Ten good reasons why I am not going to the pub to watch any World Cup games played in the US

I have decided not watch any of this year’s World Cup matches played in the US

Patrick Comerford

I have spent much of the day in London, meeting a writer fried from New Zealand, and now I’m on my way back to Milton Keynes, hoping to find an appropriate place in Stony Stratford this evening to join friends and neighbours watching the opening match in this year’s World Cup tournament, when the co-hosts Mexico plan South Africa.

Mexico is one of the three host nations, each staging its own opening ceremony ahead of its first match. Canada follows tomorrow night (Friday 12 June 2026), with its first game against Bosnia-Herzegovina in Toronto. The USA hosts the third and last opening ceremony on Saturday (13 June), before facing Paraguay in Los Angeles.

Scotland’s first match is against Haiti in Foxborough, Massachusetts in the far-too early hours of Sunday (2 am, 14 June), and England has to wait almost a week before playing Croatia in Dallas next Wednesday (17 June, 9 pm).

Doubtless, Trump will try to hijack the events, although his appearance at a major basketball game in New York was meet with Booing throughout the stadium – hopefully setting an example of how to welcome him to any World Cup games.

Today’s opening ceremony is in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City, the first stadium to host matches in three World Cups – it was there Maradona blamed it all on the ‘hand of God’ in 1986 and there Pelé passed to Carlos Alberto in 1970.

The opening ceremony in Canada takes place tomorrow at the BMO Field in Toronto while the opening ceremony for the US tomorrow when the USA and Paraguay play in the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, which also hosts the opening ceremony for the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.

In addition, two extra ceremonies are planned for 4 July as part of the celebrations marking the 250th anniversary United States during the Last 16 fixtures in Philadelphia and Houston.

I still remember my enthusiasm in my childhood and teenage years for World Cup finals: in 1962, when Brazil beat Czechoslovakia 3-1 in Chile … in 1966, as a schoolboy finding a place in Ballinskelligs, Co Kerry, to watch England win dramatically 4-2 against West Germany in London … in 1970, when Brazil beat Italy 4-1 … And who from Ireland can forget Ireland’s performance in Italia 1990, reaching the quarter final and losing 1-0 to Italy in what every Irish fan still thinks of as a victory for heroes?

But, despite all my enthusiasm, I have decided that I am going to watch televised matches played olny in Mexico and Canada, but I am not going to watch any matches played at venues in the US, even though this means I am going to miss England’s three fixtures in the Group Stage, including the opening game against Croatia in Dallas next Wednesday, and the other games against Ghana in Boston, Panama in New York or New Jersey.

Of course, I never had any notion, ever, of going to the US, or any other World Cup competition for that matter. It has never been my idea of how to spend time or to spend money. But if I was so disposed, I have no doubt I would have been refused a visa. And how could I, in all conscience, feel safe on the streets of any city in the US when even US citizens, never mind foreigners, are not safe from the capricious actions of ICE?

And if, in conscience, I would not be safe and comfortable being in the US for this World Cup, why should I feel comfortable and safe at home, watching it from a distance?

But, while I may continue to watch matches staged in Mexico or Canada, here are ten good (or bad) reasons for not watching any fixtures at venues in the US:

1, Haiti has qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 52 years, and plays against Scotland on late on /early on Sunday Saturday in Boston, in the heart of the exiled Haitian community in Foxborough. The national stadium in Port-au-Prince has been controlled by armed gangs since 2024, so the team played every home qualifier in exile, and clinched a World Cup place with a 2-0 defeat of Nicaragua.

But Trump’s travel ban bars Haitian visitors from entering the US. The players and staff have been given an exemption, but their fans have no such exemption. This can only be put down to racism. During the 2024 election campaign Trump repeated baseless claims that illegal immigrants from Haiti have been eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. During ABC’s presidential debate, he claimed: ‘In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there.’

2, Iran’s supporters are banned too. Iran’s first game is due to be against New Zealand in Los Angeles on Tuesday (16 June), but there are real fears that the team may never get there. Iran has qualified for the FIFA World Cup last March, but after months of war Iran has had to switch basecamps from Tucson, Arizona, to Tijuana in Mexico. Under the conditions of their visas, they will have to fly in and out of the US on matchday for each of their three group games. It emerged last Saturday that the US had denied visas to members of the team’s backroom staff, with 15 administrative officials denied entry.

Iran’s allocation of fan tickets for the group stage was revoked this week just days before the start of the tournament, and the US has cancelled all tickets that have been sold to Iran’s supporters. Since the US war against Iran began in February, the US military targets have included the Azadi Stadium in Tehran, where the national team trained.

3, Omar Artan, a FIFA-employed referee from Somalia and named as Africa’s best referee last year, was refused entry to the US at Miami International Airport despite having a valid travel visa and was deported to Istanbul.

4, The Iraqi striker Aymen Hussein was held and questioned for almost seven hours at O’Hare airport in Chicago, the team’s official photographer was sent back despite having a valid visa, and team members from Senegal and Uzbekistan were taken aside when they arrived and given full cavity searches.

5, The Swiss midfielder Breel Embolo was denied an entry visa – although Swiss authorities seem to have been successful in appealing against the decision.

6, The South African football team faced a 24-hour delay in their departure over a visa bungle, fans from Senegal and the Ivory Coast face restrictions despite qualifying for the tournament, and 90 per cent of Moroccan fans with tickets have been denied entry.

7, Tickets to the games are costing up to $8,000, wich means these are not fixtures for ordinary football fans. Instead, for whom the ‘beautiful game’ has became an ugly game and a game only for the rich.

8, Fans from 27 of the 48 nations taking part need a US visa, costing between $185 and $435. This represents wages that an average person in many countries in the Global South would take several months to earn. The US has a FIFA Priority Appointment Scheduling System (PASS), supposed to speed up the visa process for fans who have bought tickets through FIFA. But last month, about 150 fans in Ghana had their visa applications rejected.

9, Amnesty International is warning World Cup fans about the dangers involved in travelling to the US. Human Rights Watch has reported how an asylum seeker who attended the Club World Cup final last year in New Jersey with his children was arrested by ICE and deported.

10, FIFA’s president Gianni Infantino had no shame about giving a ‘peace prize’ to Trump, the petulant president who knows how to make demands but not how to keep commitments. When the US was bidding in 2018 to host this World Cup, Donald Trump personally wrote to FIFA promising that ‘all eligible athletes, officials, and fans from all countries around the world would be able to enter the United States without discrimination.’

