Ireland trip August 2005

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Thursday 4th

Enough about the Germans already.  Well maybe not.  Being called by God to love a nation is a serious challenge.  It is warts and all.  It is their youth as well as their adults.  Boisterous, brash, rude.  I tend to have an naive idealistic view of people that they should be somehow better than me! But as Margaret Kehoe says  "How do you expect sinners to behave?"

So Thursday morning. bleary eyed we managed breakfast by 9.00 and set off for Glendalough. Got lost of course!

But  what to make of this place? 

I so well remember my first visit, sensing the centuries of prayer, the almost tangible presence of the monks.   

The beauty of the buildings, albeit mainly ruins, imagining what it had looked like.  

This time I saw the masses of grave stones, the sense of death, the lost glory - so very different.

Probably much of that is down to expectations.

The others felt quite non-plussed too. 

This place where so many come to visit with its visitor centre and "Kevin's Cones" ice cream. 

As Sally Ann summed it up. "Why are you looking for the living amongst the dead?

We made our way to the upper Lough and sat on a little beach to reflect, almost depressed, puzzled. 

What had been here? 

Why did Kevin come here?

And so we prayed and spent time listening to the wind and the waves.

And then the simple realisation that of course it wasn't what had been here but who had been here. 

Just as Kevin had sought 

God in the solitary retreat of a cave up the mountain side, so others had come to find what he had found.

It felt to me like a divine game of hide and seek. 

There's no point looking for him behind the sofa, where he was last time, since he'll be hiding somewhere else.

"Why are you looking for the living among the dead?"

And so it became clear that it wasn't just that this was a supremely beautiful place.

It wasn't even that God was necessarily still there, though angels may be. 

But we had overlooked something which became evident in the evening.

We drove back to Carrig Eden, somewhat deflated I think, although the visitor's centre had certainly helped Sally Ann to get a better handle on what this Irish Monasticism had all been about. 

We spent a while with Marie and Jimmy just back from the funeral of a good friend who had died in his early 50's

At 7.30 Julie Carville arrived with three friends. Michael, Lynn and Elizabeth.

Elizabeth is a spiritual mapper. You could tell immediately - Bible, maps and ring-binder! She had just come back from a conference with Alistair Petrie and really knows her stuff.

Bless her, she's made a real study of  Wicklow's history and so wants to begin to deal with the issues. Inevtably there's stuff to sort with the English but her personal revelation is that the Irish have always blamed "the British" for everything, yet the roots predate the coming of the English.  Bloodshed, rivalry, witchcraft - it was all their before the English. In fact there is almost a possibility that the English were used as an instrument of God's judgement ( weigh that one ).

The mountains of course are the source of all the rivers that flow down through Dublin, Bray, Wicklow, Arklow etc. 

So the pollution of the land carries down the rivers, the valleys.

And so to the very centre of the mountains came Kevin. Perhaps to the one unpolluted valley? To clean water?  To be alone. To seek God alone. But not for long as others were drawn to him.

And so, what was the secret of Glendalough?

Glendalough had not been about a small group of men separating themselves off from the world, but a whole community of hundreds of people, men women and children with one vision. It was about a holistic lifestyle.  It was about training up missionaries for Europe - 4000 students at its height!  It was about preserving and promoting the gospel. 

Then it dawned on me.

Reading Abbey in just 400 years made a name for itself, became rich, pompous, ornate, sapped the land, controlled the people.

That was Cluniac Benedictine, 

but what of Celtic Monasticism?

Over 1000 years of simplicity, humility. 

No grand buildings, just rough hewn stone. 

None more that 30 feet high. 

No great Cathedral.  

Simplicity

Oh Lord teach us how they preserved that for so very very long.

We took communion together and added our prayers of repentance and longing for peace, harmony and unity to the thousands of others that will make this land ready for the return of Jesus.

Will we ever see a new Glendalough's? - God knows

Will Ireland again be the land of Saints and Scholars?

Will it once again send missionaries to the furthest corners of Europe.

More and full size pictures can be viewed at

Clonmacnoise http://ntlworld.photobox.co.uk/album/1690790

Dublin http://ntlworld.photobox.co.uk/album/1690619

Glendalough http://ntlworld.photobox.co.uk/album/1690418

Belfast http://ntlworld.photobox.co.uk/album/1690534