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  PassionistsGlasgow

FATHER FRANK'S LOG

24/2/2017

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FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 19th – 26th FEBRUARY

This coming Monday we will celebrate the feast of the Passionist, Saint Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows, whose statue stands to the left of the sanctuary in St. Mungo’s, next to St. Enoch, St. Mungo’s mother. I first visited the shrine of St. Gabriel in Italy in 1982 while attending our Passionist General Chapter and studying in Rome. It would normally have been a very long journey but at the time the Italians were constructing a tunnel, called the Traforo del Gran Sasso, as part of the A24 Motorway that links Rome and the Adriatic Sea via L'Aquila and Teramo. If I remember correctly, the tunnel was to be 13 kilometres long and pass through the Apennine Mountains via the Gran Sasso in Abruzzo where the shrine of St. Gabriel was, at the Passionist Retreat of Isola del Gran Sasso where Gabriel died of tuberculosis on 27th February 1862, the day before his 24th birthday.

The tunnel, an extraordinary feat of engineering which the Italians excel at, was still under construction, in fact it wouldn’t open until 1984, but it was sufficiently complete for one of our well known and respected Passionist Religious who resided at the shrine to acquire special permission from the authorities to bring a bus load of international participants from our General Chapter through the tunnel and thus cut a significant length of time off the journey. It was wintertime and I remember when we emerged from the tunnel at the far end there was plenty of crisp, deep snow on the mountains and some of our Passionists from the Philippines had never experienced snow before, so we had to stop the bus to let them get out and touch it, ensuing in a rather undignified snowball fight. On arriving at the shrine I was struck by the number of young people there visiting, but then Saint Gabriel is a patron of youth, students, seminarians and clerics; as well as of the Abruzzi region.
​
I am prompted to remember that, when I was a child, my father worked for a time on the construction of the Clyde Tunnel. For those who may not know, it was decided to build a tunnel to replace two ferries across the river which had ceased operations. They went under the river because the level of shipbuilding at that particular section of the Clyde made it impractical to build a bridge. It was ironic that my father only worked on it because he had been made redundant from the shipyards, and sadly he had died by the time the tunnel was opened in 1962. Work had begun in 1957. He died in 1960 but for the year prior to that he had been working in the steel works in Consett, County Durham.

When the Clyde Tunnel first opened, and perhaps still, a favourite game of children was to try and hold their breath from the time their car entered the tunnel until it emerged at the other side. It is estimated that a car going at 30mph would take 57 seconds to travel the 762 metres of tunnel. Holding breath for that length of time was just about impossible and it was made all the harder when some cruel relatives and friends would deliberately drive slower when the car got near to the other side.  I’m always fascinated that one of the recurring problems is graffiti, even in an underwater tunnel, the eradication of which only ever lasts a few days before the graffiti reappears.

The Clyde Tunnel is obviously much shorter than the Traforo del Gran Sasso, 762 metres as compared to 13 kilometres, and I estimate that if you tried to hold your breath at 30mph during a 13 kilometre journey you would be holding it for just a little over 16 minutes, definitely not to be recommended. Anyone who has passed through that tunnel, and is still alive, wisely didn’t attempt it.

Going through a tunnel and emerging is often a metaphor for the journey from darkness to light; from death to new life, nowhere better expressed than in John Henry Newman’s beautiful hymn:

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, lead thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead thou me on!
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see the distant scene; one step enough for me.


I was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path; but now lead thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears, pride ruled my will: remember not past years!


So long thy power hath blessed me, sure it still will lead me on.
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till the night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile, which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!

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FATHER FRANK'S LOG...

17/2/2017

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FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 12th – 19th FEBRUARY
Last weekend was disappointing in rugby terms, both for Father Gareth who is Welsh, and for myself as a Scot. On Saturday Father Gareth went down town to find a big screen to watch the Wales v England match, only for England to snatch it in the last 5 minutes; and then we both went together after the morning Masses on Sunday to watch the France v Scotland match, only for errors and injuries to hand it to the French late on. We trudged back together for the Sunday evening Mass consoling each other. Still, undeterred, Father Gareth has a ticket for the Scotland v Wales match in Murrayfield on the 25th – and if Wales win he needn’t bother coming home.

Being from the Welsh Valleys, Father Gareth is very much a rugby fan and is very knowledgeable about the game, he even understands the rules, whereas I’m much more of a football fan. The only time I ever played rugby was in my first year at St. Mungo’s Academy when I was asked by the Marist Brother in charge of the school rugby team to take a trial, which I failed miserably. From an early age however I played football at every opportunity, so long as there was still daylight. Spilllers Mills was at the bottom of our street and we used one of their delivery doors as one of the goals, and from a lamppost to a wall as the other goal. There could be any amount of kids on each side and it is a fact of life that our mothers would throw jeely pieces wrapped up in paper out of the window for us to catch, so that precious time wasn’t wasted having to trudge upstairs for mundane things like food.

