Taking to the hills

Martina Madden and Anne-Marie Connolly (Peter McVerry Trust fundraisers, pictured here) are taking on a charity challenge this October to raise money for homeless services in Dublin. They are going to trek across Morocco for five days, with the summit of Mount Toubkal as their goal. Mount Toubkal is the highest mountain in North Africa – more than 4,000 metres high! And the good news is that they are currently looking for other brave souls to join them. Fellow-trekkers are promised a fascinating journey – meeting the local Berber people, eating traditional Moroccan cuisine, and visiting the exotic markets of Marrakech – and spectacular views of the Sahara from the mountain top. Registration for the event closes on 5th May, and the trek itself takes place 1st-5th October. For more information, visit www.pmvtrust.ie or telephone Peter McVerry Trust Fundraising Office 01-8230776.

Keeping tabs on democracy

The Council of the recently established Conversation on Democracy in Ireland held its second meeting on Tuesday 28 April. Its first project, on local democracy, is being conducted in collaboration with four county councils – Cork City, Dublin City, Galway County and Louth. Four discussion groups – called ‘Juries’ – have been set up to look at what can be learnt from success in this area and how that learning can best be applied. The project will finish at the end of the year and a report of its finding will be published early in 2010. Plans are afoot to set up a website – www.conversationondemocracy.ie – which will make the work of the Conversation more accessible. Read more »

Yoga for refugees

The JRS Ireland Capacity Building Programme has just finished a five-week yoga course at Hatch Hall direct provision centre. The classes were given by Peter Duffy, yoga instructor, on Wednesday mornings and were attended by between four and ten adults. A creche was also provided for parents with young children who wanted to attend the course. As Elizabeth O’Rourke, Integration Officer with JRS Ireland, puts it: “There is a very strong institutional dimension to life in a direct provision centre. Yoga helps rebuild the confidence of asylum seekers and helps them to keep fit and active.” The yoga classes are one of a number of personal development courses which JRS runs to help alleviate the boredom and the feeling of isolation experienced in hostels.

Learn to discern

The School on Ignatian Spirituality held in the Milltown Institute in 2008 was highly successful, so little wonder that the Institute will run a follow-up course this year from 15 to 19 June. It is called ‘Ignatian discernment today’, and it will explore how the dynamics of Ignatian discernment can be applied to any meeting today. “Just as the Spiritual Exercises are being creatively adapted to the needs of our times,” the Institute says, “the same creative adaptation can be made of the discernment experience of the first Jesuits.” Important to note is that attendance this year does not require that one attended last year’s course. The leaders of the course will be Brian Grogan SJ, Brendan Comerford SJ, and Brian O’Leary SJ. For more details, contact Bronia Kornas – Tel: 01-2776 322; email bkornas@milltown-institute.ie.

Hands across the divide

Gerry O’Hanlon, from the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, joined a diverse panel on 22 April to debate the topic ‘Faith in a Crisis: Religion and Spirituality in an Economic Downturn’. It took place in the Button Factory, the refurbished Temple Bar Music Centre. The evening got off to a somewhat giddy start, with inputs from two comedians, but by the time the debate got going, the mood in the audience (largely college students and 30-somethings) was relaxed. Straight away there seemed to be a chasm between those, in the panel and audience, who see the world in terms of religion and those who do not. However, as the panel and audience interacted and as the two ‘divides’ learnt each other’s language, it became clear that Christians can have doubts and humanists can be spiritual.

Meeting the internet challenge

Webmasters from a number of European Jesuit Provinces are meeting this week (30 April to 3 May) in Malta to pool their ideas with regard to the best ways to use the internet to convey the Jesuit message. Last year the meeting was held in Barcelona, with Piaras Jackson SJ leading the way. Piaras is at this year’s meeting too, as is Pat Coyle, manager of the Jesuit Communication Centre. The attendants expect to take a good look at recent web developments in the various Provinces and to discuss current online trends and the role that spirituality can play in internet life – all in the light of what General Congregation 35 had to say about the importance of communications. They will take time out, however, to visit the ancient city of Mdina (pictured here) and some of the famous neolithic temples on the island.

