Travelling together on pilgrimage

Article published in the June issue of Grapevine, the parish newsletter of the Nenagh Union of Parishes

On Saturday 24^th May I went on a day-long pilgrimage around ancient holy sites in East Galway. This was organised by Ms Valerie Raitt, a Pioneer Minister working to develop ‘spiritual tourism’, or pilgrimage, in our diocese, something Bishop Michael is keen to promote. Around 40 of us travelled by bus around the different sites, where Dr Christy Cunniffe, an expert on Irish medieval church architecture, expertly interpreted the buildings we visited. Despite the somewhat wet day, the rain held off for the most part, and those of us who participated greatly enjoyed the day.

Holy Trinity Aughrim, with Archdeacon John Godfrey

We began at Aughrim Church, where Archdeacon John Godfrey welcomed us and led us around the community climate action park, once his historic glebe, and the site of an ancient monastery founded by St Connell c. 500, of which no trace now remains above ground. It is an inspiring place with paths mown through a flowering meadow and a walled garden, maintained by local people, with the help of school children who learn about planting, the cycles of nature, biodiversity, and sustainable living. Here, and at each of our stops, Archdeacon John shared verses from the Psalms to reflect upon as we walked, a lovely practice of the early Irish church.

Kilconnell Franciscan Friary

Pilgrims in the choir at Kilconnell

From there we travelled to visit the C15th Kilconnell Franciscan Friary, with its high tower visible from miles around. The ruins are in a near perfect state of preservation – it would not be hard to put a new roof on and bring it back into use. The curvilinear tracery of the east window, and a magnificent tomb with statues of saints are particularly notable. We then repaired to Broderick’s Bar for tea and sandwiches.

Clontuskert Abbey curvilinear tracery

Clontuskert Abbey doorway

The next stop was Clontuskert Abbey, a C12th Augustinian Priory, with its magnificent doorway adorned with complex iconography, expertly interpreted for us by Christy, including a mermaid, similar to another in Clonfert Cathedral.

Dr Christy Cunniffe explains the iconography of the great door of Clonfert Cathedral

We then made our way to Clonfert, where we stopped for tea, provided by the ladies of the RC parish, and contemplated a rare medieval painted wooden statue of the Madonna and Child in the RC church. After that we went on to C12th Clonfert Cathedral, with its quite extraordinary Hiberno-Romanesque doorway. It became a significant pilgrimage destination in the Middle Ages, and the doorway was probably built as a shrine to St Brendan the Navigator, who founded the monastery and is buried there. After Christy guided us around the building, we sang a hymn about Brendan composed by the Rector Dr John McGinty, we prayed St Brendan’s Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer, and we finished with a group photo.

The next event organised by Valerie Raitt is a pilgrim walk on Slea Head, Dingle Peninsular on Midsummer’s Day, Saturday 21^st June at a cost of €40. It sounds fascinating if your legs are good. You can find out more at tlk.ie/spiritualtourism. If you’re interested, early booking is advisable.

We may not have such magnificent medieval churches in our Nenagh Union of parishes, but alongside our precious parish churches, there are a host of interesting medieval ruined churches and holy wells. I hope we can work with Valerie Raitt to find ways to enable visitors and pilgrims to hear the stories each of them have to tell.

Joc Sanders

27^th May 2025

Paul's advice to Ephesians - and to us

St Paul writing, from an early IXth Century manuscript
in the Abbey of St Gallen, Switzerland 

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 13th May 2025

The first three and a half chapters of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians are deeply theological, about the relationship between God – as Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and human beings – both individually and together as the Church.

But in today’s reading (Ephesians 4:17-32), Paul moves beyond theology to look at its ethical implications. That is, how the Ephesian Christians should behave to each other and to their neighbours. He insists that their Christian faith must make a difference to how they live. Now, Paul tells them ‘Put away your former way of life, your old self … and clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness’. And Paul continues with very specific advice about how Christians should behave:

You must speak the truth to your neighbours, because you are all members of one community. By neighbours, I am sure Paul means everyone in the community, not just those who are Christians.

If someone angers you, you must seek to make it up. Anger is not wrong in itself – remember, Jesus often showed righteous anger, for instance when driving the money-changers from the Temple. But if you let anger fester – if, in Paul’s words, you ‘let the sun go down on your anger’– you allow evil a way into your lives – you ‘make room for the devil’.

You must be honest in all your dealings – you should work for what you get, not steal it. And why? So that you have something to share with those in need. Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor – but this is not the Christian way: you must work, so that you have a surplus to give away to those who need help.

You must avoid speaking words intended to hurt others rather than help them. And, in this time of fake news, one might add, you must weigh up carefully what you hear, to avoid being deceived into doing what is wrong.

So, says Paul summarising, ‘Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you’.

Paul is addressing the Ephesian Christians of his own time. But his message is just as relevant to Christians in every time and place, and that means to you and me. We must:

• Speak the truth
• Not let disputes fester
• Be honest in all things with everybody
• Be generous to the needy
• Avoid hurtful speech, our own and others’

Let us all take Paul’s advice to the Ephesians to heart.

