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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FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 11th – 18th MARCH

My bedroom window in Bishopbriggs overlooks a wooded area and a pond which is home to a rare breed of frogs. While I hear these frogs constantly, I have never actually seen any. Only Father Gareth, when he was parking the car one night, claims to have seen one that had come through the fence and into the estate. There are also deer in the woods, and I told the story recently of, after over a year of never catching a glimpse, coming across a number of them, romping through the estate, as I returned from a middle-of-the-night sick call to the Royal Infirmary. I have since seen two of them, now antlered, grazing in the woods.
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I can now, however, report a more unusual sighting. Before the recent snow, in the middle of another very cold spell, I looked out of the window early one Saturday morning, and I saw two beasts walking across the frozen pond. At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, but as they drew closer I could see that they were, what I can only describe as giant foxes. They were the size of wolves and their coats were, if not black, then a very, very dark brown. I watched them for a while and, when I heard Father Gareth come out of his room, which is next door to mine, but overlooking the street, I called him in and asked him to have a look. He was as mesmerised as I was.

I think that the other members of our community were more sceptical. And then, one night, as Father Gareth was driving home from the church, and nearing the house, he came upon one of these giant foxes on the path in front of him. He arrived home almost in a state of terror, being of a delicate disposition, and told anyone who would listen that, up close, this beast was even bigger and more ferocious looking than when he was watching it out of my bedroom window. I believed every word he said, but the others remained sceptical, and Brother Antony, being a local lad, seemed to suggest that giant beasts of one kind of another were fairly normal in Bishopbriggs.

At the risk of sounding fanciful, and having far too vivid an imagination, I must confess that this wasn’t the first time I had come across a larger-than-life version of an animal. When I was doing my 30-day retreat at Manresa House in Clontarf, in Dublin, back in 1987, I would walk early every morning on Dollymount Strand, which is a part of Bull Island, a specially protected bird sanctuary and nature reserve, which has since become a special area of conservation under the EU Habitats Directive. On one particular morning, about 6 a.m., as I clambered over the sand dunes to get to the strand, I was suddenly face to face with a huge hare, and, I kid you not, it was the size of a small kangaroo! Once again, I stood mesmerised as we gazed at each other, and then the hare scampered off. Being on a silent retreat I couldn’t go back to talk to anyone about it until we were on one of our two break days, when we were allowed to chat, and even go out for a few hours with the other retreatants. My story, however, met with the same reaction as that of our Passionist community to the giant foxes. Perhaps Clontarf is twinned with Bishopbriggs and giant beasts are quite normal.

Very soon, when we enter into the Easter Season, we will meet many different people in the Gospel stories, some of whom will see and believe; some of whom will believe without seeing; and some of whom will see and still not believe. All I can say to my doubters is, I know what I saw, and I will not withdraw my testimony.

Here is the chorus of a beautiful hymn to Christ by David Haas, inspired by 1 Peter 1:8:
Without seeing you we love you. Without touching you we embrace.
Without knowing you we follow. Without seeing you we believe.
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FATHER FRANK’S LOG: 18th – 25th FEBRUARY
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On the 2nd Sunday of Lent, which always tells the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor, I tend to think of mountains where I’ve walked.  I say walked, rather than climbed, as I always preferred to find the gentler ascents, and to be there for the beauty rather than the challenge. When Father Gareth and Brother Antony returned from Highgate last week, having thoroughly enjoyed their time there with the other students, they told me that they had been talking to an English Passionist, Father Ben, someone I knew well from years past. Father Ben had recently returned to London after spending some years ministering in the diocese of Galloway, but that wasn’t his first stint in Scotland. For 4 years, back in the late 1990’s, he had lived in Kingussie where he looked after the parishes of Kingussie, in the diocese of Argyle and the Isles, and the parish of Aviemore, in the diocese of Aberdeen.

His primary reason for being there, though, was to take time in a quiet place, with little distraction, to try and decipher the diaries of Father Ignatius Spencer, a 19th century Passionist priest, whose cause for Canonization Father Ben has been pursuing relentlessly for many years. The task was made all the more difficult because Father Ignatius’s handwriting was so tiny, at times managing to cram 6 months of entries into a single page. Part of the interest surrounding Father Ignatius Spencer is that he was an ancestor of both Winston Churchill and Princess Diana Spencer, as well as in his own time being a nephew of the Duke of Wellington. Those, however, aren’t reasons to be canonised. The main thrust for that, in the mind of Father Ben, is that as well as being a holy Passionist, and a diligent priest, he was 120 years ahead of his time in his work for Christian Unity. He converted from Anglicanism and spent his life working for the conversion of England to the Catholic faith. He is also known as the Apostle of Prayer for England.

The house where Father Ben was staying during this time was the parochial house in Kingussie, where it seems that Canon Sydney MacEwan lived for a while. The attic contained some items that may have belonged to him back in the day. Canon Sydney MacEwan was the famous singing priest, perhaps best known for Bring Flowers of the Rarest which is still often played on our radios to mark the first day of May. Interestingly enough, he was born and grew up in Springburn, the neighbouring parish to St. Mungo’s, and his father was from Partick, where I was born and grew up myself. He once said “I think I prefer a concert audience to a congregation. People listen to me more attentively in a concert than in a church”. But everything he did, including his singing, was really for Christ and for the Church, and we’ll forgive him that he went to St. Aloysius and not to St. Mungo’s, and that at one time he wanted to be a Jesuit and not a Passionist.

During his years there, deciphering the diaries, Father Ben found it hard to get away for a break and so, two years in a row, and being based in Prestonpans at that time, I gave up part of my summer to cover for him, so that he could get away. To be honest, it was no great sacrifice. Being younger and fitter back then, I loved to do a bit of walking in the mountains, and from this house in Kingussie, without even taking the car, I could stay on the same side of the road and, within minutes, be walking in the Cairngorms, or I could cross to the other side of the road and, within minutes, be walking in the Monadhliaths, two ranges in the Grampians. I walked in these mountains every day I was there, and I often had my breath taken away by beauty, which I always like to think of as Transfiguration moments.

Father, your Servant, Father Ignatius Spencer, spent his life preaching the love shown for us in the Sacred Passion of your Son, and working tirelessly to bring people to know that love. Help us to follow his example and show us that you are well pleased with his life by granting any favours we ask, through his intercession. Amen.
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