the spawn on one side and put it back afterwards - I trust I have not damaged it - and this morning another mass had appeared.

A View from the Pew – Life is stirring

View from the Pew is a column I write for Newslink, the diocesan magazine for Limerick & Killaloe - this peice appeared in the March 2010 edition.

Pussy willow bravely blooming

What a hard winter we’ve had of it!
First the floods in November, then the snow around Christmas, followed by the hardest frosts for many years.

The Shannon froze. It brought to mind my mother’s story of how as a teenager in the early 1930s, she and her friends walked across Lough Derg on the ice from the Tipperary to the Galway shore, dragging a small boat in case the ice cracked. Mistakenly I had thought I would never see such a thing myself because of global warming – but that confuses weather with climate. Weather is naturally variable, and even as the planet warms we can expect occasional cold snaps, though they may be rarer. Climate is about long timescales and wide areas. As we froze in Ireland, temperatures in the arctic were up to 7°C above normal this winter. Don’t be misled by the cold winter – climate change is continuing and real.

It was heartening to see how people rallied round to help their neighbours devastated by the floods and struggling in the cold. I was impressed how the IFA organised distribution of fodder donated by farmers with a surplus to those who had lost theirs. And we should all feel inspired by the generosity and enterprise of the children of St Michael’s National School, Limerick, who raised over €500 to give toys at Christmas to children who had lost theirs when they were flooded out of their homes, as reported in Newslink last month.

In the garden the frost has killed many tender plants, and I fear for a lot of others. The Chilean Puyas which survived several winters outside are all gone, as is a Cordyline. Two Olearias are looking very sick. And I have attended far too many funerals of old friends recently. Most were occasions to celebrate long lives well lived, but the death of a contemporary reminds me of my own mortality.

New life is stirring.
But now life is stirring again as the days lengthen and winter gives way to another spring. The flowering willow is covered with silver pussies, snowdrops are blooming their socks off, the first crocuses are struggling through over-long grass, and the hellebores are about to burst. The buds on Forsythia and winter cherry are swelling, and the catkins are lengthening on the cobnuts. The birds too are starting to think about making babies – I have just been watching from my window two hen blackbirds trying to chase each other away from a rather bemused looking cock. And a farming neighbour who looked ready to drop in the pew confided that he had barely slept for a week because he was up all night calving!

Is it just me who detects new life stirring in our diocese too? I hope not. These are just some of the things that I have noticed recently:

• The buoyant mood of the hundreds of people who made the pilgrimage from all corners of the diocese to Limerick for Celebrate Together in November. Something new happens when we move out of our own small parishes to come together.


• The mixture of fun and serious purpose in the largely lay group that Vicki Lynch brought together to attend the NOSTRA public lectures at Mary I. It was eye-opening to meet so many others who also yearn to talk about their faith and its implication for mission, to discover we are not alone.


• The new training programmes designed to equip lay people for ministry, as parish and diocesan readers and in pastoral and youth work, and the moves toward a ‘fellowship of vocation’. They promise to release the gifts of those who take them up for Christian service.

There are stirrings too in other churches. For all the disillusionment over clerical abuse, increasing numbers of Roman Catholic lay men and women are seeking pastoral and theological training – and they are pressing for a greater lay involvement in their parishes. New churches and worship communities are springing up as well. In my parish, for instance, there is the Nenagh Baptist Group, a new church plant which particularly welcomes the unchurched and young families, and Living Water, an interdenominational charismatic group, holding joyous monthly meetings of worship and prayer in a local hotel, both well worth a visit.

Where are the stirrings leading?
We know where the stirrings in the garden will lead – to burgeoning life, beautiful flowers and a bountiful future harvest.

It is less clear where the stirrings in the church are leading, but I feel sure the Holy Spirit is doing a new thing. Perhaps this Lent we should all ponder where the Spirit is leading us, both as the church and individually, and listen prayerfully for the Spirit to guide our responses.

Here are my own tentative first thoughts:

• We should not be afraid of new life stirring, but rather seek to nourish it. It springs from within our tradition, like a shoot sprouting from a rootstock, drawing strength from the faithful witness and unsung service of so many Church of Ireland people over the years. Let us see it as a harbinger of exciting renewal, not frightening change.