It all amounts to a complete package of lies, humiliation, discrimination, racism, petty vindictiveness and an apparently planned and co-ordinated effort to humiliate black and Muslim players and team officials. So much for football being the ‘beautiful game’. So much for that FIFA ‘peace prize’ for Trump, who is using this world cup for propagamda in the same way Hitler used the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

These may be small gestures on my part. They may have no impact at all. And I don’t want anyone to interpret them or misrepresent them as anti-American protests. Nor do I want any family members or friends in the US to take offence, to take umbrage. I have had too much of the Trump regime, and I do not want Trump to have one more viewer who adds to his capacity to boast that this year’s World Cup was his World Cup and his success, his triumph.

I have decided not watch any of this year’s World Cup matches played in the US

‘A Priest along the Way of a Pilgrim’

Where were you 60 years ago? … Ballinskelligs, Co Kerry, was an introduction to ‘The Way of a Pilgrim’ and the Jesus Prayer (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

‘A Priest along the Way of a Pilgrim’

Patrick Comerford

Ecumenical Pilgrimage to Walsingham

Thursday 12 March 2026,

5:15 pm, The Orangery, Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham

Introduction

Thank you to Father Mark for inviting me to speak this evening. I had visited his cathedral in London last year without him knowing, without me ever expecting this invitation, and without knowing we have shared Comerford family links to catch up on.

Thank you too to Cyril Wood for his generosity and kindly going out of his way to get me here this week. It’s a long way from Stony Stratford to Walsingham for someone like me who does not drive. It’s even longer than you imagine, because this time last week I was somewhere in the air between Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia and Oman in the Gulf, not knowing if I was going to get back to England in time to be here.

Although I have been a member of the Society of Catholic Priests, this week is proving to be somewhat outside my experiences; this is my first-ever visit to Walsingham, and first impressions are always both striking and formative.

I am Irish, but I have only once been to the Knock Shrine in Co Mayo, and that was out of interest in the architecture of the basilica rather than out of interest in the Marian Shrine. Yes, I have been to Armagh, Downpatrick and Kildare. But I have never been to any of the Marian pilgrim sites or ‘moving statues’ in Ireland.

If you are a football fan like me, and you are about the same age as me, you will be able to answer immediately where you were 60 years ago. I remember the summer of 1966 quite clearly.

I watched the 1966 World Cup Final in July 1966 in a convent in Ballinskelligs at the western end of a remote peninsula in Co Kerry, in one of the furthest corners of south-west Ireland, looking out onto the wild Atlantic waters.

During that month in Coláiste Mhichíl, I also remember learning Irish dancing, boring evenings listening to an old seanachaí, rising to the challenge to go ‘skinny dipping’, my first kiss and my first smoke, reading Anne Frank’s Diaries and being introduced to JD Salinger’s writings, Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey.

As a 14-year-old, little did I realise then of the significance of Franny and Zooey. It introduced many in the west to The Way of a Pilgrim. That book, as many of you know, began as a collection of essays first published as four short stories in Russia in 1884. It is now a beloved spiritual guide to many, introducing them to the Jesus Prayer and the riches of Orthodox spirituality.

My old copies, translated by RM French and introduced by Bishop Walter Frere, are torn and worn or were given away long ago. I later acquired a more recent edition, published in 2017, translated by Anna Zaranko and edited and introduced by Father Andrew Louth. But that too has been lent, borrowed or passed on with the passage of time.

I remember quite clearly how I was obsessed that summer 60 years ago with football, with little or no interest in prayer, spirituality or any pilgrim’s way. But perhaps the seeds were being sown for a very real experience five years later in my teens.

The Chapel and the Hospital of Saint John Baptist without the Barrs, Lichfield, today … recalling a pilgrimage in life that began 55 years ago (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

A pilgrim’s experience of the ‘uncreated light’

As a 19-year-old, I walked in one summer evening, by accident rather than design, into the Chapel of Saint John’s Hospital in Lichfield. I say by accident, because I was attracted by the Tudor architecture of this almshouse rather than its religious significance.

And to this day, it is a lived and living experience, as I remember the sound of lifting the latch, stepping down into the chapel, and being filled with what I still describe 55 years later as the light and love of God.

Physically, it was impossible: sunlight does not stream through the east window of any church or chapel on a summer evening, and that chapel has no west window.

Psychologically, there may be alternative explanations. But, in time, the experience and the sensations would have faded, and not remain so real, so explicit, so alive after 55 years. You could say it was – still is – a living experience of the ‘uncreated light’, of being filled with the light and the love of God.

How was a 19-year-old to respond to such an unexpected experience? I immediately went down Saint John Street, up Bird Street and into Lichfield Cathedral and for the first time sat in the choir stalls for Choral Evensong. Silent. Receptive. Enfolded by the love of God.

On the way out, one of the residentiary canons shook my hand and said something like, ‘I suppose a young man like you is coming back to church because you’re thinking of ordination.’

All in one summer afternoon or evening.

It was too much to take in. It still is. I am still coming to terms, 55 years later, with its meaning and its implications. I have described it to one interviewer as my ‘self-defining existentialist moment.’ It is too limiting, too reductionist, too partisan, too trite, to describe it as a conversion experience, still less as being ‘born-again’.

And, if it could happen to me, I realised, then it was not unique or individual, it could happen to anyone and everyone. God’s love for me had to be God’s love for everyone. It was, is, an experience with immeasurable and unfathomable dimensions and universal implications: if God loves me, then why, of course God loves you, and you, and you …

Or, as the Revd Dr Kenneth Leech (1939-2015), the Anglican ‘slum priest’ in the East End, once said: ‘Transfiguration can and does occur “just around the corner,” occurs in the midst of perplexity, imperfection, and disastrous misunderstanding.’

And yet, in a way, without feeling at all uncomfortable, I can feel like saying I was born in Lichfield that day. And so, I go back on pilgrimage, not to relive that experience – because it remains a living experience; not, like Peter, James and John wanting to stay on the mountaintop and build their booths of piety; but as a pilgrim, to give thanks, to pray, to reflect, to be silent, to – as it were – cover my head and bare my feet, for I stand on holy ground.

I go back at least two or three times a year to Lichfield, to this spiritual home or birthplace, to pray in that chapel, sometimes silently without words, when God speaks to me too without words; to follow the cycle of daily prayer and the liturgy in the cathedral; to be comfortable in the presence of Christ in word, in sacrament, and in the body of Christ, the people who are the Church.

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.

(TS Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’)

And I hope I’m not being too pious, too po-faced about it. I meet friends, I eat rather than fasting, I go for walks through fields and farmland that I know, some that bear my family name from generations ago. And I enjoy a drink at the end of the day – ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good’ (Psalm 34: 8). (Aside: if I had ever end up in a Benedictine monastery, I want to be the cellarer).

