St. Bronach’s Day Lecture Delivered by President McAleese for St. Bronach’s School Of Celtic Studies
Christian Renewal Centre, Rostrevor, 4th April, 2003
I need no enticement to return home to Rostrevor as you know but I am grateful for the opportunity to join in this annual commemoration of St. Bronach. Her name is part of the warp and weft of this community, spoken every time we mention Kilbroney (Bronach’s church in Irish), heard in the names of the many children of the area who are still called after her and remembered with curiosity by all who know the story of Bronach’s legendary bell. I hope St. Bronach will forgive us for commemorating her feast a couple of days behind schedule and I also hope she might forgive the McAleese family a less than comfortable role one of them played in silencing her famous bell for the second time in its fifteen hundred year history.
Most of you here will know the story of how Bronach’s bell lay hidden for centuries in an oak tree, its sound heard only in times of storms, which greatly added of course to its legend and its mystery. By the time the bell was found in 1885 it had already fallen into silence as its tongue had long since disintegrated but it found a new voice as the altar bell in our local Catholic Church where generations of altar boys were its custodians. It was struck with a sizeable stick and over the years presumably to protect the bell, the end of the stick had been covered in soft cushioning material. If its ring was somewhat muted no one seemed to take objection until my son Justin became an altar boy. My memory of his first Mass was of him taking six good paces back and then making a flying assault on the bell with all the strength and velocity he could muster. It certainly produced a noticeable increase in volume. But shortly after the bell was decommissioned and installed behind a screen to be looked at but no longer heard or hammered by over enthusiastic altar-servers!
That bell is an intriguing link between our modern times and those far off days of Bronach when Gaelic Ireland was a fertile garden of christian mysticism and spirituality. It was a time when many of the country’s finest thinkers both male and female achieved a level of almost transcendent piety, a prayer-centred time when men and women of faith lived their lives with one foot in this world and one foot in the next but a time that was to fade into darkness and neglect.
We know so little about St. Bronach herself, that it is little short of miraculous that her name has been carried like a sacred treasure in the hearts of successive generations. The fact that it has is indicative of the profound effect she had on the people of this area. We know she was an important and revered mystic. Was she the same Bronach who founded the first Irish convent at Clonbroney in Longford, the same Bronach who was daughter of Milcho who held Patrick captive. Are the Farrells of Longford who are so proud of Clonbroney’s Bronach, related to the Farrels of Rostrevor among whom is one who has written of Bronach in song? There are so many things about Bronach that will forever be frustratingly unknown to us but what we do know is that her name Bronach - meaning sorrowful in the Irish language, was to be prophetic.
The golden era of rich and profound spirituality she had known and which inspired our neighbours throughout Europe, faded under the onslaught of civil disturbances which began with the Viking raids and which seem to have been a feature of Irish life regularly since. The fact that those conflicts of more recent centuries and even more recent years have been between Christians has made it hard for us to make ourselves credible as a centre of spiritual gravity in the world. We became a sorrowful mess. Yet Bronach offers a shared landscape to all who share this island, a space in which we can, if we try, find again that link of humility between Creator and created, that link of curiosity about our world which was so absorbing and fascinating that it utterly distracted the human spirit from pettiness and spite, lifting it to heights of joy and wisdom.
Now would be a good time to reconnect with the inspiration that drove Bronach. The thirst our ancestors had for the spiritual enrichment, which Christianity brought, transformed this island forever. Something about the message of Jesus attracted these pagan people so totally that the transition was relatively seamless and they became devout Celtic Christians as noted for their serenity as their self-confidence and strength.
We see their self-confidence in the directness of their prayer. We see their strength, in their determination to live lives far from the comforts of peace and plenty in monastic communities on the very edge of the world. These Celtic Christians saw the presence of their Creator in everything around them including their fellow and sister human beings. They saw in each, the image of God, the hand of God, no matter how distorted by the world, the flesh and the devil. They studied the Scriptures deeply. Through daily prayer, they thanked and praised God. Through the exercise of a testing and practical charity, they strove for a spiritual perfection. They followed the seasons seeking to find harmony between the natural and spiritual realms. They set out in frail boats to take their insight and message across the then known world. Their reputation for contemplation, scholarship and hospitality earned them that epithet in whose reflected glory we still bask - island of Saints and Scholars. They are today, exacting and challenging and relevant role models for an Ireland, which has skewed and abused the gospel commandment to love one another so badly. They are particularly good role models for a people struggling to build a new peace out of the fragments of a bitterly divided past. Bronach is mother to all of us no matter how different we believe ourselves to be from one another. She is a loving and tolerant mother to all of us, willing us on to surrender the brutal vanities of difference, to replace them with joy and respect in diversity.