• Similar stirrings are at work in other churches, as I found when I sought out and talked to Christians of other traditions. Most long to share Christian witness, prayer and service with others, just as we do. This suggests to me that the Spirit is leading our different denominations to walk together, recognising each other as fellow disciples of Jesus, who unites us in our diversity. Let us cultivate ecumenical activity - perhaps through a ‘Churches Together’ group in our own locality.


• In all our churches, ordinary lay men and women both feel a call to play a more active role and are responding to it. The old model of full-time professional clergy dispensing ministry to laity who passively consume it can no longer be sustained. With fewer vocations, limited finances and ever larger parish unions, clergy are overworked and risk burnout. In an age of mass higher education and democracy lay people recognise that they also are gifted for ministry and seek to exercise their gifts. It is now generally recognised that all Christians are called to serve in a multitude of different ways – the clergy’s role is to equip them to do so. Let us make a reality of passionate all-member ministry.


• We are most likely to discern where the Spirit is leading by sharing our own thoughts with others and testing them in discussion. Let us unleash the power of the Spirit by contributing to the debate.

What do you think? If you agree or disagree, or feel moved to contribute to the debate, why not share your thoughts in a letter to Madam Editor?

Hardress Jocelyn de Warrenne Waller, 5th May 1917 - 6th March 2010

Hardress Waller, by Vijay Bhushan, Hyderabad 1982

Late addition - see also his obituary in the Irish Times for Saturday 17th April 2010.

My friend and cousin Hardress Jocelyn de Warrenne Waller of Rynskaheen, Nenagh, Co Tipperary, died aged 92 after a short illness on 6th March 2010. He is survived by his widow Lygia (née Banasinska), son Jocelyn, grandson Thomas and great-grandchildren Alexander and William. A second grandson Edward was killed by a terrorist bomb in Bali in 2002.

At his funeral service in St Mary's Church of Ireland, Nenagh, on 10th March 2010, a large congregation joined together to give thanks for and celebrate his long life, well lived, and to recall his gifts of character, integrity and leadership, his sense of humour and zest for life, and all the ways in which he touched the hearts of his family, friends, neighbours and the wider community. After the service he was buried beside his parents Edgar and Dorothy in the family graveyard at Clough Prior, followed by refreshments at Lough Derg Yacht Club, of which he was a past Commodore.

He had a distinguished army career, serving in the Horse Artillery and Royal Horse Artillery where he was known by the nick-name Sam. After fighting in Burma during the Second World War, where he was awarded the Military Cross, he served in many places around the world, was received an MBE in 1956, and retired in 1965 with the rank of Brigadier. In a second career in horseracing, he was Secretary to the Horserace Betting Levy Board 1965-68, Director General of the Racecourse Association 1968-1975, and Senior Steward of the Irish Turf Club 1991-93. He was educated at Rossal and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.

He was also an accomplished polo player, a highly competitive and successful sailor of Shannon One Design dinghys, a military historian, a family genealogist, and with his wife Lygia a restorer of oil paintings.

I will miss him greatly.

The Waller family crest

I used this prayer of William Penn over his coffin the night before his funeral:

We give you back, O God, those whom you have given us
You did not lose them when you gave them to us,
and we do not lose them by their return to you.
Your Son has taught us that life is eternal and love cannot die.
So death is only an horizon, and an horizon is only the limit of our sight.
Open our eyes to see more clearly, and draw us closer to you,
so that we may know we are nearer to our loved ones,
who are with you.

View from the Pew - Love one another!

View from the Pew is a regular column in Newslink, the Limerick & Killaloe diocesan magazine. This piece appeared in the February 2010 edition.

Praying for Christian Unity
For many years churches around the world have designated 18th - 25th January as a Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Each year the global organisers, the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity and the World Council of Churches, ask the churches of one country to prepare materials for use by all. This year the job was given to Scotland, to mark the centenary of the first world mission conference held in Edinburgh in 1910, which is often seen as the beginning of the modern ecumenical movement.

All of us, I’m sure, will have prayed in our parishes for Christian unity during that week. Many will have taken part in ecumenical services. In the Nenagh Union, for the 2nd year running, we hosted an alternative evening of ecumenical singing under the title ‘Come teach us your songs’. It was delightful, with enthusiastic choirs from the Church of Ireland, the Roman Catholics and the Nenagh Baptist Group joining in songs precious to each of our traditions, though we missed the Methodists and Living Waters who could not be with us this year, due to a prior engagement and illness. At the end we shared refreshments in a happy buzz of conversation, echoing Jesus’s constant table fellowship recorded in the Gospels.