It was a petty offence to play football in the street so we posted a lookout to watch for police. If the lookout saw the police approaching he would give a signal and we would run like the clappers. Hugh and I used to take refuge in our granny’s house in Partick Bridge Street until the coast was clear. This worked very well until one day we were confounded by two plain clothes officers whom the lookout never recognised. Some of the group managed to scatter but six of us were booked – 2 Keevins’s and 4 Kelly’s – which resulted in us getting a 5 shilling fine each. That was 10 shillings our mother had to pay out, and £1 that Mrs. Kelly had to pay out, and that would have been a fair bit to them, but I don’t really remember it stopping us returning to the scene of the crime for more kickabouts.

My playing days ended as a Passionist student in Dublin in 1982. Vocations were in decline so the Passionists and the Discalced Carmelites combined to put a team together to play in the seminary league, which we regularly won. During that period, Father Lawrence, a member of the present community, was our goalkeeper, and a good one too; and Father John Craven, recently departed for Ardoyne in Belfast, was a scoring midfielder. He was like a very upper-class character in the
Hornet called Gorgeous Gus who was too posh to run around, but if you put the ball at his feet he could score from almost anywhere. Father John was older than the rest of us so he didn’t like running around either, but he had a fantastic shot, so all we had to do was deliver the ball to his toes and he would score. One year we got to the Devine Cup Final, a prestigious college tournament, where we played St. Patrick’s Teachers’ Training College. The final was played at Tolka Park, Shelbourne’s home ground, and the week before, George Best, who was playing on a game for game basis for Cork Celtic at £1000 a time, had played on the same ground. The headline in the paper the following day was “Best at his worst as Shelbourne win” The 2-1 defeat turned out to be his third and last game for Cork Celtic. Despite that, as we had the away dressing room, I like to think I hung my strip on the same peg that was used by the great George Best – all comparisons end there. We lost the final, by the way.

Sport is one of those subliminal areas of life we don’t always mature in, but here’s a lovely, mature, prayerful, sporting reflection by a 5th year pupil at Sacred Heart Catholic School in Orlando, Florida:
​
There is no “I” in team. In other words, nobody can carry a team on his or her own. You need to trust and have faith in your coaches and teammates. Win or lose, a team needs to stay together, have faith, and believe in one another. If you can trust your team and coaches, nobody can stop you. One of the best feelings in sports is to get that extra support from your team mates. Your team is your family, and that’s how you should treat them. On and off the pitch you stay one and nobody can split you apart. Having faith in your team members is an important part of being successful. What I particularly love about being an athlete at Sacred Heart is that we pray before and after each game. We rely on God for strength and confidence and give back humbly our glory or our infamy to God. We are trained to always remember to play fair.
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FATHER FRANK's log...

9/2/2017

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FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 5th – 12th FEBRUARY

Last week I had the most amazing and beautiful response to my log from a lady who had lived across the road from us when I was growing up in Thurso Street in Partick. She recounted her memory, much better than I ever could, of my father’s funeral in St. Simon’s in April 1960, when she and I were just children, with the neighbours filling the street as we walked to the church, and she went on to describe how the experience had stayed with her as a graced moment, and influenced other aspects of her life and faith. I had no memory of this lady, even though we may have played together as children, but then, apart from the families who stayed up the close that we lived in at no. 5, I have no great recall of any of our neighbours back then, but it did bring to mind another experience I had almost 40 years ago.

In the summer of 1977, as a Passionist student, I was working on a project for homeless men in Leeds, most of whom were addicted to one substance or another. The project had been initiated by a Passionist priest, Fr. Paulinus Healey, whom I had first met in the Passionist Retreat House at Coodham in 1969, 6 years before I entered the Passionist Postulancy in Enniskillen. He later went on to become the Catholic Chaplain in Toronto airport but came back to live out his final days in Mount Argus while I was rector there.

The police brought a man in one night and he was assigned to me to look after. The next day I found myself with the rather strange task of walking the city streets in Leeds with this man in search of his false teeth. He was due up in court the following morning and, with his own sense of dignity, didn’t want to appear before the judge without his teeth. He brought me to all the weird and wonderful places he might have lost them, places where he regularly tried to sleep, until eventually we found them in an alleyway adjacent to a hotel where he had bedded down beside a ventilator that was blowing out heat from the kitchen. Delightedly he picked up the teeth, wiped them on his sleeve, and popped them straight into his mouth.

In the course of the day we’d had an interesting conversation. It turned out that he came from Glasgow, which I knew anyway from the first moment he had opened his mouth the night before, having, unlike myself, not lost any trace of his Glasgow accent; but also, that he grew up in the same street, Thurso Street, as I did, went to the same primary school of St. Peter’s, attended the same church of St. Simon’s, and was only one year older than me. We exchanged familiar names and places and memories until slowly I came to a realisation of who this man was and who were his family. As he told me of his slide into addiction and homelessness I couldn’t help but think that “there but for the grace of God go I”.

