FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 10th – 17th SEPTEMBER 2023

As I write the log today, we are getting ready in St. Mungo’s to begin our annual Novena to Our Lady of Sorrows. I would have preferred a few more relaxed days beforehand to get ready, but I had to go to Minsteracres at the beginning of this week for two days of meetings with the interim Passionist Provincial Council of the new, expanded St. Patrick’s Province. That resulted in my being absent when our live streaming service was launched in St. Mungo’s last Monday. Father Gareth was the first to go live at the 10am Mass, and it all seems to have gone smoothly. My first opportunity to welcome people on the world wide web was just yesterday, Wednesday morning. I had hoped to get a haircut beforehand as last Sunday, before Mass, a number of people had sensitively told me that I really needed one. However, I just didn’t find the time, and I celebrated Mass looking like a cross between Albert Einstein and Ken Dodd. Later in the day I did manage to get shorn, and so now I look more like a billiard ball.
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I got to thinking then, that I could almost recount the story of my earlier life through the various phases of my head and facial hair. When I was growing up in Thurso Street in Partick, there was a man across the road in the same street who seemed to do the barbering for all the children in the area. On a regular basis we would be brought over to his house, settled into a chair with a board across it to raise us up; then, a bowl would be placed on our heads, and everything beneath the bowl was clipped away. I think we had the Beatles style before the Beatles ever had it. By the time I was into my teens we had moved to Drumchapel, and it was now the 60’s. Like most of my contemporaries, I grew my hair as long as I was allowed to grow it while attending St. Mungo’s Academy, and throughout those years I went to an actual barber. On leaving school I grew my hair even longer, and when I began to play in a folk group, I also grew a beard, after all, I had to look the part of a serious folkie. At this time, I was also trying to find work and I was being advised that nobody would give me a job if I continued to look so hirsute. I stubbornly kept my long hair and beard and, in fact, had no problem being accepted for a job, firstly in the Singer Sewing Machine Company in Clydebank, and then in the Olivetti factory in Queenslie. To their credit, my future bosses looked beyond the hair, even though they regularly teased me about it. Later on, I had a variation on my long hair and beard, when I took a notion to shave the beard away, just at the chin. This was the look I sported when I was best man at my brother’s wedding. It looked horrendous, and my sister-in-law delights in producing the photos now and again. Although, as they were both sporting matching perms at the time, they could scarcely talk. When I entered the Passionists, aged 24, my hair was still quite long, and I had a bushy beard. So too did my fellow Scot who joined at the same time, although he has since left. We had matching green quilted anoraks as well, and when we turned up at the Graan in Enniskillen on the 4th of October 1975, our four fellow postulants, all younger than us, three from Ireland and one from Nigeria, looked at us alarmingly, as if they had just been invaded by some marauding Scottish Highland Clan. At some point during that postulancy year, during the season of Lent, I got my haircut and shaved my beard off completely. One of the older members of the community didn’t recognize me at all until about three days later, thinking that I was a new postulant to whom he hadn’t been introduced. Since then, only once did I grow a beard again, and then shaved it off immediately as it looked awful, So, this is how it is since then and now, folically challenged, and just needing a three-and-one now and again, and an eyebrow trim, to keep me looking respectable. Just to say that my best barber ever was Father Antony.

I will take a break from the log next week to focus on the closing days of the Novena.

As ever, protect yourself, your loved ones and others, and protect Christ in your lives.
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FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 3rd – 10th SEPTEMBER 2023

I have found myself, this week, lamenting the demise of letter writing. It was sparked off by my relief that, for the daily Masses, the first readings have moved away from a period of long extracts, taken from the earlier books of the Old Testament, from Genesis through to Judges, and have now returned to the Letters of St. Paul. Wonderful though these Old Testament readings are, at 10 o’clock in the morning, with a relatively sparse group of people in the church, and with lots of unpronounceable names in the text, they can be a bit exhausting. St Paul’s letters are much more palatable. Apart from St. Paul, many of the saints were prolific letter writers, e.g., Catherine of Siena, Ignatius of Loyola, and Teresa of Avila. So too was St Paul of the Cross, the founder of the Passionists. There are about 3,000 of his letters that have survived, and a collection of these, from 1720-1775, the year of his death, have been collected into a 3-volume work, imaginatively entitled “The Letters of St Paul of the Cross”.

In 1992, when I was transferring to Minsteracres in County Durham, I realised that the monastery was only 10 miles from Consett. In the mid to late 1950’s, when my father was made redundant from the Anchor Line shipyard on the Clyde, and after a short spell working on the Clyde Tunnel, which has just celebrated the 60th anniversary of its opening, my father took a job in the steelworks in Consett, which I think at that time was called the Consett Iron Company. It meant that he was away from a Sunday night to a Friday night, living in digs, and we only saw him at weekends. That only lasted about a year, however, as he sadly suffered a heart attack cycling to work one morning, 8th April, 1960, and died almost instantly. It transpired that he had written many letters to my mother during that time, and she still had them all wrapped up in a bundle in a tin box. I didn’t ask if I could read them, they would have been too personal, but, from these letters, I was able to discover the address of his digs and so, shortly after I moved to Minsteracres, and got settled into my work with the North European Passionist Novices, I made my way to Consett, for the very first time, to see where my father had lived, worked and died, during that short period from 1959-1960. The steelworks of course had shut down for good in 1980, by Margaret Thatcher, ironically known as the Iron Lady, and there was precious little for me to see of what they once were. I did, however, find the place where his digs had been, and, close by, there was still the remnant of a working men’s club that he may have frequented, but that was about it.

