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FATher Frank's Log...

26/5/2018

FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 20th – 27th MAY

Last Friday, at the invitation of Father Gareth, who is a massive rugby fan, Brother Antony and myself accompanied him to the Scotstoun Stadium, which had upped its capacity to 10,000 for the night, to see the Glasgow Warriors take on the (Llanelli) Scarlets in the semi-final of the prestigious pro-14 tournament. The last time I had gone to a rugby match was in Dublin in 2015 when two parishioners brought me along to see the Glasgow Warriors play Leinster in what was then the pro-12 tournament, before two South African teams were added to make it the pro-14. It was a remarkable match that night with Glasgow running riot in the first half to lead 25-7; and then Leinster doing exactly the reverse in the second half so that the match ended 32-32. The Warriors actually won the tournament that year, beating Ulster in the final.

So, after closing the church on Friday evening, the three amigos walked into town to get the train from Queen Street to Scotstounhill. The train was naturally full of rugby fans going to the match but we managed to get seats more or less next to each other. Father Gareth sat beside a man from West Lothian who was clearly a fanatical rugby fan who claimed to support both Glasgow Warriors and Edinburgh, and to follow them both wherever they went. We could believe it as he never paused for breath, talking rugby, throughout the whole journey, although Father Gareth seemed to hold his own quite well. At one stage our friend said to me that I must remember Captain Mike Gibson and Willie John McBride, who were top Irish players in the 1960’s, so it seemed both that he wrongly guessed I was Irish, but rightly guessed my age pretty accurately. Meanwhile Brother Antony was pretending to be asleep to escape the onslaught. When we got off the train Father Gareth was beginning to panic that this man would stick to him like glue for the rest of the night, so he made the most unsubtle excuse imaginable to take Brother Antony and I in another direction and bade his farewells.

When we reached the stadium Brother Antony and I wanted something to eat. The smallest queue was at the fish and chip stall so Father Gareth gave us our tickets and said he would meet us at our seats in the West Stand. After eating our chips, which were very nice, we meandered past the very, very lengthy queue for the bar and began to climb the steps of the West Stand, only to see Father Gareth reclining back in his seat with a nice drink in his hand and basking in the lovely evening sunshine. Somehow, and this will be no surprise to anyone who knows him, he had charmed his way past the stewards to get into the main stand where he was able to avoid the portaloos and the bar queue, and then saunter back at leisure to his place in the stand and wait for us, grinning broadly.

As to the match itself, the Warriors were terrible. They were playing towards our end in the first half and we hardly saw them as Scarlets ran up a big first half lead. Brother Antony and I had started out not really bothering who won, until we found our ears being assaulted by a very noisy Welshman behind us who shouted, screamed, roared, and murdered Bread of Heaven and Land of Our Fathers throughout, and we began to pray the Warriors would win just to shut him up. In the second half, with Scarlets now playing towards us, Father Gareth said “I bet you we hardly see them up this end at all”, and he was right. Warriors played a bit better but never enough to get back into the game.

All in all, we enjoyed the night and we were happy for Father Gareth, and now he is looking forward to finding somewhere to watch Scarlets play Leinster in the final this Saturday. As we left the ground, Brother Antony and I congratulated him and said to each other, “So long as Celtic win the cup tomorrow”, which of course we did. On the train going back I was reminded of my age again when a couple took pains to make sure I got a seat and then sympathised with me as I searched my pockets again and again for my train ticket, which I never found, and so, I was grateful for a kindly guard back at Queen Street who let me through no problem. Thanks for a great night Father Gareth – I think!

Here is the first verse of Bread of Heaven, one of the Welsh anthems, and a beautiful hymn when it’s not being murdered by a noisy, and rather the worse for wear, Scarlets supporter:
Guide me, O thou great Redeemer, pilgrim through this barren land; I am weak, but thou art mighty; hold me with thy powerful hand: bread of heaven, bread of heaven; feed me till I want no more; feed me till I want no more.

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FATHER FRANK's LOG...

17/5/2018

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FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 13th – 20th MAY

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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May 12th, 2018

12/5/2018

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FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 6th – 13th MAY

I was drawn to an item recently on the STV evening news about an event taking place in Clydebank Town Hall called the Singers Stories Festival. It was the first such event to take place and teams of volunteers had gone around to collect personal stories about Singer sewing machines and about life in the Singer factory in Clydebank, from people who had worked in what was once the largest sewing machine factory in the world. It opened in the 1880’s and closed in 1980, employing up to 16,000 people, and the reason I was drawn to this item was that I myself had worked in Singers for a short time after leaving St. Mungo’s Academy. I had at that stage decided to pursue a career in accountancy and I was lucky to get a job as a costing assistant in Singers which permitted me day release to pursue my studies in what was then called the Institute of Cost and Works Accountancy (ICWA). This was in 1969 but then, unfortunately, I was made redundant from Singers in 1970.

It was a good job at the time because I could walk to and from work each day from Drumchapel where I lived and save money on bus fares. The department I worked in was called High Volume Cost which had to do with the costing of smaller items that were used in high quantities, like screws, in the making of the machines. I had very long hair at the time because I was playing in a folk band and my boss, a good Orangeman called Archie, would tease me endlessly about my hair, and about my being a Catholic and a Celtic supporter, but in truth I believe he liked me and was never anything but extremely kind and encouraging to me and, when I was made redundant on a last-in, first-out basis, he was very sympathetic.