I first visited Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1987 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

A pilgrim’s pilgrimages

In my life in the 55 mature years since, I have been a pilgrim or on pilgrimage to many places:

Jerusalem, which was a graduation present after receiving one of my degrees, along with a ‘bling’ certificate signed by Avraham Sharir and Teddy Kolleck that says I have ‘ascended to Jerusalem, the Holy City’ and am ‘henceforth authorized to bear the title of Jerusalem Pilgrim’.

Mount Athos: (aside: how many of you have been there?) as a priest, I had to receive a particular invitation and permit. As I left, the monks reminded me that when I returned I was to remember that Vatopedi is now my monastery.

Patmos: where Saint John experienced the light in the cave as ‘seven golden lampstands’ and ‘a flame of fire’ (Revelation 1: 12-13) and, incidentally, the monastery of Metropolitan Kallistos.

Mount Sinai: where Moses covered his face with a veil after speaking with God because his face was radiating intense light (Exodus 34: 29-35), and Elijah heard the still small voice in the crag of the rock (I Kings 19).

The Western Desert: the beginnings of monasticism and the home of many of the Patristic writers.

Arkadi and the monasteries of Crete: especially Aghia Irini, where the nuns have brought the place to new life, and welcome tourists on tour buses from throughout the world, bringing the light of Christ back out into the resorts.

Vlatadon: the monastery that is the balcony above Thessaloniki, and where I had a moving moment recalling my grandfather’s own war-time sufferings and eventual death.

Tolleshunt Knights in Essex, which was a regular one-day pilgrimage from Cambridge during the courses organised by the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies. There Saint Sophrony, the disciple and biographer of Saint Silouan, made the monastery a major centre for the practice of the Jesus Prayer and the community follows the hesychast tradition. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’. Even as a child, Saint Sophrony would say, he experienced the Uncreated Light.

The Jesus Prayer and the Uncreated Light seem to be constant, recurring and repetitive tropes in each of these places for this pilgrim priest.

And there are others too: the churches of Cappadocia … Santiago (without doing the Camino) … Bethlehem … Notre Dame … Rome … the Julian Shrine in Norwich … Coventry Cathedral … Whitby … Glenstal … Rostrevor … Mount Melleray … Saint Mary’s Church, Johannesburg …

I have been strongly influenced by Jewish spirituality over the years, so there is a feeling of pilgrimage too when I visit the Jewish quarters in Kraków, Prague, Berlin and Venice, Le Marais in Paris, or the grave of the Chatham Sofer in Bratislava. I may be too broadminded for some of you when I talk about the efforts I made to organise my own one-day visit to the tomb and shrine of Rumi in Konya:

A mouse and a frog meet every morning on the riverbank.
They sit in a nook of the ground and talk.

Each morning, the second they see each other,
they open easily, telling stories and dreams and secrets,
empty of any fear or suspicious holding back.

To watch, and listen to those two
is to understand how, as it’s written,
sometimes when two beings come together,
Christ becomes visible.

(Rumi)

And I always return to Lichfield, constantly, as that first place where I become me, realised who I was made to be, that I am loved by God, made in God’s image and likeness, the God who loves each and every one of us.

The gates of Auschwitz … a sense of pilgrimage in the memories of darkness evil (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

A pilgrim or a tourist?

We do that sort of thing in secular life and family life too.

Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Sachsenhausen … they can never be reduced to being places of tourist curiosity, they are sacred and secular, secular and sacred.

In our own family lives, we go back to the houses we were born in or where our parents or grandparents were born or lived. If we can’t get inside those houses, those houses get inside us and we walk around them in our minds’ eyes.

We go back to where our parents brought us on holidays, walk the beaches, remember the childhood experiences, try to explain them to our children and grandchildren. I do … I even went back some years ago to that beach in Ballinskelligs I so happily remember from 60 years ago – for that World Cup final seen in a convent parlour, and for Franny and Zooey’s introduction to The Way of a Pilgrim and the Jesus Prayer.

We go back to our old schools, no matter what we thought of them then or think of them today.

We go back to see where we were brought to our first football matches, the pubs where we had our first drink, we long wistfully for the cinemas we knew as children, the shops whose windows we once gazed at, smile inwardly as we remember where we stole that first kiss. My visits to Venice or Portmeirion are less tourism and more like architectural pilgrims.

Those of you are married or still married probably go back occasionally to or remember with fondness where you first met, where you were married, where you went on honeymoon, where you had your first home. Yet they also become visits marked by pain and sorrow, or regret and penitence, for those who are widowed or divorced.

Not all pilgrimages are filled with joyful, promise and sweet memory. You may know of the painful stories of the ‘Mother and Baby’ homes and ‘Magdalene Laundries’ in Ireland. Whenever I have written about places such as the former Good Shepherd Convent in Limerick or Dunboyne Castle, I become aware of how many of those women, their children and their grandchildren want to visit and revisit them, because, with all the pain and inhumanity, this is where they were born or formed and made who they are today.

These family and social visits are not just secular pilgrimages, they are spiritual too. They break down the barriers between the profane and the sacred, for these are the places where we were made, and we are made in the image and likeness of God. These pilgrimages have their sacred value too. They are, as we should affirm, incarnational. For in the incarnation, Christ tears down the barriers we set up between the sacred and secular.

In that story of darkness and light in the Gospel reading the Sunday before last (John 3: 1-17, Lent III, 1 March 2026), we were told of our birth and reminded that ‘God so loved the cosmos’ – not the world, not merely humanity, still less ‘man’ – ‘God so loved the cosmos that he gave his only Son, so that everyone (aside: let’s emphasise everyone) … may have eternal life’ (verse 16).

That Pythagorean concept of the cosmos implies that we are created, nurtured, brought into existence within the womb of God. And God then turns that around in the incarnation when God becomes flesh in the human womb. We are made in the image and likeness of God, then God is made in our image and likeness. We could say, in a deep and very true sense, humanity is God’s own pilgrimage.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

(TS Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’)

The Jesus Prayer … an image from Crete (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

‘We are pilgrims on a journey’

I have spent the last two weeks in Malaysia, travelling there and back through Oman in the Gulf. I was aware in both places how Ramadan and Lent overlap significantly this year. For Muslims, Pilgrimage, like Ramadan, is one of the five pillars of Islam. But as Christians, do we give pilgrimage the same value, imperative, significance it has for Muslims?

It is wonderful to be here. But we should not make pilgrimage too difficult for people in their everyday, sacred secular lives. We are all pilgrims in this life, not just in our own lives but sharing in God’s pilgrimage in humanity.

I am reminded of Richard Gillard’s lyrics in ‘The Servant Song’:

Will you let me be your servant,
let me be as Christ to you;
pray that I may have the grace
to let you be my servant too.