When my mother died in 2001, and I was doing a bit of a clear out of stuff, I discovered that she had also kept the letters that I had written to her after I joined the Passionists in 1975, and had moved to Enniskillen. We had no access to phones at that time, even though on occasion, during our half-day off on a Saturday, I would surreptitiously find a phone box and call home, having to reverse the charges, because we had precious little money either. So, mostly, I wrote letters. There would be later letters from Dublin, Crossgar and Rome, as I pursued my studies towards priesthood. After ordination, with more opportunity to make phone calls, my letter writing eased off, and only resumed again when I spent a year in South Africa and Botswana in the mid-1990’s. All my letters were there, in her tin box. I had been quite a good letter writer to friends as well in those earlier years, and really looked forward to getting a reply. When I look back on it, my writing then was quite neat and legible. Now, with the proliferation of the internet, email and texting, not to mention all the other social media stuff I don’t use or understand, personal letter writing has become a thing of the past and, if ever I do have to write anything longhand, as, for example, in greetings cards, it’s so scrawly I can’t even read it myself, never mind anyone else. So, as I mentioned at the beginning, I am lamenting the demise of this beautiful art form of letter writing, which I think is a great loss.

As ever, protect yourself, your loved ones and others, and protect Christ in your lives.
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FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 26th MARCH – 2nd APRIL 2023
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At the beginning of this week, I travelled over to our Passionist Retreat Centre in Crossgar, County Down. The reason for my journey was to attend a meeting of leaders and administrators from different parts of the newly expanded St. Patrick’s Province – Ireland & Britain. The task before us was to make progress towards a unified approach to elements of our Passionist life that previously would have had a slightly, or in some areas, more than slightly, different approach when we were two distinct provinces. This applied to areas such as mission, finance, media & communications, safeguarding, formation, and others. It was a very big agenda to get through, and we will be at this task for some time to come.
 
Miraculously, I had no problems on my travels. Flights departed and returned on time. Despite them being small, propellor type aircraft, and the weather being stormy, everything went smoothly. When I arrived at Belfast City Airport on Monday night, Father Antony was there to meet me. He had travelled by car from Minsteracres to take the Cairnryan-Belfast Ferry. He had planned his trip to fit in a visit to the brethren in Holy Cross, Ardoyne, and then on to collect me for the final stage of the journey. As a note of interest to St. Mungo’s people, on that same day, Father Terence McGuckin, much loved in St. Mungo’s in years past, left Holy Cross to take up residence at Mount Argus in Dublin, where he will be able to be better cared for, as he, like most of us, gets older and frailer. When I was first posted to St. Mungo’s, after ordination in 1983, it was to replace Father Terence as Vocations Director. At the beginning I had to struggle to be accepted, simply because of people’s sadness at seeing Father Terence go. In the end, however, people’s goodness and kindness, and their love for the Passionists in general, won them over – as well, of course, as my sparkling personality! Arriving at Crossgar, Father Antony’s classmate, Father Aidan, came down to open the gate for us and then, after a quick hello to those who had arrived earlier, we retired for the night, both of us being very tired.
 
In preparation for the meeting, our Provincial Secretary had put together a document outlining our personnel situation as we expect it to be at the end of 2023. It makes for sobering reading. If there are no deaths, which in itself seems unlikely, there would be 52 members of St. Patrick’s Province; 4 of whom would be over 90; 20 of whom would be over 80; 14 of whom would be over 70; 8 of whom would be over 60, and only 6 of whom would be under 60. We would also have 3 members on loan from other provinces, 2 from India and 1 from Africa, all of whom would be in their 40’s. Obviously, the stark realism of that has to be taken into account in moving forward. Still and all, we travel with faith and hope.
 
At the end of the meeting, I was brought to the airport for the journey home by Father Tom, the rector of Crossgar. Also in the car was Father Martin, one of our English brethren. I was fascinated to hear Father Martin speak of his current Passionist life as a leader in a community in North London, quite near to the Passionist church of St. Joseph’s in Highgate, which is part of the Catholic Worker Movement founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1933. Hospitality is one of the keystones of the Catholic Worker Movement and, at present, Father Martin lives with two other leaders, and nine guests, most of whom are asylum seekers. It’s a hard life, and I have great admiration for him in the selfless work that he does, which he easily and rightly connects with our Passionist spirituality as having a care for the crucified of today. I think it’s fair to say our province is now more diverse than ever before. Pray for us.
 
Father Frank’s Log will take a wee break now until after Easter. I hope you all have a very happy and blessed time.

As ever, protect yourself, your loved ones and others, and protect Christ in your lives.