FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 16th – 23rd SEPTEMBER
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I had to travel to Ireland last week for two meetings, one in Dublin on Tuesday, and the other in Belfast on Wednesday. I’ve no doubt that when I say in this log from time to time that I was over in Ireland for meetings, there will be some who think “lucky him”, however the reality is that, setting aside the fact that meetings are often tedious, short haul travel is not always all that pleasant. These two days last week, for example, coincided with Storm Ali. The journey to Dublin had been okay but the storm was in full force on Wednesday morning when myself and Fr. Eugene, the rector of Holy Cross, Ardoyne, where the meeting was taking place, left Dublin for Belfast, and it took us a long time to get out of the city. At one stage, as we were driving through a tree-lined section of the road. we found ourselves assailed by conkers blowing off the trees and battering our windscreen. For a while it was a wee bit scary as we felt the windscreen was going to come crashing in on us at any moment.
 
All along the road we saw signs telling as that it was European Day Without A Road Death. The idea was that no one should die on the roads of Europe on that very day, Wednesday 19th September, and in the lead up to it road users were asked to think about the risks they face, the risks they pose to others, and how they can go about reducing those risks. Issues highlighted were speeding, drink-driving, not wearing a seat belt, using the phone while driving, using vehicles that haven’t been kept roadworthy, parking cars on bicycle lanes, blocking pedestrian crossings, not turning on lights, and engaging in risky manoeuvres. Nobody said anything about avoiding flying conkers. I don’t know how the day went but please God it was a success and there were in fact no road deaths, although I doubt it as I witnessed many selfish people on the day taking those very risks, especially using their phones, and I do know that at least two people died in Ireland as a direct result of Storm Ali.
 
The middle part of the journey was okay, although we did experience the car being buffeted by winds on high sections of the road around Newry. When we reached Lisburn, however, and tried to get onto the M1 into Belfast, everything came to a standstill. Traffic was either crawling or not moving at all. We put the radio on and heard that some electrical cables had been blown down and that part of the motorway was closed. We had no option but to stick with it and, as a result, our final section of the journey, that should have taken around 15 minutes, in fact took us an hour and 15 minutes. After the meeting I was supposed to get dropped off at Dublin Airport to fly home to Glasgow, but the person who was to bring me, on finding the M1 closed, had abandoned their journey and returned to Dublin. I was then dropped off at Belfast Bus Station to get a bus to the airport. I got my ticket and was told which platform the bus would leave from. I saw a bus with Airport Express written on the side and got on. Just before it took off it occurred to me that many of the people on the bus didn’t look as if they were travelling very far; it turned out I was on a bus to Belfast Airport with local stops along the way. I was just in time to hop off and jump on to the right bus.
 
When I arrived at a very crowded Dublin Airport I was still wondering if my plane would take off at all, as I knew that many flights had been cancelled during the day. Luckily, Storm Ali had abated enough for the flight to be enabled, although it was going to be delayed by about an hour and a half. An egg sandwich, a Bounty Bar, and about 100 pages of my novel later, I was at last Glasgow bound, and I was grateful to Brother Antony for collecting me at Buchanan Bus Station and having me home in Bishopbriggs before midnight. So, the next time I head to Ireland for meetings, don’t say “lucky him”, say “poor him”.
 
Almighty God, creator of all, like the disciples who were caught in the midst of a mighty storm, we ask you to come to our aid. We feel small and helpless before the great power of a storm, and so we place our trust in You, to shelter us, and to lead us to safe harbour, Amen.

FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 26th AUGUST – 2nd SEPTEMBER
 