Of course, just because I worked in Singers, doesn’t mean I know the first thing about sewing or about sewing machines, a fact that could sometimes be lost on some very good friends in Dublin who were obsessively into sewing and into textile art, quilt-making, book-making and the like, and who did wonderful and creative work for us in Mount Argus Church. When they would start to talk about these and related things, though, they just couldn’t help themselves until, after regaling me for ages with the intricacies of Mola and Hawaiian Applique, would suddenly notice that my eyes had begun to glaze over and decide it was time to stop.

The quilt-making was used to good effect when, occasionally for Good Friday, we would make a blanket of pain. This consisted of people throughout Lent handing in pieces of fabric that represented some difficult experience in their lives, especially in the year gone by, and these pieces of fabric would then be woven together to form a kind of patchwork quilt that was carried up on Good Friday and placed near to the Cross, linking our sufferings with the sufferings of Christ. Whenever we did this it was always very moving, and when this idea was first put to me I was informed that Native American Indians were deemed to be the best quilt makers in the world, and that often the memories of a tribe would be woven into their beautiful and colourful quilts, which were then used in their religious ceremonies. Every quilt however, by design, had to have some flaw. They could easily have produced the perfect quilt, but they went out of their way to introduce a flaw because, since for them the quilt was a representation of human life and the human condition and, since no human life is perfect; every human life is flawed; it was deemed important that the quilt should reflect this. At the time that struck me as very beautiful, very powerful, and very true.

By the way, I went on to resume my accountancy studies with Olivetti in Queenslie, and I know absolutely nothing about typing (except with two fingers) or typewriters either. Here is a traditional American Indian Prayer that seems to mirror St. Patrick’s Breastplate:
As I walk, as I walk, the universe is walking with me. In beauty it walks before me. In beauty it walks behind me. In beauty it walks below me. In beauty it walks above me. Beauty is on every side. As I walk, I walk with Beauty.

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FATHER FRANK'S LOG

5/5/2018

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FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 29th APRIL – 6th MAY
When the weather took a turn for the better during last week Brother Antony decided to cycle into the Church, taking the Kirkintilloch/Springburn Road on the way in, and coming back via the Forth and Clyde Canal. He did invite me to join him but I declined as cycling has never been something I enjoyed. In fact, when I first joined the Passionists in 1975, at the age of 24, I am embarrassed to say that I couldn’t even ride a bike. The only bike I had ever
ridden prior to that was a three-wheeler at a very young and tender age.

My first year as a Passionist, the Postulancy year, was spent at the Graan in Enniskillen, and I was informed that, when I would go to Mount Argus in Dublin for studies the following year, I would need to be able to ride a bike, as that was the only means of transport that was
available to the students, apart from Shanks’s Pony, and it would be far too far to walk the road to the college on a regular basis. And so, I was given a big black bike with no gears and began, in the little free time that was available to us, to practice cycling around the country roads of County Fermanagh. After a very shaky start I eventually managed to get proficient enough so as not to dread too much what lay in store in Dublin. It was only as the Postulancy year drew to a close that the rector of the Graan told me how much I had been entertaining the local farmers and their families in my early attempts, when it seemed that the only way I knew how to stop the bike was by crashing into the nearest dry-stone wall, a few of which I then toppled over, head first.

Of course, cycling around the country roads of County Fermanagh was a very different
prospect from cycling along the manic roads of Dublin. When I arrived at Mount Argus there were twenty-one of us on the student corridor. Many possessed their own bikes, with multiple gears, but I was given one of the bikes I mentioned a few weeks ago that came out of the lost or stolen property store of the Irish Police. It resembled a great deal the one I had in
Enniskillen. Around that time there had been a popular science-fiction film out called
Rollerball, starring James Caan. Rollerball was a violent sport in which two teams clad in body armour roller skated around a banked, circular track, a bit like a velodrome. The object of the game was to score points by throwing a steel ball into a goal. The skaters however had unbridled leeway to attack and barge the opposing players so as to take possession of the ball, and the Passionist students at Mount Argus, inspired by this, had adopted this method on the daily cycle to college. This generally meant that whenever we were stopped at traffic lights, and the twenty-one bikes were lined up like Formula One racing drivers, ready to launch off when the lights changed to green, they would begin to barge one another and try to knock each other off their bikes so as to get ahead of the pack. I know, as I write this, that Brother
Antony would have loved it as there is nothing he likes better than a bit of danger. After my first few experiences of this, and still not being a confident cyclist, I adopted the method of hanging back and accepting the ignominy of being the last in college every day.

Once my student days were over I didn’t cycle very much, although, during my studies in
Italy, I was taken by a cycling mad Passionist to a place about 40 miles north of Milan, on top of a steep hill that climbs up from the shores of Lake Como, to the Church of Madonna del Ghisallo. Over many years this church had become an established stopping point for cycling
enthusiasts and, in 1949, Pope Pius XII recognised the cycling community's adoption of this little church and gave Madonna del Ghisallo the title of Patron Saint of Cycling. The Church is now a bike lover's paradise, its walls absolutely covered with cycling paraphernalia, much of it donated by professional cyclists who made a pilgrimage to worship at the Shrine after
winning a race, or to pray for some special intention. There is also a museum close by that
collects and displays artefacts from cycling history. The cycle up to that church nearly killed me and I pray to Madonna del Ghisallo regularly that I will never, ever, get on a bike again.

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FATher Frank's Log...

FATHER FRANK's LOG...

May 12th, 2018

FATHER FRANK'S LOG

FATHER FRANK KEEVINS C.P.

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