We are pilgrims on a journey,
we are trav’lers on the road;
we are here to help each other
walk the mile and bear the load.

I will weep when you are weeping;
when you laugh, I’ll laugh with you.
I will share your joy and sorrow
’til we’ve seen this journey through.

We make – or we are invited to make – that pilgrimage every Sunday to the holy mountain, to Mount Tabor, when we meet Christ present for us in Word, in Sacrament, and in the Body of Christ, the living and holy members of the Church.

Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱὲ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλό
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner

At the Eucharist in the Chapel of Saint John’s Hospital, Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Possible asides or added conversation points:

One pilgrimage I am not making this year – the World Cup in the US

JD Salinger and Anne Frank, a conjoint introduction to Jewish spirituality as well as connection to Jesus Prayer

These notes were prepared for the Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage Trust, 10-13 March 2026, with the support of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius and the Society of St John Chrysostom

I return to Lichfield, constantly, as that first place where I became me, realised who I was made to be (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Daily prayers in Ordinary Time with USPG: (124) 29 September 2023

Skellig Michael and the Skellig Rocks … both the church and the monastery were dedicated to Saint Michael (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

We are in Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar, and this week began with the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity (Trinity XVI, 24 September 2023).

Two of us are travelling to York later today. But, before the day gets busy, I am taking some time this morning for prayer and reflection.

The Church celebrates Saint Michael and All Angels today (29 September). So my reflections each morning this week and next are taking this format:

1, A reflection on a church named after Saint Michael or his depiction in Church Art;

2, the Gospel reading of the day in the Church of England lectionary;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.

The ruins of Ballinskelligs Priory, Co Kerry … still a place of prayer and peace for pilgrims and tourists alike (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Skellig Michael and Ballinskelligs Priory:

Legend says that the first inhabitants in Ireland arrived in in the Bay of Ballinskelligs. The myths say that Ireland was uninhabited until a woman named Cessair, accompanied by her father, two men and over 40 women, arrived in a ship that landed at Ballinskelligs Bay in the year 2361 BC.

The legend says Cessair was the granddaughter of Noah, who had no room for her in the Ark when he had finished building it. She built her own three ships and set sail for Ireland, believing it was free from sin.

After surviving a voyage that endured for seven years and that suffered the loss of two ships, Cessair landed in Ballinskelligs and decided to stay. Two of the men died, the third fled, leaving Cessair so heart-broken that she too died soon.

I first became enamoured with Ballinskelligs when I spent the summer of 1966 at Dungeagan as part of an Irish summer school programme that my parents hoped would give me adequate Irish to pass the ‘Inter Cert’ (Junior Certificate) in 1967.

It was a beautiful summer, but I learned less Irish than they probably expected, and I have memories of endless, sun-filled afternoons swimming at the long sandy beach, reading Anne Frank’s Diary and Catcher in the Rye in the sand-dunes, watching the 1966 England v Germany World Cup final on the only television my cousins and I could find – a black and white television in a convent – and maturing as a teenage boy.

I have been back in Ballinskelligs three or four times since, enjoying walks along the long sandy beach, watching the Atlantic waves break against the sand, and walking out to the ruins of the old Augustinian priory, the old graveyard and the ruins of the MacCarthy castle that once guarded the entrance to Ballinskelligs Bay.

It is said the monks of Skellig Michael called Ballinskelligs ‘the nearest thing to heaven’ when they settled in the area, and they made this place a spiritual centre in early Christian Ireland. According to legend, the monks had travelled across Ireland to find ‘a paradise on earth.’

These early Irish monks wished to emulate the sacrifice and the pure withdrawal into a life of faith exemplified by Saint Anthony who went out into the Western Desert in Egypt.

Ireland’s remote and deserted offshore islands offered a parallel experience. The monastic ideal was to demonstrate an intense devotion by acts of self-exile: peregrination pro Dei amore or ‘pilgrimage for the love of God.’

The monastic settlement on Great Skellig is said to have been founded in the sixth century by Saint Fionán, a saint from south Kerry who founded Innisfallen Abbey. The site attracted the support of the members of the local Corcu Duibne dynasty in Kerry, and there the love of God was brought to a new level, for no other Irish monastery was built in such a challenging location.

Saint Finian is said to have founded both the monastic settlement on the Skelligs Islands and a church at Killemlagh in the sixth century. The ruins of two early churches can still be seen near the Skelligs Chocolates factory, a major attraction on the Skelligs Ring, and Saint Finian’s Bay, which offers some of the best views of the Skelligs Rock – although they are often shrouded in clouds and mist at this time of the year.

While the monks settled on the rocks of Skellig Michael, they found a winter home on the mainland in Ballinskelligs.

The first definite reference to monks on the Skelligs dates to the eighth century when the death of ‘Suibhni of Scelig’ is recorded. By the ninth century, the continuity and survival of life on the remote monastery was challenged with the arrival of the Vikings. The flights of steps on three sides of the island, which had provided the monks with landing for their boats in different sea conditions, now gave the invading Vikings the opportunity to attack the monastic site from different sides simultaneously.

The annals record: ‘In 824 AD, Scelec was plundered by the heathens and Étgal was carried off into captivity, and he died of hunger on their hands. There came a fleet from Luimnech [Limerick], in the south of Erinn, they plundered Skellig Michael, and Inishfallen and Disert Donnain and Cluain Mor, and they killed Rudgaile, son of Selbach, the anchorite. It was he whom the angel set loose twice, and the foreigners bound him twice each time.’

It is said that in 993 the Viking Olaf Trygvasson, later to become Olaf I, King of Norway, was intent on a raid of the monastery but instead was baptised a Christian by a Skellig hermit. His son, Olaf II, became the patron saint of Norway.

Increasing hardships, Viking raids and changing climatic conditions all contributed to the eventual decision of the monks to move from their monastic settlements on the Skelligs Rocks to the mainland, settling on an outcrop at the edge of Ballinskelligs Bay.

The Skelligs Rocks and the Abbey at Ballinskelligs shared one abbot, and the move was completed some time between the 11th and 13th century.

The dedication of the monastery to Saint Michael the Archangel appears to have happened some time before 1044, when the death of ‘Aedh of Scelic-Mhichíl’ is recorded. It is probable that this dedication to Saint Michael was celebrated by the building of Saint Michael’s church in the monastery.

The church of Saint Michael is mentioned by Giraldus Cambrensis in the late 12th century. His account of the miraculous supply of Communion wine for daily Mass in Saint Michael’s Church implies that the monastery had a large community at the time.

The Church was being reorganised along diocesan patterns in Ireland in the 12th and 13th centuries. These changes, and harsher winter storms, forced the monks to abandon the island.