During that summer, while working on the project, myself and the other students involved had been staying at the Passionist Retreat House in Ilkley, and I remember very vividly coming down to breakfast on our final day, 17th August 1977, and hearing on the news that Elvis Presley had died the day before. It was one of those occasions, like JFK and Princess Diana, where they say you always remember where you were when you heard the news, and that’s certainly true for me in this instance.

That sense of
“there but for the grace of God go I” brings to mind this quote from Henri Nouwen about not judging others:
​
“We spend an enormous amount of energy making up our minds about other people. Not a day goes by without somebody doing or saying something that evokes in us the need to form an opinion about him or her. We hear a lot, see a lot, and know a lot. The feeling that we have to sort it all out in our minds and make judgments about it can be quite oppressive. The desert fathers said that judging others is a heavy burden, while being judged by others is a light one. Once we can let go of our need to judge others, we will experience an immense inner freedom. Once we are free from judging, we will be also free for mercy.”
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Father Franks Log...

2/2/2017

2 Comments

 
​FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 29th JANUARY – 5th FEBRUARY

While I was preparing this week’s Newsletter and inserting the notice about the 25th World Day of the Sick which takes place on the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, I got to thinking about the different experiences I’ve had of being a pilgrim to Lourdes over the years.

On my first trip a lot of it passed me by. I was 18 and our curate in St. Laurence’s in Drumchapel had arranged to take a group of lads on a trip to France, spending a few days in Lourdes, and then heading over the mountains for a week’s camping in Lloret de Mar on the Costa Brava. It was the year I left St. Mungo’s Academy and, before I went on a serious job search, I took up work in a Catering Suppliers to get some money together for what would be my first trip abroad. The curate acquired an old van which he expertly turned into a minibus and off we went. We drove from Glasgow to Portsmouth and took the ferry from there to Le Havre. Our first stop was Rouen and its famous Notre Dame Cathedral, and from there it was about a 9-hour drive to Lourdes. It was amazing to see this place that I knew about from my Catholic upbringing and I thought it was beautiful but, as I said, most of it passed me by, and I best remember that trip for the three days I spent in the tent in Lloret de Mar with terrible sunburn, not having appreciated the sun was a bit stronger there than in Glasgow.

After joining the Passionists, in my final years as a student and in my early years as a priest, I was involved with a group called CASA (
Caring and Sharing Association) and each year we would take groups of people with disabilities on pilgrimage to Lourdes, always staying in the Mediteranee Hotel, close to the shrine, on the banks of the River Gave. I would combine liturgical duties with being a carer for one of the pilgrims and in the year of my ordination, when I first went as a priest/carer, I was assigned to accompany a great lad with Downs Syndrome. He took his companionship with the priest very seriously and from about the third day onwards we had a ritual at meals where he would join his hands in prayer, bless himself, then raise his bread, as I would the host at Mass, before he ate it; he would then cover his water glass with his napkin as if it was the chalice, then remove the napkin and raise his glass, as I would the chalice at Mass, before he drank it. He did this with such a great reverence that it deeply touched the others at our table, and at the surrounding tables, and he probably gave me a better appreciation of the words “through the action of the priest”. If I could perform those actions at Mass, always with the same reverence, I would be doing well. Nothing about those trips passed me by, as on my first trip, because on these occasions I was in every moment involved with the most important people in Lourdes, and that is the sick, the disabled and the suffering.

In later years I would go on parish pilgrimages from Mount Argus and those were wonderful too, with very special people involved. I remember beautiful liturgies, the trips to the baths, the visits to the City of the Poor, the torchlight processions, and the times of quiet, prayerful stillness together at the Grotto, or on the prairie on the opposite side of the river from the Grotto, as well as those moments of deep emotion, sharing, laughter, tears, and all the elements that combine so uniquely to make a pilgrimage to Lourdes quite special. The last time I was there was in 2008, the 150th Jubilee Year of the Apparitions of Our Lady to St. Bernadette, when we were invited to follow a special
"Jubilee Path" by visiting the baptismal font where St. Bernadette was baptized, the abandoned jail where she and her impoverished family lived throughout the apparitions, the grotto where she saw the Blessed Virgin, and the chapel where St. Bernadette made her First Communion. At each of the stops we got a special sticker so that at the end we could show that as pilgrims we had followed the Jubilee Path.

It's amazing how many memories can be evoked just because I was typing up a notice. I am thankful for all of the wonderful people down through the years that made those pilgrimages such times of grace and blessing, and I will offer Mass very sincerely on 11th February, Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, for all the sick, disabled and suffering people. Here is Pope Francis’s prayer for that day:

Mary, our Mother, in Christ you welcome each of us as a son or daughter.
Sustain the trusting expectation of our hearts, succour us in our infirmities and sufferings,
and guide us to Christ, your Son and our brother.
Help us to entrust ourselves to the Father who accomplishes great things.


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    Picture

    FATHER FRANK KEEVINS C.P.

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