Sat 23 March 2024
Dublin & Environs Meet-Up
We ask all groups in Dublin and surrounding counties to ensure that 2-3 people from each group attend this meeting (10:30 – 12:30). It is so important to strengthen our sense of belonging to a common contemplative community
Sat 13 April 2024
Regional Coordinators
This will be an online event via Zoom from 11 am to 12:45. We hope that as many as possible will then be able to travel to Dublin for the Annual Forum and AGM on 11 May 2024.
Sat 11 May 2024
Annual Forum & AGM
Our Annual Forum and AGM will take place on Saturday, 11 May 2024 in Balally. We hope as many as possible will attend as it is a wonderful opportunity to engage with Board members about how we can animate our community,
Our Irish meditation community after Covid – like so many of our European counterparts – is considerably smaller than it was before the pandemic. In 2019 we had 130 weekly meditation groups active across Ireland, North and South. Today, that number has fallen to 60. Research indicates that the same fate has befallen very many kinds of activity, including much social events such as theatre and music events – that people are much less inclined to come together than before covid. But there are also signs of green shoots emerging and in recent weeks we have added a new meditation group and we look forward to adding many more.
But we do want to stress the importance of gathering together in community and we are asking all groups to consider participating in opportunities for doing so this year. For example, we invite all meditators from Dublin and surrounding counties to attend our next Dublin Meet-Up on Saturday, 23 March. We will meet in Balally in Dublin (Eircode D16 E032) from 10:30 to 12:30, with tea and coffee available from 10:00 a.m. We ask each of our weekly groups to send at least two from the group to attend the event. There will be a guest speaker and an opportunity for sharing about our experience of meditation.
We invite all who meditate across Ireland to consider attending our Annual Forum and AGM on Saturday, 11 May, also in Balally. This is our opportunity to meet once a year as a national community, to meditate together and to explore how we might revitalise our community and engage young people in the practice. We will have more information about these events in later bulletins but please put them in your diary now and resolve to be there!
This month we honour the passing of Rita O’Connell, one of our beloved members who passed away on 11 January 2024, aged 90 but full of enthusiasm for life to the end. She was a person of many talents and used them all to the full. She touched so many peoples lives through her art, her work with the Legion of Mary and the Samaritans and especially through her deep faith and devotion to the practice of Christian Meditation.
Rita made a lifelong commitment to contemplative practice as an Oblate of WCCM and who was a driving force for the development and nourishment of our meditation community in Cork city and county. Laurence Freeman wrote that he was ‘very saddened by the news that Rita will not be here to stimulate and challenge us as she has done with humour and passion for so long. She was full of surprises as when I discovered during a silent retreat her great passion for Irish rugby – especially Munster -and her comprehensive knowledge of everything about the game. But there is so much to celebrate and be inspired by especially how faithfully she trod the oblate path. I will offer mass for her and those who grieve for her and may she rest in the Lord’s peace and joy.’
Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins written 1877)
Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Rita was gentle and kind, generous and wise who was nonetheless direct and clear.
The many messages of condolence on RIP give testimony to a woman who was unique – authentic, kind, caring, generous and inspirational. Hers indeed was a life well lived by a woman well loved. The extent to which she touched peoples lives was captured beautifully in a comment by her neighbour Mona Lynch who wrote that ‘by our side, your faith our hidden comfort for half a century‘. That captures so well what we, who were her fellow contemplatives in the Irish Christian Meditation community, would want to say about Rita. She will be sorely missed by many. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam dílis.
Rita loved Hopkins’ poem ‘Pied Beauty’ in which the poet God for the variety of dappled things in nature, including the landscape which has been plotted and pieced into fields (like quilt squares) by agriculture and the great variety of human endeavour. The ending of the poem is beautifully surprising: the entire poem has been about variety but ends acknowledging that God’s beauty is unchanging, as is God’s love for us. Rita had a deep appreciation of this truth which inspired her throughout her life.
The Bird in the Tree by Ruth Pitter
The tree, and its haunting bird,
Are the loves of my heart;
But where is the word, the word,
Oh where is the art,
To say, or even to see,
For a moment of time,
What the Tree and the Bird must be
In the true sublime?
They shine, listening to the soul,
And the soul replies;
But the inner love is not whole,
and the moment dies.
Oh give me before I die
The grace to see
With eternal, ultimate eye,
The Bird and the Tree.
The song in the living Green,
The Tree and the Bird –
Oh have they ever been seen,
Ever been heard?
from Waiting on the Word by Malcolm Guite
Reflection by Noel Keating:
This poem, about hearing a bird in a tree, addresses the question of how the transcendent might for ‘a moment of time’ tremble through into the immanent. The poet wishes to be utterly open to the moment, yet despairs of finding the word, the art, to convey the epiphany she has experienced. Guite observes that ‘The heart of Ruth Pitter’s poetic vision might be summed up in Herbert’s phrase ‘‘heaven in ordinary’’: not simply that she had the gift to communicate a transfigured vision, and unveil a little of heaven in the ordinary; she believed that there was no ordinary. It was her conviction that the experience of ordinariness was simply a failure of attention, a lazy habit of mind.’ Guite considers that ‘Her question is not, how can I write about this bird and this tree so poetically that for a moment they symbolize the sublime?, but rather, how can I concentrate sufficiently and write with enough exactitude and clarity to see this bird and this tree even for a moment in actual disclosure of their true sublimity?’
Her understanding of the transcendent nature of the experience is shown in the way she capitalises the Bird and the Tree for most of the poem – she sees beyond their physical appearance to their true nature as manifesting God-self. They shine, listening to the soul, and the soul replies; but the inner love is not whole, and the moment dies. This is the human condition and one of our key reasons for meditating twice each day is to strive to make whole that inner love which our divided attention obscures, hiding from us the true nature of reality, its transcendent dimension. This leaves us disconnected from our own true nature but we know from our own experience of meditation that our daily practice can heal the division caused by our inattention. Every time we are given a momentary glimpse of that unity which so often eludes us, we experience an inconsolable yearning to experience it more fully.
The closing section of the poem – Oh give me before I die the grace to see with eternal, ultimate eye, the Bird and the Tree – might well serve as an opening prayer for meditation. Does it not match very poetically the John Main prayer ‘Heavenly Father, Open our hearts to the silent presence of the Spirit of your Son.’ Through our practice we are not seeking an ‘experience’, however sublime, but to be transformed; so that we might live our lives from a state in which we might always see with eternal, ultimate eye, the Bird and the Tree. May our meditation help us to see God in everything and everyone and to live our lives from that perspective.
