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  PassionistsGlasgow

January 26th, 2017

26/1/2017

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FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 22nd January - 29th January

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, just gone, brought to mind an experience I had twenty years ago, when I was parish priest of St. Gabriel’s in Prestonpans. Over the years the relations between the different Christian denominations in this Reformation heartland had been strained. There used to be a pub called Billy’s Bar opposite St. Gabriel’s and it was not uncommon for the church to be the victim of petty vandalism at closing time on a Friday or a Saturday night. I’m told that the late Father Aloysius CP once tried to defuse the situation by going over one evening to Billy’s Bar and leading the revellers in a rendition of The Sash My Father Wore. His gesture went down well.

By the time I went to Prestonpans, Billy’s Bar had gone and relations between the faiths were much improved. During Christian Unity Week in 1997, the local Church of Scotland Minister and myself decided to do a pulpit exchange, with him coming to preach at our 9.00am Mass and me going to preach at his 11.00am Service. Everything went well at St. Gabriel’s. The minister included in his sermon a very powerful appreciation of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan Friar who volunteered to die in the death camp at Auschwitz in place of another man who had a wife and family.

I was very interested in this as I had actually been at the canonisation of Maximilian Kolbe in 1982, while I was studying at the Gregorian University in Rome. The night before the canonisation I was at a press conference with the man whom Kolbe had sacrificed his life for, Franciszek Gajowniczek. He was at the canonisation as a personal guest of Pope John Paul ll. He said that so long as he had breath in his lungs, he would consider it his duty to tell people about the heroic act of love by Maximilian Kolbe, and he was true to that until he died in 1995, a full 53 years after his life had been spared. A sad memory of that day was that, on my way to the Vatican, I met a young Scottish Franciscan nun at the bus stop. She had been professed as Sister Maximilian, after Kolbe, and she was very excited about attending the event. She was a lovely person, but a short time later she was killed in a road accident in Africa after leaving her parents to the airport. I visited her grave in the Missionaries Cemetery in Nairobi in 1994, the same cemetery where the Venerable Edel Quinn is buried.

But getting back to that pulpit exchange. As I said, the minister was very well received by our congregation in St. Gabriel’s, and then it was my turn. The people at Prestongrange Church of Scotland welcomed me warmly but, as I got up to read the Gospel and preach, two burly men came out of their seats and stood in front of me. For quite a while they just stared at me, and then they turned and marched out of the church. It occurred to me in that moment that I had just been “protested” against. I was urged to continue, which I did, and afterwards the apologies were profuse. Apparently these two characters, while known to many, rarely set foot inside the church, and had come specifically that day to make their protest.  I think all they did was embarrass themselves. The rest of us had a cup of tea together afterwards and, all in all, the exchange had been a great success.

I had a different kind of protest experience with another minister, the wonderfully vibrant lady minister at Wallyford, who would have made the Vicar of Dibley seem dull. In Wallyford, which was part of the Parish of St. Gabriel’s, the Oratory of St. James’s, where I celebrated Mass once a week, was right beside the minister’s house; in fact, the catholic lady who looked after the oratory was also the housekeeper for the minister and her husband, and I was often invited in for a drink and a chat. Now, the people of Wallyford had a concern about traffic coming off the A1 and speeding through the village with obvious danger to pedestrians, especially children. Appeals for traffic calming measures had so far fallen on deaf ears and so the pair of us joined the people of Wallyford in a stand-up protest in the middle of the road, risking life and limb, until their voices were heard. So, if ever you drive through Wallyford and curse the traffic calmers, I’m partly to blame.

Here is one of St. Maximilian Kolbe’s most powerful sayings:


No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the hecatombs [e.g. the sacrifice of many victims] of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?
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FATHER FRANK'S LOG...

20/1/2017

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FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 15th – 22nd JANUARY

I was in Sauchiehall Street last week and I took the notion to buy an Evening Times from one of the street vendors. I asked the price and handed over 65 pence but, instead of just being given the latest edition, I was given an Evening Times goody-bag containing the newspaper, a can of Irn Bru, a chocolate biscuit, and a packet of cheese and onion crisps, all for the price of the newspaper.

As I pondered whether I had ever received such a bargain before my mind went back to the year 2001 when myself and another Passionist priest were asked to go to an International Vocations Seminar run by the Sisters of St. Benedict, at the Immaculate Conception Monastery in a place called Ferdinand, Indiana, in the U.S.A.  We flew into Louisville International Airport, Kentucky, picked up a hire-car, and began the drive through what was very much bible belt America to Indiana. At one point we thought we might stop for a coffee but, when we walked into the first bar we came to, every head in the place turned towards us and seemed to be measuring up the two strangers. I think we were both hearing “Duelling Banjos” playing in our ears, even if were in the wrong part of the country, and mutually agreed to postpone the coffee until we reached our destination.