By then, the monks on Skellig Michael had adopted the rule of Saint Augustine. Eventually, they left the island and settled on the mainland at Ballinskelligs, where they founded a new abbey. In the early 14th century, the Prior of the Augustinian Abbey at Ballinskelligs was referred to as the Prior de Rupe Michaelis, indicating that the island still formed an important part of the monastery at the time.

The ruins of the later Augustinian Priory date from ca 1210, and include a church, the prior’s house, cloisters and a refectory. A number of buildings, mainly from the 15th century, constitute the priory, including a rectangular church. The church and the other buildings were arranged around a central cloister, which had covered walkways for working and praying. Parts of the cloister and a large domestic hall still survive.

The abbey is one of a number of important spiritual sites dedicated to Saint Michael in this area. For visitors who come to Ballinskelligs as pilgrims or tourists, this remains a place of peace and prayer.

The names of the vicars and rectors of Killemlough are known only from the early or mid-15th century. Eugene O’Sullivan was appointed to the parish ca 1447 even though he had not been ordained. He was eventually forced out of the parish in 1459 because he had still not been ordained.

His successor, Florence O’Sullivan, also had to leave the parish after he was ‘said to have committed simony and to be guilty of fornication.’ Cornelius O’Mulchonere had to obtain a dispensation to be ordained for the parish because he was the illegitimate son of an Augustinian Canon Regular – perhaps a friar from the priory at Ballinskelligs.

In the Church of Ireland, the parish was known as Killemlough and sometimes as Killemlagh or Kyllemleac, and the parish included the offshore island of Puffin Island and the Skelligs Islands.

The Parish of Killemlough was held by the Treasurers of Ardfert from 1615 to 1839. They included William Steere, who became Bishop of Ardfert in 1628, James Bland, who became Dean of Ardfert in 1728, and William Cecil Pery, who became Bishop of Limerick. The Church of Ireland parish was united with Valentia in the 1870s.

Meanwhile, the connection between the monastic settlement on the Skelligs Rocks and the people of Ballinskelligs remained part of romantic memory and folklore.

In the late 1930s, JB Leslie recalled a custom from 60 years earlier known as the ‘Skelligs Lists.’ Doggerel poetry was issued early in Lent naming and pillorying couples who were supposed to be courting but who had not married before Shrove Tuesday.

‘Sometimes those lists were distinctively libellous and perhaps malicious, but were anonymous,’ Leslie notes.

Leslie quotes the phrase ‘send them to Skelligs,’ and suggests ‘that on the island (Skelligs) marriages might be celebrated, perhaps as in Gretna Green.’

‘Or could it have been,’ he asks, ‘that the keeping of Easter and Lent was different in Skelligs and on the mainland, so that marriage could be celebrated there after Shrove Tuesday?’

The monks from Skellig Michael settled at the priory in Ballinskelligs in the 13th century (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

John 1: 47-51 (NRSVA):

47 When Jesus saw Nathanael coming towards him, he said of him, ‘Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!’ 48 Nathanael asked him, ‘Where did you come to know me?’ Jesus answered, ‘I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.’ 49 Nathanael replied, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ 50 Jesus answered, ‘Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.’ 51 And he said to him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’

The ruins of the Augustinian priory, behind the beach at Ballinskelligs (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Prayer:

The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Flinging open the doors.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday by the Revd Anthony Gyu-Yong Shim, Diocese of Daejeon, Korea.

The USPG Prayer Diary today (29 September 2023, Saint Michael and All Angels) invites us to pray:

Almighty God, renew your spirit within us and your churches across the globe.

A lancet window in the old priory buildings in Ballinskelligs (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Collect:

Everlasting God,
you have ordained and constituted
the ministries of angels and mortals in a wonderful order:
grant that as your holy angels always serve you in heaven,
so, at your command,
they may help and defend us on earth;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Post Communion Prayer:

Lord of heaven,
in this eucharist you have brought us near
to an innumerable company of angels
and to the spirits of the saints made perfect:
as in this food of our earthly pilgrimage
we have shared their fellowship,
so may we come to share their joy in heaven;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The monk’s beehive at Saint Michael’s Well, behind the house where I stayed in my teens in Dungeagan in Ballinkselligs (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Yesterday’s Reflection

Continued Tomorrow

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

The beach at Ballinkskelligs, close to the monastic settlement founded by the monks from Great Skellig (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Anne Frank’s tree is difficult to find at the British Library after 25 years

The Anne Frank Tree planted at the British Library 25 years ago is now almost hidden from sight (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

I am from a generation that became engrossed in Anne Frank’s Diary just at the stage in our teenage years when we realised the importance and excitement of reading books.

Anne Frank was 13 when she was given her diary as a birthday present. I was 14 when I read her Diary from cover to cover on the beach, day after day, during a formative summer in Ballinskelligs in the Kerry Gaeltacht.

I have passed by the British Library a few times in recent weeks, walking between Euston and King’s Cross. On one of those afternoons – the sme afternoon I attended a family commemoration for my ‘cousin’, the Jewish historian Kevin Martin – I decided to look for Anne Frank's Tree, planted at the British Library 25 years ago on 12 June 1998.

I was disappointed to find that the tree itself is virtually impossible to see, lost almost entirely and half buried in a modern planting scheme that gives priority to the high brick walls surrounding each area of greenery.

Up to 10 years ago, there was a statue of Anne Frank by Doreen Kern (1999) in the forecourt of the British Library. Sadly, it was a victim of vandalism, and so, it was repaired in 2003 and moved to the lower ground area, near the cloakroom.

Although the tree is almost impossible to see, the plaque unveiled when it was planted remains for all to read:

Anne Frank's Tree

Planted on 12 June 1998

To commemorate Anne Frank and all the children killed in wars and conflict in this century.

‘It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions …

‘In the meantime, I must hold on to my ideals. Perhaps one day will come when I’ll be able to realise them.’

Anne Frank’s Diary, 15 July 1944

Planted by the British Library and the Anne Frank Educational Trust UK.

The plaque is now on a red brick wall in the British Library plaza. The tree is less easy to find! It is behind the wall that is about two-metre high that has a privet hedge along the edge.

A life-size bust of Anne Frank, sculpted by Doreen Kern for the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, was placed at the British Library on the 70th anniversary of Anne’s birth, 12 June 1999.

The former children’s poet laureate Michael Rosen wrote a poem specially for the planting of the Anne Frank Tree:

We hope that anyone who knows of this tree
will remember Anne Frank
We hope that anyone who knows of this tree
will remember how from her attic window
Anne Frank watched a tree growing outside
and was so moved and entranced
She couldn’t speak
We hope that anyone who knows of this tree
will remember how Anne Frank lost her life
We hope that anyone who knows of this tree
will never let such things happen again
We hope that anyone who knows of this tree
will have as much hope in their hearts and minds as Anne did.