Seamus Heaney’s ‘Cure at Troy’ reminds us that:
“Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and they get hard.”
We have all seen the devastating downstream consequences of hardened hearts. We still wait to see the consequences of a world driven by unconditional love and forgiveness. Do we wait as cynical spectators or do we roll up our sleeves and commit to making it our life’s work as Bronach did?
Are we still a spiritually hungry and deep thinking people? Are we capable of building the trust and the friendship on which a stable peace can rest? Are we capable of “building to fill the centuries arrears” to quote John Hewitt’s memorable lines? Only time will tell but I believe and believe passionately that we are. Protestant and Catholic, nationalist and unionist, cynic and despairing, wounded and fearful, I believe we have good hearts. Those hearts are capable of great softness, the kind of softness that reconfigures history and contradicts all the odds - precisely as Christ himself did, precisely as Bronach did. It costs and it takes courage and it takes the daily grind of lived commitment, not in monasteries like Bronach but in our homes, workplaces, streets and communities, making of them places where her spirit dwells.
Two millennia after Christ, a millennium and a half after Bronach, we may know very little of her life or his but we know enough to recognise the uncompromising call to goodness, to healing, to reconciliation, to unselfishness, to the values that build us up humanly and make life worth living.
This thing called peace that we are building may be fragile, intangible and difficult to describe. But where it is absent there is misery, as we know to our cost. Around the world its absence is wreaking havoc with lives that could be happy and fulfilled. In our own time its absence has given us too many victims, too many tears. The road to peace ahead of us is rocky and uncharted. We are asked to take that road in the company of people whom we may distrust, dislike, fear and regard as enemies.
Some have taken it long since and for all its risks and difficulties they stand ahead of us, champions of Christian love, encouraging the dilatory and the nervous to take the chance to come and see the landscape of hope they can see from where they now are. They have made the friendships others are scared of. They have been enriched by the very otherness of those others, blessed in their support to one another, humbled by the infinite mystery of creation itself which makes each of us utterly unique and utterly loved by our shared Creator.
We should be eternally grateful to all those champions, like those who founded this Christian Renewal Centre in the mid-seventies when unity among Christians was the thing we were least renowned for. Here was a powerful sign of contradiction building on a tradition of prayer and resolute fidelity to the gospel that goes back to Bronach and to Patrick. Here was an uncompromising statement that the future will belong to the softened hearts. It will be crafted by them. It will be made by hands linked in friendship not lifted in hate.
Can St. Bronach help us to find the courage to rise above the paralysis of blame and anger and offer each other the gift of friendship and trust? We certainly need all the help we can get. Some day I hope her bell will toll again over an Ireland where differences of faith, politics and gender have ceased to be outrageous cul-de-sacs where opportunities are lost or still-born, an Ireland of good neighbours, renowned for the easy way in which they build bridges to each other.
My family came to Rostrevor as strangers many years ago. We had been traumatised by the hatred and violence that had driven us from our former home in Belfast. My youngest brother Clement then aged five summed it up when after a few weeks here he declared - “you know I am a very happy boy now”.
The place that Bronach chose is still a very special place with a great tradition of fidelity to her vision for God’s family. From generation to generation, the baton of stewardship of her name and her values have been carefully handed down. We are a blessed generation, the first for a very long time to be able to look to the future with real hope and an appetite for peace. May St. Bronach guard and guide our steps. May she give us energy when we falter and inspire us to give the kind of leadership she gave all those centuries ago. One life, lived well does make a difference. We have a chance to take the sorrow out of Bronach’s name and make it a byword for loving trust and friendship.
Once again, my thanks to you for your kind invitation and for your wonderful warm and generous welcome to me. I have enjoyed this evening and I hope I can say, in the words of prayer of the early Celtic church that "I will travel to my next place in the presence of the angels of protection".