The Log returns this week after a summer break.  I also had a wee break to myself. At the end of July I spent the second week of the Glasgow Fair with my younger brother in sunny Drumchapel – and sunny indeed it was. We just chilled out, which was just what I needed. I slept a lot; read a lot; and watched a few dramas that my brother had recorded for me. I love a good drama series but don’t often get the chance to see them, especially if they run for six weeks or more, so it’s great to just relax and watch them over a few days at home.
Then, in the first week of August, I went to Schoenstatt for a week’s retreat. The Sisters gave me St. Joseph’s Cabin, which is a self-catering facility, and that let me set my own rhythm for the retreat. I took with me a book that I had in my possession for many years. It was called “Alone with the Alone” by a Jesuit, now deceased, called George A. Maloney. It was set out as an 8-day retreat based on the method of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits.
At regular periods in the morning, evening and night time, I would read a section in my room and pray the scripture passages that accompanied that section. I would then spend time in the little shrine at Schoenstatt. The Schoenstatt Shrine is a very special and prayerful place to experience the closeness of God.  It is modelled on the original shrine at Schoenstatt in Germany, and there are now over 200 of them, all identical, in different centres throughout the world. I found it a beautiful place to spend my prayer periods each day. I also celebrated Mass at a fixed time each day and fed myself very simply as I’m not a great cook.
The weather by then had changed a bit and so it was a week of sunshine and showers, much cooler than the previous weeks had been, but that was just as well because another part of my retreat was walking in the Campsie Fells, or along sections of the John Muir Way, the Thomas Muir Heritage Trail, and the Strathkelvin Railway Path, which all seemed to merge into each other. I think I would have struggled and suffered in the hot weather of the previous weeks and, to be honest, humbly acknowledging my increasing lack of fitness in my senior years, I stuck more to the trails on the level, than to the steep paths of the Campsies.
Although my retreat was planned around an 8-day programme, I had to leave Schoenstatt after 7 days due to the cycling time trials that were part of the European Championships being held in Glasgow. Every road around the Schoenstatt area was going to be closed from midnight and, what’s more, every road around our Passionist community house in Bishopbriggs was going to be closed as well. So, on the seventh day, after my final prayer time, I returned to Bishopbriggs, packed an overnight bag, and headed in to St. Mungo’s where I spent the night in the office, so as to be there to open the church the next morning and celebrate the 10 o’clock Mass. The last time I had to do that was during the heavy snows when I spent two nights in the office before the thaw. That same morning, Father Gareth walked the 5 miles from our house to St. Mungo’s to be there for Confessions and for the lunchtime Mass. Between St. Mungo’s church and our little oratory in Bishopbriggs I was able to complete the eighth day of my retreat and thank God for a very blessed time.
Here is the beautiful prayer of St. Ignatius – “Suscipe” – that I said every day:
Take, O Lord, and receive my entire liberty, my memory, my understanding and my whole will. All that I am and all that I possess You have given me: I surrender it all to You to be disposed of according to Your will. Give me only Your love and Your grace; with these I will be rich enough, and will desire nothing more.

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FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 13th – 20th MAY
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Very soon I will need to seek out a good optician and get tested for new glasses. I usually do this every two years but I think with the move from Dublin to Glasgow it has been much longer than that. I have very bad eyesight which I first discovered when I started at St. Peter’s Primary School in Partick back in 1956. My teacher put something up on the board and I couldn’t see it so I was sent for an eye test. As well as having bad eyesight I also had a lazy eye and had to wear a pink eye patch over my right eye for quite some time. It didn’t achieve a whole lot as my left eye remains very weak. Ever since then I have worn glasses, and such is my prescription that my lenses have to be specially made. The optician usually has to shop around to find somewhere that will make them. Throughout the time I lived in Dublin my lenses had to come at times from Germany, at other times from England, and always took weeks after the test before I would get them.
 
Even choosing a frame creates a problem for me. After my eye test the optician would send me next door to his assistant to choose a frame. My choice would be whittled down right away as only certain shapes and sizes of frame would take my lenses, and then I would have to ask the assistant to tell me which of the appropriate frames suited me as putting on a frame with no lenses meant I had to screw up my eyes to look in the mirror and so I wouldn’t really get the best sense of how it looked.
 
I had wondered for a time if my eyesight might prevent me from driving. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about not being able to ride a bike when I first joined the Passionists; well, neither could I drive. There had never been a car in the family growing up and so none of us ever learned to drive. It was only when I went to the Novitiate in 1979 that I took my first lessons and thankfully, before the novitiate was over, I had passed my test. I remember that the part I dreaded most was being asked to read the number plate of a car so many yards in front of me. When I arrived at the test centre, in a place called the Flying Horse in County Down, there were only two cars in the vicinity and I committed the number plates to memory. But thankfully, when asked, I was able to read them anyway, thanks to the gift of glasses. Over the years, with developing technology, my lenses have gone from being very thick and heavy glass, to very light and much thinner plastic – wonderful.
 
Being an avid reader, I would hate to lose my sight. Friends of mine, two sisters, tell the story of how, just after their grandparents got engaged, their grandfather was in an accident and lost his sight, and he said to his fiancé that he would understand if she wanted to call off the wedding, so she went off and had a think and a pray, and then came back and said no, I loved you before you lost your sight and I love you now, we’re going to get married, and so they did, and it turned out to be a long and happy marriage. The two sisters loved to speak of how their grandfather taught them to appreciate the gift of touch, and of how he loved to trace the features of their face with his hand, so as to “see” them in his own way. So, perhaps one gift is compensated by another.
 
I am reminded of another story, a parable really, of a relationship in which the man was sighted and the woman was blind. The man wanted to get married because he loved the woman very much, but the woman wouldn’t marry him because she was blind and she couldn’t accept it, it damaged her sense of self-worth. Sometime later she got the chance of an eye transplant and she underwent the surgery and she got her sight back again. She sought out the man who had proposed to her but was shocked to discover that he had now gone blind, and she said that she couldn’t marry him now because he was blind. The man accepted this graciously, but a little while later he wrote her a letter to wish her well, and he said please take care of those eyes, they once belonged to me, and she realised that out of his great love for her, he had given his eyes that she might see, and so now she received another gift of sight – a gift of insight, into love, even greater than the first gift.
 
Jesus said to Paul, 'I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen of Me and what I will show you. I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in Me.' (Acts 26:16-18)
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