Anne Frank’s Diary was first published as a book in Dutch in 1947. Since then, millions of people have read the thoughts and hopes of this one young girl and have been inspired by them.

Ann Frank was born in Frankfurt in 1929, and her family moved to Amsterdam when she was four after Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933.

Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, and the Frank family went into hiding in 1942. Anne wrote about receiving her diary as her birthday present that year: ‘I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.’

Anne Frank and her sister Margot and their mother Edith died in Bergen Belsen. Her father Otto Frank was the only member of her family to survive. When he returned to Amsterdam he found Anne’s diary, and decided to publish it so people would remember his daughter and the millions of other people who died in the Holocaust.

‘It’s difficult in times like these; ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.’

Shabbat Shalom

A plaque on a red-brick wall in the British Library plaza is a reminder of the Anne Frank Tree (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Praying in Ordinary Time with USPG and TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’: Friday 11 November 2022

‘I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me’ (TS Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’) … a solitary fisherman by the shore at Torcello (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Today, the Calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship remembers Saint Martin, Bishop of Tours, ca 316-397 (11 November 2022).

Saint Martin of Tours, who was born ca316 in Pannonia, in modern-day Hungary, Martin was a soldier in the Roman army and a Christian. He found the two rôles conflicted and, under the influence of Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers, he founded a monastery in Hilary’s diocese in the year 360, the first such foundation in Gaul. The religious house was a centre for missionary work in the local countryside, setting a new example where, previously, all Christian activity had been centred in cities and undertaken from the cathedral there. Martin was elected Bishop of Tours by popular acclaim in 372 and he continued his monastic lifestyle as a bishop, remaining in that ministry until he died on this day in 397.

Before this day gets busy, I am taking some time this morning for reading, prayer and reflection.

Throughout this week, I am reflecting in these ways:

1, One of the readings for the morning;

2, A reflection based on TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’ first published 100 years ago, in 1922;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary, ‘Pray with the World Church.’

‘What is the city over the mountains / Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air / Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal’ (TS Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’) … the Jerusalem Steps in Vienna (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Luke 17: 26-37 (NRSVA):

26 Just as it was in the days of Noah, so too it will be in the days of the Son of Man. 27 They were eating and drinking, and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed all of them. 28 Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot: they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, 29 but on the day that Lot left Sodom, it rained fire and sulphur from heaven and destroyed all of them 30 —it will be like that on the day that the Son of Man is revealed. 31 On that day, anyone on the housetop who has belongings in the house must not come down to take them away; and likewise anyone in the field must not turn back. 32 Remember Lot’s wife. 33 Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it. 34 I tell you, on that night there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. 35 There will be two women grinding meal together; one will be taken and the other left.’ 37 Then they asked him, ‘Where, Lord?’ He said to them, ‘Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.’

‘There is not even silence in the mountains / But dry sterile thunder without rain’ (TS Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’) … waiting for a storm on the beach at Ballinskelligs, Co Kerry (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Waste Land 5: ‘What the Thunder Said’’

TS Eliot published ‘The Waste Land’ in 1922, the same year as James Joyce published Ulysses. The poem includes well-known phrases such as ‘April is the cruellest month,’ and ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’ Recent studies see in ‘The Waste Land’ a description of Eliot’s pilgrimage from the Unitarianism of his childhood to his life-lasting Anglo-Catholicism.

‘The Waste Land’, which I am reflecting on throughout this week, was first published 100 years ago at the end in 1922. It is a masterpiece of modern literature and one of the greatest poems in the English language. Its opening lines are often quoted, even by people who have never read all five sections and 434 lines of the poem.

‘The Waste Land’ was published in Eliot’s The Criterion in October 1922. It was then published in the US in the November issue of The Dial, and was published in book form in December 1922.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, I am dipping in and out of the five sections of The Waste Land in this prayer diary each day this week. ‘The Waste Land’ is divided into five sections:

1, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair.

2, ‘A Game of Chess’, employs alternating narrations, in which vignettes of several characters address those themes experientially.

3, ‘The Fire Sermon’, offers a philosophical meditation in relation to the imagery of death and views of self-denial in juxtaposition, influenced by Augustine of Hippo and Eastern religions.

4, ‘Death by Water’, includes a brief lyrical petition.

5, ‘What the Thunder Said’, the culminating fifth section, concludes with an image of judgment.

In ‘The Waste Land,’ Eliot draws on diverse sources across the history of culture and literature, including Greek mythology, the Upanishads, Buddha’s sermons, the Bible, Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, Shakespeare’s plays, Wagner’s operas, the writings of Herman Hesse, Shackleton’s account of his Antarctic expedition, and even the colloquial dialogue he overheard between his first wife and their maid.

We are almost mid-way through November and is noticeable since the clocks went back how the days are drawing it and by late afternoon the evenings are turning to darkness. Advent approaches, with Christmas less than seven weeks, and so we soon prepare to move from reflection on our own mortality and penitence to the celebration of new life.

In this poem, Eliot provides a rich resource for understanding this passage of time as he contemplates his own passage from scepticism to belief, from cynicism to the embrace of divine mystery, drawing on these themes as he narrates his spiritual journey.

In the midst of the wasteland, we become aware that the Incarnation invites us to a new journey on the road, a new pilgrimage in life, accompanying Christ, as Eliot reminds us in Part 5:

Who is the third who walks beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you.

The experience of failure and disappointment is sometimes understood as a crisis of religious faith. In the Gospels, however, it is precisely at this moment that the Risen Christ appears to the disciples. Only as we deny ourselves, only in the awareness of our human limitations, Eliot insists, are we open to the ‘peace that surpasses understanding.’

The poem is seen by many as obscure, and its obscurity is heightened by shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures. Yet, despite this perceived obscurity, the poem is a touchstone of modern literature. Among its famous phrases are its last line, the mantra in Sanskrit:

Shantih, shantih, shantih.

Paula L Gallagher points out that in this fifth section of the poem, other major historical and cultural cities in addition to London are depicted as crumbling ‘falling towers’ and as ‘Unreal’: Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria and Vienna. Significantly, Rome is not included in the list, and so is symbolically excluded from the Waste Land. Rome, the ‘Eternal City,’ symbolises the grace of Christ and is a fortress of culture and tradition. Eliot’s recognition of the unreality of modernity and the role of Rome in history is another step on his path to conversion.

Gallagher argues that the beginning of Eliot’s conversion, as prefigured in the poem, begins with his recognition of the emptiness of modernity. The fact that Eliot is writing this poem about the barrenness of modernity and imaging it as a Waste Land shows that he sees through modernity to the reality of its sterility. ‘The image of the Waste Land represents the aridity of modernity, its lack of culture and tradition, and indeed its inability to allow culture and tradition to grow and flourish...’

