So, Cinzia, Fr Jim. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what is your role at Balally Parish?
Cinzia, Balally Parish Leader
Fr Jim, Balally Parish Priest
I’m Fr Jim, I’m the parish priest here in the Ballaly. I’ve been here now for about three years. My journey to meditation, I suppose, has come over the last ten years, and it was highlighted by the fact that I spent five years in a Cistercian monastery in South Carolina, a monastery called Mepkin Abbey.
And, when I came back from there, I really wanted to bring something of the contemplative nature of what I’d experienced to the new parish. And for some years before going and while I was in the monastery, I was a good friend of Father Laurence, and I learned of the way of Christian meditation.
So we were very determined that when we started back that the way we would try to do meditation in the parish would be Christian meditation and the teachings of John Main and Father Laurence, and also that we would have meditation and service.
What it is about the life and rhythm of the parish that embodies that contemplative spirit of Celtic Christianity?
Cinzia, Balally Parish Leader
Balally parish is trying to be a monastery without walls, where everybody is welcome and no matter what their religious background or where they live. And we’re trying to not be a parish with a meditation group but meditation is ingrained into everything in the parish and everything we do in the parish, like every monastery, it is punctuated by a rhythm of a prayer, throughout the day. And this is what we do in Balally basically.
We have a lovely group of people here, a ministry called the Friends of Simpson that gathers here in the parish every Thursday and they start their meditation in the icon chapel, and then they go out to the Simpson Hospital, and so they give their service to them. So just a service of being there, present for them, they’re lonely people and many of them have Alzheimer’s and they just need that company, they can’t have it from their family.
And, we offer people a contemplative place in the city. They can come here to do meditation and meditation is at every mass as well. We also do morning and evening prayer in the icon chapel every day and the Silence Sabbath about once a month. We do contemplative pilgrimages, to Celtic monastic places, like Glenstale Abbey, Glendalough and Kildare and that’s at the heart of the parish.
This year's John Main Seminar title is 'The Vision of Celtic Christianity for the Crisis of 21st century'. From your perspective and your experience, what is the most pressing crisis that Celtic Wisdom can help us with right now?
Fr Jim, Balally Parish Priest
I think that all of the churches, in a crisis time, post Covid, and post all the different problems that we’ve had. So, I think we need something fresh and something new and something imaginative. And, with Celtic Christianity, it’s bringing us back to a time before the churches were divided and to a time that’s deeply rooted here in our old culture. But as we’ll be doing in the seminar, this is not a perfect time, the time of Celtic Christianity, it too had many problems.
Brother Colmán, who is giving one of the talks, was telling us that the Book of Kells, which is such a beautiful piece of work, has 400 mistakes in it.
So I think there’s a lot we can learn from Celtic Christianity that we can bring to bear on what we’re doing. Like, for example, the Celts loved the place, they had a real sense of place. We’re lucky here, we’re in a beautiful part of Dublin, but we’re in a city. It’s a suburban area. But we have beautiful church buildings and parks and so on around, as well as beautiful places.The Celts look to people as beautiful. And so we’re trying to really say that we have to, in the environment in which we live, create a place where a community can grow. The community was here before we came here, before Cinzia or I came here, before anything like that. So we’re building on a very strong foundation.
But Christianity is really at a crisis point.In terms of structures, the old structures are collapsing. And it’s my own belief that the structures that are collapsing won’t be replaced by sitting down and having strategic plans or reviews, but buy mustard seeds, little pockets of hope that grow up in different places. So we’re not putting this forward as a vision for everybody, but as a vision which has a validity, in the 21st century. And Cinzia was talking earlier about pilgrimage, and we go on pilgrimage to Celtic places. And also another important part of that pilgrimage was the inner pilgrimage that everybody is trying to overcome their ego and everybody is trying to live in a more communal way. And that’s where meditation is so helpful, because it brings us to silence. And then another part of Celtic Christianity that’s very relevant is hospitality, because I think, certainly here in Ireland, that where we have a very strong sense of community and welcome that’s still there.But since Covid, we’ve had a lot of resistance to new Irish people coming in, to refugees.
Ireland was famous for the Céad Míle Fáilte, a 100,000 welcomes. They’re less than they were now in the past because people are more suspicious and there is so much news coming on social media. So into that world comes a real sense of community that we can really develop and that needs to develop, that we can learn from the Celts.And finally, I think to see that in this area, where we are in the Dundrum area, the initial Christian community, which probably developed about the year 350-400, was actually a monastic one. So we have monastic saints in our DNA here, we have St. Nahi, St. Attracta and these were Celtic saints.So that probably just about a mile from where we’re talking there was in a church called Saint Nahi’s there was probably a community of monks.
It’s just letting the Spirit move and saying, okay, let’s let’s look at what the Celts did. Let’s look at what contemporary monasticism does and let us in some way try to be a monastery without walls for the 21st century.
How do you believe this year's theme connects with the synodal dialogue that the Church has been talking about for quite some time?
Fr Jim, Balally Parish Priest
It’s going to be interesting to see how the synodal gathering will emerge on the final day with Father Laurence and Barry and Stefan. But it seems to me that in the role of Saint Benedict, which is so important to us in WCCM, which of course, is a little different from the Celtic rules of life, because the Celtic rules of life are very harsh. The Celts were quite judgmental and quite stern and quite penitential.
The Rule Benedict is much nicer. It’s challenging, but it’s gently challenging. So one of the things that Benedict did with his, in his role was he said, when there’s an important issue to be discussed, the abbot gathers all of the monks and listens to their wisdom. Then he goes off and he makes the decision based on that wisdom.So I think that that will be a useful model for our synodal gathering in Dublin with Father Laurence. Now, that is more Benedictine, I think, than Celtic. I think the Celtic Council were probably a lot more directors, but it’s a mixture of both. Because Benedict at the end says, yeah, but the abbot has to decide and everyone has to accept that.
And he’s also saying that the youngest and the oldest have a wisdom. So I think balancing all of that, it’s going to be a very interesting experience to see how that plays out on the final day, because they think about the synodal gathering in Pope Francis’s understanding is we don’t know the outcome and we don’t know the outcome of anything, actually, because everything is in the Lord’s hands and we can say we’re building a contemplative parish here, but we’re only building as if it’s what the Lord wants.
And if it’s the Lord’s work, and I’m convinced that it is. But it goes sometimes in directions that we hadn’t planned, and I’m sure that the synodal discussion will be true for that as well.
Cinzia and Fr Jim will lead this year’s John Main Seminar at Balally Parish, Dublin from 6 to 9 November with the theme ‘INTEGRAL CHRISTIANITY: The Vision of Celtic Christianity for the Crisis of the 21st Century’