Such ecumenical get-togethers give us a warm feeling, don’t they? I detect a great yearning for fellowship among lay Christians I meet of all denominations. Jesus prayed to his Father in heaven for his disciples, ‘that they may be one, as we are one’ (John 17:22). The Spirit is surely calling his people together today, just as Jesus did two thousand years ago.

Unity in Diversity
But I don’t think that means the Spirit calls all Christians to be identical – to worship in the same way, or to believe the same things. Our Father in heaven delights in diversity, judging from the wonderful variety of life that he has called into being on this planet. In the same way, surely, he calls his churches to be diverse in the glorious variety of their traditions and beliefs. Just as there is a unity in the diversity of life based on shared inheritance through DNA, so there is a unity in the diversity of our churches based on our shared inheritance of the love of God through Jesus.

We can learn so much about the love of God from our brothers and sisters in different denominations. Their different insights and spiritualities can only enrich our own if we engage with them – we don’t have to agree with them in all things, nor copy them, just engage with them lovingly and respectfully. The body of Christ contains us all, and is diminished by any that are missing.

There is a darker side, however. All denominations, surely, also have things to be ashamed of, things to be repented of, things others should take as awful warnings. But let us take the beam from our own eye before we look for specks in our neighbour’s. We Anglicans behave like hypocrites when we talk to others about Christian unity yet are incapable of maintaining it within our own Anglican Communion.

Schism is an ugly word
But that seems to be what the Anglican Communion faces in the near future, unless the Holy Spirit brings about a change of heart. For generations Anglicans have prided themselves on being a broad church, able to hold together in reasonable amity a wide variety of views, from low-church Evangelicals to high-church Anglo-Catholics and everything in between. But all this has changed in recent years. Now many Anglicans are unable to abide together in love. Though the focus of conflict is elsewhere, we in the Church of Ireland are not immune from the schismatic forces, which are already opening up old North-South fault lines.

The main presenting issue is whether homosexual practice is compatible with Christian discipleship, though there are others, like the ordination of women. Some people identify the root cause as deep underlying differences about the authority of scripture. But I think less seemly forces are also at work, involving power and politics in the church and funding from outside it. Parties have formed:

• One side call themselves ‘orthodox’. They see themselves as maintaining traditional biblical values. They abhor homosexuality as sinful, and some, though not all, oppose the ordination of women.
• The other is called ‘liberal’, at least by their opponents. They call for the church to be ‘inclusive’ of women and minorities, including partnered homosexuals. They support their ordination as priests and bishops, and hold services of blessing for those in civil partnerships and same sex relationships.

Most ordinary folk in the pews hear little of the disputes. The protagonists are for the most part clergy, arguing with other clergy; many if not most of them seek to steer a middle path and try not to disturb the faith of their flocks. But the contending voices have become shockingly shrill and bitter, as can be seen from the blogs and web sites where much of the argument is conducted (for a taste of it - but not for sensitive souls - try googling ‘Anglican Mainstream’, ‘Inclusive Church’, and ‘Virtue Online’). Both factions accuse their opponents of not being true Christians, seek to drive them out of ‘their’ church, and try to recruit the rest of us to their cause.

I would be less than honest if I did not admit that my own sympathies lie with the liberal, inclusive side – the Jesus I encounter in the Gospels never rejects those who come to him, and is infuriated by those who place the letter of the law above its spirit. But I am deeply disturbed by the sheer hatred displayed by some on both sides. It is as if an evil spirit has possessed otherwise decent, Christian men and women, who share much more than divides them.

Love one another
I think this evil spirit of faction can only be opposed with love. Recall that Jesus said to his disciples, ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another’ (John 13:34).

St Paul, who knew a thing or two about faction fighting, has some good advice. He urged the Ephesians to ‘speak the truth in love’ and warned the Corinthians not to let their liberty become ‘a stumbling block’ to others. Let us love one another. Let us respect each other’s integrity and be honest with one another. Let us walk the extra mile with those with whom we disagree. And if at last some decide to walk apart, let us be generous to them, wish them God speed and give them something for the journey.

And let us pray together, for unity in our diversity, and for the grace to hear where God’s Holy Spirit is leading us.