She finds another prefiguration of Eliot’s conversion in the opening lines of the fifth section, ‘What the Thunder Said’, which contain allusions to Christ’s Passion:

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses

Professor Lawrence S Rainey of Yale University also recognises a connection between the phrases ‘silence in the gardens’ and ‘agony in stony places’ and the Garden of Gethsemane. [Lawrence S Rainey, The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p 116.]

Gallagher identifies the ‘Prison and Palace’ with Pontius Pilate’s house and prison, continuing the connection to Christ’s Passion. Christ has died – ‘He who was living is now dead’ – and his Resurrection is merely hinted at:

… reverberation
Of thunder of spring.

Thunder is preliminary to the rain, and springtime is the time of rebirth. The rain is the symbol of hope, that there could be a regenerative, spiritual rebirth. Water in the Waste Land is Christianity, and the Resurrection is the heart of Christianity. The Resurrection makes possible the rebirth of humanity into the life of grace through baptism.

In choosing these images to prepare the later presentation of Christ as the source of hope and regeneration, Eliot’s conversion is again prefigured, she writes.

In this section, Eliot also alludes to Christ’s post-Resurrection appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. In the poem, the people are journeying, continuing the conceit of a pilgrimage. The poet sees but does not know who the third person is: ‘Who is the third who walks always beside you?’ This is Christ, hidden from recognition, for he is

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded.

The climax of the poem comes with the arrival of the rain. The scene is a deserted church, inside which a ‘cock stood on the rooftree’, crowing. The cock traditionally heralds the dawn, which is another symbol of Christ. Thus the cock is announcing the Resurrection. Instantly the rain arrives:

Then a damp gust
Bringing rain.

The arrival of the rain is the apocalyptic moment, when the reanimation of modernity can finally come to fruition. The arrival of the rain, at the moment when the cock crows, connects Christ and his resurrection as the source of life (water) in the desert of the Waste Land. With the resurrection and with grace, modernity can recover its deadened culture and traditions; modernity can be regenerated and made fertile again. By connecting the resurrection imagery with the remedy for the barrenness of the Waste Land, Eliot recognises the crucial role that Christianity plays in society and in reality.

The Thunder, which is mentioned in the title of Section 5, speaks near the end of the poem, giving three commands that Eliot explains as give (data), sympathise (dayadhvam), and control (damyata). According to Rainey, giving means charity, sympathy means compassion, and control means self-control. These three commands, given in the voice of the thunder, are Eliot’s instructions for what to do when the rain, or the grace of the resurrection, comes to humanity. Living these commands will allow humanity to truly live a meaningful life, after being reanimated by the rain.

The last lines of the poem contain many images and allusions, which formally incarnate the collapse of the Waste Land. The unreal city is collapsing:

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down.

Modernity cannot sustain itself and it crumbles. Eliot knows that the Waste Land is empty and collapsing; for him the way to the Waste Land is ruined. The next line, from Dante’s Purgatorio – ‘Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina’ (‘Then he vanished into the fire that refines them’) – indicates that Eliot himself has chosen to leave the Waste Land and to journey towards Purgatory and its purification.

The poem ends with an offering of hope. The last line is:

Shantih shantih shantih.

According to Eliot’s footnote, this means ‘the Peace which passeth understanding.’ Rainey notes that this line also alludes to Philippians 4: 7, ‘And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.’ And so, the journey or pilgrimage through the Waste Land of modernity finds its true end with the arrival of rain and grace, and concludes with the peace of God. The poem ends on a note of hope and the possibility of order emerging from the madness and disorder of modernity.

‘The Waste Land’ read by Robert Speaight, Argo Records cover by Olga Lehmann

V. What the Thunder said by TS Eliot

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
– But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon – O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

‘… the limp leaves / Waited for rain, while the black clouds / Gathered far distant’ (TS Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’) … waiting for a storm in Stony Stratford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Today’s Prayer (Friday 11 November 2022, Feast of St Martin of Tours):

The Collect:

God all powerful,
who called Martin from the armies of this world
to be a faithful soldier of Christ:
give us grace to follow him
in his love and compassion for the needy,
and enable your Church to claim for all people
their inheritance as children of God;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Post Communion Prayer:

God, shepherd of your people,
whose servant Martin revealed the loving service of Christ
in his ministry as a pastor of your people:
by this eucharist in which we share
awaken within us the love of Christ
and keep us faithful to our Christian calling;
through him who laid down his life for us,
but is alive and reigns with you, now and for ever.

The theme in the USPG Prayer Diary this week is ‘A New Commandment.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday by Sue Claydon, chair of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship.

The USPG Prayer Diary invites us to pray today in these words:

Today we celebrate the feast of Saint Martin of Tours, we give thanks for his bravery in refusing to fight and instead following his faith.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

‘If there were water / And no rock / If there were rock / And also water’ (TS Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’) … Acqua Alta in Saint Mark’s Square, Venice (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Reading:

TS Eliot, The Complete Poems & Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969).
Steve Ellis, TS Eliot, A guide for the perplexed London: Continuum, 2009).
A Lee Fjordbotten, ‘Liturgical influences of Anglo-Catholicism on ‘The Waste Land’ and other works by TS Eliot,’ Fordham University, 1999.
Paula L Gallagher, ‘The Prefiguration of TS Eliot’s conversion in ‘The Waste Land’,’ Saint Austin Review (January/February 2012), pp 19-20).
BC Southam, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of TS Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1968).
Barry Spurr, ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’ TS Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010).
George Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to TS Eliot, a poem-by-poem analysis (London: Thames and Hudson, 2nd ed, 1967).

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

‘What is the city over the mountains / Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air / Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal’ (TS Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’) … one in a series of paintings of Jerusalem by Alfred Daniels in Church House, Kidlington (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

‘You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending’

Saint Michael’s Victory over the Devil, the 1958 bronze sculpture by Jacob Epstein at Coventry Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

The Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels,

Wednesday 29 September 2021

11 am.: Festal Eucharist, Saint Mary’s Church, Askeaton.

The Readings: Genesis 28: 10-17; Psalm 103: 19-22; Revelation 12: 7-12; John 1: 47-51.

Saint Finian’s Bay, near Ballinskelligs, Co Kerry, with Skellig Michael in the distance (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

May I speak to you in the name of God, + Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen

Saint Michael is closely associated with churches in these dioceses, including churches in Pery Square, Limerick, Killorglin and Waterville in Co Kerry, and, of course, the monastic settlement on the Skelligs Rocks, one of the most popular tourist sites in this part of Ireland.

Culturally, the feast day of Saint Michael and All Angels has been an important day for the Church: the beginning of terms, the end of the harvest season, the settling of accounts.

It is the beginning of autumn, and as children in West Waterford we were told that Michaelmas Day is the last day for picking blackberries. As I grew up, I realised that this is a superstition shared across the islands, from Achill to Lichfield, from Wexford to Essex and Cambridge.

In his poem ‘Trebetherick,’ John Betjeman seems to link ripening blackberries and the closing in of the autumn days with old age and the approach of death:

Thick with sloe and blackberry, uneven in the light,
Lonely round the hedge, the heavy meadow was remote,
The oldest part of Cornwall was the wood as black as night,
And the pheasant and the rabbit lay torn open at the throat.

But the former poet laureate had a more benign view of blackberries on a visit to the Isle of Man, when he described ‘wandering down your late-September lanes when dew-hung cobwebs glisten in the gorse and blackberries shine, waiting to be picked.’

In his poem ‘At the chiming of light upon sleep,’ first drafted on this day 75 years ago (29 September 1946), the poet Philip Larkin links Michaelmas and a lost paradise with chances and opportunities he failed to take in his youth.

This is a day to allow the mind to wander back to childhood memories, and a time for contemplation and unstructured prayers, giving thanks for the beauty of creation.

September is also the beginning of the Church Year in the Orthodox tradition, so this too is a day to think about and to give thanks for beginnings and ends, for starting and ending, for openings and closings, for memories and even for forgetfulness.

In John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, Michael commands the army of angels loyal to God against the rebel forces of Satan. One of the best-known sculptures by Sir Jacob Epstein is Saint Michael’s Victory over the Devil at Coventry Cathedral.

Yet Michael is mentioned by name in the Bible only in the Book of Daniel, the Epistle of Jude and in the Book of Revelation (Daniel 10: 13, 21, 12: 1; Jude 9; Revelation 12: 7-9; see also Revelation 20: 1-3).

In Jewish tradition, Rabbinic lore and the Midrash made Michael the special patron of Adam, the rescuer of Abraham, Lot and Jacob, the teacher of Moses; Michael tried to prevent Israel from being led into captivity, to save the Temple from destruction, and to protect Esther, whose story we heard about on Sunday (26 September 2021).

In the early Church, Michael was associated with the care of the sick, an angelic healer and heavenly physician. Saint Basil the Great and other Greek fathers placed Michael over all the angels and so called him ‘archangel.’ The Orthodox Church gave him the title of ‘Supreme Commander of the Heavenly Hosts’ (ἀρχιστράτηγος, archistrategos).

In all our imagery, in all our poetry, Saint Michael is seen as crushing or slaying Satan, often Satan as a dragon.

Our ideas of dragons are also culturally conditioned. For the Chinese, dragons symbolise gift and blessing, and represent the majesty of the imperial household.

In most European languages, the word for a dragon is derived from the same Greek word used for a serpent. In European folklore and mythology, legendary dragons have symbolised danger and evil. We are warned in the Greek classics against sowing dragon’s teeth.

Most of us know that throughout life we are going to meet our own dragons, and how they are going to ensnare us if we do not face them and slay them.

During the Blitz in World War II, the poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) spent some of his late teen and early adult years with his father’s family, close to Saint Michael’s Church in Lichfield, where generations of the Larkin family are buried. There, on the north wall of the church, in a large, looming sculpted image, Saint Michael is crushing the dragon under his feet.

Memories of this image and this churchyard may have inspired the imagery in at least two poems written by Larkin some years later. In his poem ‘At the chiming of light upon sleep’, first drafted on this day 75 years ago [29 September 1946], Larkin links Michaelmas and a lost paradise with chances and opportunities he failed to take in his youth.

In his poem ‘To Failure,’ written a year before he moved to Belfast, Larkin realises that failure does not come ‘dramatically, with dragons / that rear up with my life between their paws.’ Failure comes with more subtlety in those wasted opportunities and lost chances.

Throughout life, we find we have your own dragons to slay. We must learn to know our dragons. And we need to pay heed to the opportunities in life that pass far too quickly, to take the opportunities we are presented with, like Nathanael in our Gospel reading, waiting beneath the fig tree, preparing for the next stage in life, the call to follow Christ.

There may be few dramatic conflicts with our inner dragons in daily life. But in time, we may regret not paying attention to the little opportunities, the minor details of life. Then we do not notice the changes, the days passing more quickly, and the years passing by.

Philip Larkin writes:

It is these sunless afternoons, I find,
Install you at my elbow like a bore.
The chestnut trees are caked with silence. I’m
Aware the days pass quicker than before,
Smell staler too. And once they fall behind
They look like ruin. (You have been here some time.)

Sitting under his tree, Nathanael was aware of the opportunities and did not allow them to pass him by. And when we seize these opportunities, we may find ourselves prepared to ‘see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man’ (John 1: 51).

And so, may all we think, say and do be to the praise, honour and glory of God, + Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

In the Palace of Saint Michael and Saint George in Corfu (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

John 1: 47-51 (NRSVA):

47 When Jesus saw Nathanael coming towards him, he said of him, ‘Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!’ 48 Nathanael asked him, ‘Where did you come to know me?’ Jesus answered, ‘I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.’ 49 Nathanael replied, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ 50 Jesus answered, ‘Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.’ 51 And he said to him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’

‘There was a ladder … reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it’ (Genesis 28: 12) … ‘you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending’ (John 1: 51) … ascending and descending angels on a frosted-glass door in Coventry Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Liturgical colour: White

Penitential Kyries:

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.
Lord, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.

Woe is me, for I am lost;
I am a person of unclean lips.
Christ, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.

Your guilt is taken away,
And your sin is forgiven.
Lord, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.

The Collect:

Everlasting God,
you have ordained and constituted the ministries
of angels and mortals in a wonderful order:
Grant that as your holy angels always serve you in heaven,
so, at your command,
they may help and defend us on earth;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Introduction to the Peace:

Hear again the song of angels:
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace. (Luke 2: 14)

Post-Communion Prayer:

Lord of heaven,
in this Eucharist you have brought us near
to an innumerable company of angels
and to the spirits of the saints made perfect.
As in this food of our earthly pilgrimage
we have shared their fellowship,
so may we come to share their joy in heaven;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Blessing:

The God of all creation
guard you by his angels,
and grant you the citizenship of heaven:

Saint Michael slaying the Dragon, an image at Saint Michael’s Church, Lichfield … may have inspired at least one poem by Philip Larkin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Hymns:

346, Angel voices, ever singing (CD 21)
332, Come let us join our cheerful song (CD 20)

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



Material from the Book of Common Prayer is copyright © 2004, Representative Body of the Church of Ireland.