The seminar was okay but the food was pretty sparse for two grown men, and when the last day came my colleague and I departed as quickly as we could. We returned the car to the airport and, with several hours to kill, we made our way into Louisville in search of decent food. We first of all visited the spot downtown where there is a plaque commemorating Thomas Merton’s famous vision, insight, revelation, call it what you will. Louisville is also the birth place of Cassius Clay, later Muhammad Ali, the greatest boxer who ever lived, and who was known as the Louisville Lip; but we didn’t go in search of his boyhood home, now a museum, because the craving for food was too strong.
It was a Sunday and there didn’t seem to be much open so we asked a taxi driver where we might get a decent bite to eat. To cut a long story short the Kentucky Derby Race Meeting was starting that day and he brought us a couple of miles down the road to the Churchill Downs Race Course where we paid 2 dollars in, for which we also received a commemorative glass with the names of all the winners of the famous
Run for the Roses going back to its inception in 1875; plus admission to the restaurant above the track with a table overlooking the winning post, and where for another 10 dollars we could eat as much as we wanted from a carvery containing the most incredible spread of food we had ever seen in our lives. Needless to say we took full advantage, and in all honesty I’d have to say this must rate higher than the Evening Times goody-bag, a great bargain though that surely was.

If you’ve never read Thomas Merton’s account of his famous downtown Louisville vision, which seems appropriate in this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, here it is:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
​
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Fr Frank's Log

12/1/2017

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FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 8th – 15th JANUARY
After a two week break it’s time to get back to the log and I hope that all who will read this had a peaceful transition from the old year to the new and that 2017 has many blessings in store for you.
​
I was thinking back to my transition from 1982 to1983, the year I was ordained. I was doing my diaconate year in Rome at the time and living in the Passionist Monastery of Saints John & Paul on the Caelian Hill, near to the Colosseum. In the lead-up to the new year the local newspapers were pleading with the ordinary inhabitants of Rome to abandon a long-time custom that seemed to be a bit reckless and dangerous. Apparently, at the stroke of midnight, when the bells chimed to greet the new year, the good Roman citizens would open wide their windows and cast out into the streets below any possessions and household items, including crockery and pieces of furniture, that they wanted to be rid of and replace –
out with the old and in with the new – which meant that in the early morning the refuse lorries had to come around and clear the debris from the streets to ensure safe passage.

It reminded me of Edinburgh in the early part of the 18th century when the inhabitants of the overcrowded tenements would cast open their windows and empty the contents of their chamber pots into the streets below, famously crying “
gardyloo” to give passers-by the message that they had better move away pretty sharpish. While being drenched with the contents of a chamber pot would have been pretty disgusting, it was probably preferable to having a wardrobe or a chest-of-drawers land on your head. (Perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration). Needless to say, the good citizens of Rome ignored the appeals and continued as before, although I imagine there have been new health and safety regulations since to bring the practice to an end.

My transition from 2016 to 2017 was quite traditional. My niece, Lisa, has taken on the mantle of family gatherer, and for quite some years now we have assembled in her house for the traditional steak pie dinner before gathering round the television for the midnight chimes, raising a toast to each other, and singing Auld Lang Syne with the usual confusion as to when we are meant to cross arms and link each other. At that point someone looked out of the window and noticed the people in the house next door assembling in the garden and a young lad setting himself up to play the bagpipes, so with general agreement we abandoned Jackie Bird and went out into Lisa’s garden to join them. As he began to play the people in the house on the other side came out too, as did the people from across the road, and before long we were having our own street party with greetings being exchanged by all concerned. The young piper was getting more chuffed with every cheer he got at the end of each set.

In previous years I was able to go home and have a good sleep-in, but this year, being back in St. Mungo’s, and having to open the church and celebrate Mass on New Year’s morning, I left early and put my head down in my younger brother Patrick’s house before the morning and its duties came. 

Nobody captures the beginning of a new year better than the Servite Sister, Joyce Rupp O.S.M.:

Sacred Mystery, waiting on the threshold of this new year,you open the gates and beckon to me: "Come! Come!Be not fearful of what awaits you as you enter the unknown terrain,be not doubtful of your ability to grow from its joys and sorrows.For I am with you. I will be your Guide. I will be your Protector.You will never be alone."Guardian of this new year, I set aside my fears, worries and concerns,I open my life to mystery, to beauty, to hospitality, to questions,to endless opportunity of discovery in my relationships,and to all the silent wisps of wonder that will draw me to your heart.I welcome your unfailing Presence and walk with hope into this new year.
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    FATHER FRANK KEEVINS C.P.

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