JESUITICA: Taking a stand

St Edmund Campion’s Brag to Elizabethan priest-hunters: “Be it known unto you that we have made a league – all the Jesuits of the world – whose succession and multitude must over-reach all the practices of England – cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us and never to despair of your recovery while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, to be racked with your torments or to be consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted, so it must be restored.”

JESUITICA: Foresight

Is there a special Providence that saves Jesuits from hitting the jackpot? In 1809 the New York Jesuits bought a farm up country in a place called Elgin. The countryside was pretty and the air was good, but they knew the city would never move out that far. When they needed cash to repaint the college on 16th Street, they sold the upcountry farm for $12,000. It is now the site of St Patrick’s Cathedral, which you can see pictured here, sharing the same Manhattan air-space as many skyscrapers.

Forthcoming events

• The Parents’ Council of Gonzaga College are sponsoring a lecture byMichael Paul Gallagher SJ at 7.30 p.m. on 23 April, in the college chapel: “God Missing but not missed- Will the next generation have Faith?” All are welcome.
• Christian Life Community has a Day of Prayer on 6 June 2009 at Emmaus Retreat Centre, Swords, Co. Dublin, from 10am – 4.30pm approx.
• Gerry O’Hanlon SJ is participating in a debate tomorrow night (Wednesday, 22 April), entitled, ‘Faith in a Crisis: Religion and Spirituality in an Economic Downturn’. The debate – styled as a political cabaret incorporating a panel discussion, music and film – will take place in the Button Factory, Temple Bar (Dublin) at 8:00 p.m., on Wednesday, 22 April, 2009. Tickets are €17.50, available from Tickets.ie.

Pilgrim teachers

In the first week of April, Fergus O’Donoghue SJ and Brian Flannery led a group of educators from Jesuit schools through the places in Northern Spain associated with St Ignatius’ early life. There were three teachers from Clongowes and St Declan’s, and two each from Gonzaga, Galway and Belvedere. The group gelled. Their most vivid memories are diverse: the extraordinary sharing sessions at the end of each day; the eerie spirituality of Palm Sunday in Zaragosa with bunched canons turning their backs to the church, and penitents in pointed hats processing to drumbeat; the spectacular impact of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia temple (pictured here) in Barcelona. In the best tradition of returning travellers, their stories and enthusiasm would make anyone envious, and keen to follow those footprints.    124

Liam greets the volunteers

On 18 April Irish Aid organised a Volunteering Information Fair in Dublin. Liam O’Connell SJ represented Jesuit Volunteers International (JVI) and the Mission Office at the event, and he had interesting conversations with 48 of the 400 people who attended. These included past students from Jesuit schools, people who have just taken early retirement, husband and wife teams who want to volunteer, and those making plans for 2010. JVI are specifically looking for people to teach in a Jesuit primary school in Dodoma in Tanzania, starting in July, and people to teach English to adults in a Jesuit language school in Yangon, Myanmar starting in August 2009. For further details consult the JVI website.

Richard’s Easter

This is rare. Richard O’Dwyer SJ describes the impact on him of a ravaged corner of Sudan while the experience is still raw. Richard, formerly a chartered surveyor, is working for the Jesuit Refugee Service in South Sudan, and has just send the account below of Easter Happenings in South Sudan. The inhospitible terrain and the even starker histories of its denizens made a deep impact on Richard, but he was equally overwhelmed by the resilience of the people, the priests and the bishop of the diocese where he works. “I marvelled,” he writes, “at how these joyful, smiling people whose Church, town and whose very lives had been reduced to dust, were able to rejoice so exuberantly. I felt I was witnessing a new beatitude in the making.” Read more »

Hunting for Easter eggs

160 Easter eggs were donated to Jesuit Refugee Service Ireland in response to their appeal. This enabled them to send Easter eggs out to children living in three direct provision centres in the Dublin area. They were also able to use the remaining eggs for the Annual JRS Ireland Easter Egg Hunt. It took place in Mountjoy Square Park on a gorgeous, sunny Easter Sunday afternoon. After a scramble to find the hidden chocolate eggs there was time to enjoy face painting, ‘creme egg and spoon’ races (see picture), kite making, hoola hooping, football and relay races. The fantastic weather brought about 120 people into the park. The day was a great success, thanks in large part to the assistance of many JRS volunteers.