 

The Good Shepherd and the sheep

 

Christ as the Good Shepherd …
a mosaic in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna
(Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on Sunday 11th May 2025, the 4th of Easter

‘My sheep hear my voice’, says Jesus, ‘I know them and they follow me’.

Now, I don’t have much personal experience of sheep, but one day as a child I helped my Grandfather move a flock to fresh grazing. It wasn’t easy – the sheep took every opportunity to get away through gaps and over ditches as we drove them down the public road. We got them all there in the end, but I’ve never forgotten how wilful sheep can be.

One Sunday, years ago, I was preaching about the Good Shepherd, and I remembered this experience. I expressed surprise that in Jesus’s time shepherds could expect their sheep to follow them. Surely shepherds then must have had a different relationship with their sheep than they do today, I said. After the service a wise and experienced farmer came up to me and said slyly, ‘My sheep follow me’. I asked him how he did it, and he replied, ‘I walk in front of them with a bucket of sheep nuts – they’re intelligent animals, they recognise me, and they know very well what the bucket means’. I learned a good lesson about leadership that day.

John tells us in his Gospel that Jesus said, ‘I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.’ (John 10:14)

Those who heard him couldn’t agree whether Jesus was the long expected Messiah, or not. Some thought he must be mad, but others pointed to his miraculous deeds, such as causing the blind to see, which was just the kind of thing they expected of the Messiah.

Jesus returns to this shepherd theme in today’s reading from John’s Gospel (10:22-30). He is walking in the temple, sheltering in the portico of Solomon from the winter weather, during the festival of the Dedication. This festival commemorates the re-dedication of the temple 200 years before, after the great Jewish leader John Hyrcanus had defeated the Greek Seleucid king Antiochus IV, who had desecrated it. In Hebrew the festival is called Hanukkah, and Jews still celebrate it around Christmas time – this is why some people, particularly in America, prefer to say ‘Happy Holidays’ rather than ‘Happy Christmas’.

A crowd gathers around Jesus, asking him to put an end to the debate about his identity, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.’ Jesus knows that many in the crowd are looking for a Messiah who is a great military leader, someone like John Hyrcanus, someone who will liberate them from Roman oppression and re-establish the kingdom of Judah, someone who will make Judea great again. But this is not the kind of Messiah that Jesus knows himself to be. He surely also knows that many in the crowd hate him, and hope he will incriminate himself as a subversive, so they can get rid of him.

So Jesus does not answer directly. Instead he says, ‘I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.’ Jesus is pointing them to God, who he calls his Father. God works through me, says Jesus, I know those who believe in me, they listen to me and follow me. But you do not.

He continues, ‘I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand.’ Jesus is saying that he gives those who follow him eternal life, which is to know God, and he will keep them safe, because God has given them to him.

‘The Father and I are one’, he finishes. This last phrase infuriates the crowd. Jesus is claiming identity with God, which pious Jews see as blasphemy. In the following verses they get ready to stone him, but Jesus makes his escape and travels away from Judea, across the Jordan. His time has not yet come.

As Christians we believe Jesus when he says, ‘The Father and I are one’.

We believe that God the Father, God the Son, who is our Saviour Jesus Christ, and God the Holy Spirit are three persons but one God.

We should take great comfort from Jesus’s words. We are his sheep, and as our shepherd he gives us eternal life and will keep us safe – nothing and nobody can take us away from him, just so long as we believe in him. As the 23^rd Psalm appointed for today puts it:

‘Though I walk in the shadow of death, I will fear no evil;

for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.’

The truth is we are not alone. Jesus lives and Jesus is in and with us. And not just with you and me, here today, but with everyone who has ever believed, and will ever believe in him, from those first apostles and disciples like Peter and Tabitha we heard about in the 1st reading (Acts 9:36-43), down the centuries to us, and forward in time to Christians yet unborn. United with them, and led by Jesus our Good Shepherd, we make up the eternal church, militant here on earth and triumphant in heaven.

We should listen to the physicists and cosmologists, I think, and look beyond the four dimensions of space and time in which we live our little lives. Because God is not constrained by space and time. In God’s perspective all that is, and was, and is to come (Revelation 1:8), is simultaneously present. And that includes every one of Jesus’s disciples, dead, living, and yet unborn.

Whenever and wherever we live, we are all included in St John’s great vision of the eternal kingdom expressed in the poetry of today’s reading from Revelation (7:9-17). We all belong to that

‘great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white’.

Seen from God’s perspective, outside space and time, in a higher dimension, we stand with them

‘before the throne of God,

and worship him day and night within his temple,

and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter us.

We will hunger no more, and thirst no more;

the sun will not strike us,

nor any scorching heat;

for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be our shepherd,

and he will guide us to springs of the water of life,

and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.’

Jesus is not just our Good Shepherd, but also the Lamb who laid down his life to bring us to eternal life.

I shall finish in prayer with the Collect of the Word set for today:

Gracious God,
you sent Jesus, the good shepherd,
to gather us together:
may we not wander from his flock,
but follow wherever he leads us
listening for his voice and staying near him,
until we are safely in your fold,
to live with you for ever;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen