04 December 2021

Rathkeale and Kilnaughtin
Group parish notes in
‘Newslink’ December 2021

Seven candles and seven names … November has been a month of remembrance

Rathkeale and Kilnaughtin Group of Parishes

Rathkeale, Askeaton, Castletown and Kilnaughtin

Priest-in-Charge: Revd Canon Patrick Comerford,
The Rectory, Askeaton, Co Limerick.

Parish Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RathkealeGroup/

Remembering and Remembrance:

From All Saints’ Sunday, throughout November, seven candles on the altars in the four churches have remembered seven parishioners buried since last Christmas: Alan Fitzell, Arthur Gilliard, Gill Killick, Joey Smyth, Kenneth Smyth and Linda Smyth.

Remembrance Sunday was marked with a special Remembrance Service of the Word in Rathkeale, and Gerard Griffin laid wreaths at the two church plaques remembering the dead from the parish from World War I and World War II.

Preparing for Advent and Christmas:

An ecumenical carol service, organised with the support of the Rathkeale Pre-Social Cohesion Project, takes place in Ballingrane Methodist Church at 7 p.m. on Wednesday 1 December. All are welcome.

Three short Advent reflections on prayer are planned for the Rectory on Monday evenings: ‘Why do we Pray?’ (28 November) ‘Where do we Pray?’ (6 December) and ‘How do we Pray?’ (13 December).

As part of this year’s Advent Study programme in Saint Flannan’s Cathedral, Killaloe – ‘The Church of Ireland – who are we?’ – Canon Patrick Comerford spoke on Wednesday 24 November on the theme, ‘Apostolic and Catholic, Protestant and Reformed.’

Parish services in December 2021:

1 December (Wednesday): 7 pm: Ecumenical carols, in association with Rathkeale Pre-Social Cohesion Project, Ballingrane Methodist Church.

5 December (Advent II): 9.30, Parish Eucharist, Askeaton; 11.30, Morning Prayer, Tarbert; 4.30, Carols and Lighting the Christmas tree, the Old Abbey, Rathkeale.

12 December (Advent III): 9.30, Parish Eucharist, Castletown; 11.30, Morning Prayer, Rathkeale.

19 December (Advent IV): 9.30, no morning service, Askeaton; 11.30, Parish Eucharist, Tarbert; 3 p.m., Carol Service, Askeaton, followed by refreshments in the Rectory (subject to Covid restrictions at the time).

Christmas Eve, Friday 24 December:

7 pm, Tarbert, Christmas Eucharist (HC 2); 9 pm, Castletown, Christmas Eucharist (please note times).

Christmas Day, Saturday 25 December:

9.30 am, Askeaton, Christmas Eucharist; 11 am, Rathkeale, Christmas Eucharist.

26 December (Saint Stephen’s Day, Christmas 1): 11 a.m., Morning Prayer, Rathkeale (note the time; this is the only service this Sunday).

Sunday 2 January 2022 (Christmas 2):

9.30, Askeaton, the Parish Eucharist; 11.30, Tarbert, Morning Prayer.

Thursday 6 January 2022 (The Epiphany):

11, Askeaton, the Epiphany Eucharist, followed by traditional Epiphany ‘chalking’.

Sunday 9 January (Epiphany 1): 9.30, Castletown, Parish Eucharist; 11.30, Rathkeale, Morning Prayer.

Sunday 16 January (Epiphany 2): 9.30, Askeaton, Morning Prayer; 11.30, Tarbert, Parish Eucharist.

Sunday 23 January (Epiphany 3): 9.30, Castletown, Morning Prayer; 11.30, Rathkeale, Parish Eucharist.

Saturday 29 January: afternoon ‘Muddy Church’ in Curraghchase for the Limerick, Adare and Rathkeale groups of parishes.

Sunday 30 January (Epiphany 4, the Presentation): 11 am, United Parish Eucharist, Rathkeale.

A special thank you:

Barbara and Patrick are overwhelmed by the recent presentation on behalf of parishioners and the four parishes. This was surprising and unexpected, and your generosity is truly appreciated.

Staying online:

Sunday sermons and Monday morning school assembly talks are available online through Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Canon Patrick Comerford’s blog (www.patrickcomerford.com). Links to the sermons are sent out in a weekly email. Please contact Patrick if you would like to receive this weekly email.

Remembrance Sunday in Holy Trinity Church, Rathkeale

This is an edited version of the Rathkeale and Kilnaughtin Group parish notes in the December 2021 edition of ‘Newslink’, the Limerick and Killaloe diocesan magazine

Praying in Advent 2021:
7, Nicholas Ferrar

Nicholas Ferrar, from a portrait by Cornelius Janssen in the Senior Fellows’ Common Room, Clare College, Cambridge

Patrick Comerford

This is the Season of Advent. Before a busy day begins, I am taking some time early this morning (4 December 2021) for prayer, reflection and reading.

Each morning in the Advent, I am reflecting in these ways:

1, Reflections on a saint remembered in the calendars of the Church during Advent;

2, the day’s Gospel reading;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.

Today [4 December 2012] the Calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship commemorates Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding.

Nicholas Ferrar … a window in the Chapel of Clare Chapel, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Nicholas Ferrar (1593-1637) was the guiding light of one of the most remarkable experiments in Christian community living in the history of Anglicanism. An English academic, courtier and businessman, he gave up his successful careers, was ordained a deacon and retreated with his extended family to the manor of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire (now Cambridgeshire), where they lived in community.

Nicholas Ferrar was born in London on 22 February 1593 and was baptised five days later. The Ferrar family claimed to be closely related to Robert Ferrar, Bishop of Saint Davids, who was burned at the stake in Carmarthen on 30 March 1555, in the reign of Mary I. Nicholas was the third son and fifth of six children of Nicholas Ferrar and his wife Mary (Woodnoth) Ferrar. The Ferrar family was wealthy and was deeply involved in the London Virginia Company, which had a Royal Charter for the plantation of the colony of Virginia. Nicholas Ferrar’s niece is said to be the first child to have been named Virginia. His family home was often visited by people like Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake.

At the age of four, Nicholas Ferrar was sent to school at Enborne, near Newbury, Berkshire, and is said to have been reading perfectly by the age of five. He was confirmed by the Bishop of London in 1598, contriving to have the bishop lay hands on him twice.

In 1605, at the age of 13, he entered Clare Hall, now Clare College, Cambridge. He was elected a fellow-commoner at the end of his first year, took his BA in 1610 and was elected a fellow that year. While he was an undergraduate in Cambridge, he first met the priest-poet George Herbert.

He probably received the degree MA in Cambridge in 1613, and he may have been planning an academic career as a Cambridge don. But Nicholas Ferrar’s health had been weak since his childhood, and the damp air of the Fens was bad for his health. By the time of his graduation his health had become a cause for serious concern, and he was advised to travel to warmer climate of continental Europe, away from the damp air of Cambridge.

In 1613, Ferrar obtained a position in the retinue of the Queen of Bohemia, Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King James I and wife of the Elector Frederick V. He left England in April, but by May he had changed his mind and left the Court to travel alone. Over the next few years he visited Holland, German principalities, Austria, Bohemia, Italy and Spain, and learned to speak Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish.

He studied in Leipzig and in Padua, where he continued his medical studies, and he broadened his religious education through meetings with Anabaptists, Jesuits, Oratorians and Jews.

During this time, he recorded many adventures in his letters home to his family and friends. Finally in 1618 he is said to have had a vision that he was needed at home, and returned to England.

On his return to England, he was refused a Professorship at Gresham College, London. Meanwhile, he found that the family fortunes which had been invested primarily in Virginia were faring badly and were under threat. His brother John had become over-extended financially and the Virginia Company was in danger of losing its charter.

From 1619, Nicholas devoted much of his energies to the affairs of the troubled Virginia Company. In 1622, he succeeded his elder brother John as the company’s Deputy, becoming responsible for its day-to-day administration. In 1624, twin disasters struck: the company was dissolved and John faced a threat of bankruptcy.

Ferrar was elected an MP for Lymington, Hampshire, in 1624, and in Parliament he tried to promote the cause of the Virginia Company. He also worked closely in the Commons with Sir Edwin Sandys, and together they were part of the parliamentary faction known as the ‘country party’ or ‘patriot party,’ grouped around Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, which seized control of the finances from a rival group, the ‘court faction,’ grouped around Sir Thomas Smith, also a prominent member of the Virginia Company.

In a pamphlet, Sir Thomas Smith’s Misgovernment of the Virginia Company, Ferrar accused Smith and his son-in-law, Alderman Robert Johnson, of running a company within a company to skim off the profits from the shareholders. The argument ended with the London Virginia Company losing its charter following a court ruling in May 1624.

The turn of events convinced Nicholas and the family that they should renounce worldliness by leaving London and devoting themselves to a life of godliness. At the age of 33, Nicholas abandoned his successful political and commercial career to move to found a community of prayer. He retired from parliament in 1625 and bought the deserted manor and village of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, a few miles off the Great North Road, with the support of his mother, Mary Ferrar, and his brother John.

Little Gidding had been deserted since the Black Death in the 14th century. The Ferrar family probably found Little Gidding through a recommendation from John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, whose palace was in the nearby village of Buckden.

On Trinity Sunday 1626, Nicholas Ferrar was ordained a deacon in Westminster Abbey by William Laud, the Bishop of Saint Davids and later Archbishop of Canterbury, although Nicholas made it clear that he would not proceed to the priesthood. When he had been ordained, Nicholas pledged: ‘I will also by the help of my God, set myself with more care and diligence than ever to serve our good Lord God, as is all our duties to do, in all we may.’

The first thing his widowed mother did at Little Gidding was to enter the church for prayer, ordering it to be cleaned and restored for worship before any attention was paid to the house. The poet Richard Crashaw described Mary in her ‘friar’s grey gown’ as ‘the gentlest, kindest, most tender-hearted and liberal handed soul I think is to-day alive.’

Mary Ferrar and the extended family and household – about 30 to 40 people – moved into the manor house, and Nicholas became the leader and spiritual director of the community.

This was the only religious community in the Church of England between the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII and the revival of religious communities that came with the Oxford Movement. The household was centred on the Ferrar family: Nicholas’s mother Mary; his brother John Ferrar, his wife Bathsheba and their children; and his sister Susanna, her husband John Collett and their children.

They restored the abandoned little Church of Saint John the Evangelist for their use. The household always had someone at prayer and had a regular routine. They read the daily offices of the Book of Common Prayer and also read the complete Psalms each day. Day and night, there was always at least one member of the community kneeling in prayer before the altar so that they might keep the word, ‘Pray without ceasing.’

They fasted with great rigour, and in other ways embraced voluntary poverty, so that they might have as much money as possible for the relief of the poor. The life of the Ferrar household was strongly criticised by Puritans, and the community was condemned by William Prynne in a series of scurrilous pamphlets as ‘an Arminian Nunnery.’ However, the family never lived a formal religious life at Little Gidding; instead, this was a family living a Christian life in accordance with the Book of Common Prayer and according to High Church principles.

The community members looked after the health and education of the local children, and Nicholas and his family produced harmonies of the Gospels. The community wrote books and stories on different aspects of Christian faith and practice, and many members of the family also learned the art of bookbinding from the daughter of a Cambridge bookbinder.

The community attracted much attention and was visited by King Charles I. He borrowed a Gospel harmony produced at Little Gidding and only returned it several months later in exchange for a promise of a new harmony to give to his son, the future Charles II. The Ferrars then produced a beautifully bound manuscript that passed through the royal collection and is now in the British Library.

The poet George Herbert (1593-1633), who had been a contemporary of Nicholas Ferrar at Cambridge, also became a friend of the community. At the time, Herbert was a deacon and held the prebend of Leighton Bromswold, four or five miles south of Little Gidding.

After being ordained priest, Herbert moved to Wiltshire. On his deathbed in 1633, Herbert sent the manuscript of The Temple to Nicholas Ferrar, asking him to publish the poems if he thought they might ‘turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul,’ but otherwise, to burn them. Ferrar decided to publish them, and within half a century The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations had gone through 13 editions.

Nicholas Ferrar, who never married, died on 4 December 1637 at the age of 45. He was buried outside the west door of the church in Little Gidding. His papers are held at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

The leadership of the community at Little Gidding passed to his brother John Ferrar, and the Ferrar family continued its way of life and continued to attract many visitors. During a period of local unrest in the Civil Wars, John Ferrar and some of his family went to Holland in 1643, but they had returned to Little Gidding by 1646.

Charles I returned to Little Gidding twice more. Once he came with the Prince of Wales and donated some money he had won from the prince in a game of cards the night before. On his last visit to Little Gidding on 2 May 1646, at the height of the English Civil War, King Charles I briefly took refuge after the Battle of Naseby as he fled north to try to enlist support from the Scots.

Huntingdonshire was loyal to Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), who was born in Huntingdon. Cromwell had lived in Huntingdon, and nearby in St Ives and Ely, and was MP first for Huntingdon and then for Cambridge.

The community was forcibly broken up by the Puritan soldiers of Cromwell’s Parliamentary army in 1646, and the brass font from the church was thrown into the pond.

The last members of the community, John Ferrar and Susanna Collett, died within a month of each other in 1657. Little Gidding remained the property of the Ferrar family, however, and in 1714 John Ferrar renovated the church, shortening the nave by about two feet, installing wooden panelling and building the ‘dull façade,’ as TS Eliot calls it.

TS Eliot honours Nicholas Ferrar in Little Gidding, his fourth poem in the Four Quartets. Little Gidding was published in 1942, Eliot published no more poetry afterwards, and he died in 1965.

From Little Gidding by TS Eliot:

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull façade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

The former Poet Laureate the late Ted Hughes claimed he was directly related to Nicholas Ferrar on his mother’s side and Hughes and Sylvia Plath named their son Nicholas Farrar after this Anglican saint.

The Feast of Nicholas Ferrar is celebrated on 1 December in the calendar of the Episopal Church (TEC) in the US and was celebrated on 2 December in the calendar of the Alternative Service Book of the Church of England. His commemoration may have been moved to 1 and 2 December because Saint John of Damascus is commemorated on 4 December. In Common Worship, Charles de Foucauld, Hermit in the Sahara (1916), is now commemorated on 1 December.

Quotation:

The remembrance of death is very powerful to restrain us from sinning. For he should well consider the day will come (and he knoweth not how soon) … no more Suns will rise and set upon him; … no more seeing, no more hearing, no more speaking, no more touching, no more tasting, no more fancying, no more understanding, no more remembering, no more desiring, no more loving, no more delights of any sort to be enjoyed by him ... let any man duly and daily ponder these things, and how can it be that he should dare …

The chapel of Clare College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Matthew 9: 35 to 10: 1, 6-8 (NRSVA)

35 Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37 Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; 38 therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest.’

1 Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness [and said:].

6 ‘But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 7 As you go, proclaim the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” 8 Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.’

The Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary today (4 December 2021) invites us to pray:

We pray for those affected by the Covid-19 virus, that despite their circumstances they may remain steadfast in faith and hope.

Yesterday: Saint Francis Xavier

Tomorrow: Clement of Alexandria

Th bridge at Clare College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org