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The Chapel at Mount Anville, Lolín Menéndez rscj
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This is a reflection by an Irish playwright and poet Aidan Mathews, past pupil of Mt Anville. Mt Anville past pupils organised a day of celebration in April 2008 to thank the Society for its work there 1853-2007.
When I was little I loved this chapel. I loved its smell and its silence. They filled me with that happy shyness which is sometimes the origin of prayer or at any rate the beginning of prayerfulness. I liked whoever lived here very much. And the odour of the sanctuary and the choir-stalls has stayed in my scent memory for the restless rest of my life. Even at six and seven, you see, as the sisters of the Sacred Heart were teaching me to read and to write, they were also showing me how to come and see that in later years I might go and tell the same dangerous story which is that God has given us his word that he adores us and is only dying to prove it.
In October 1962, at the start of the conker season when the chestnuts fruited, I sat in a classroom with a green blackboard as the Hebrew letters in my reader began to form English sentences for the first time. Away in the eternal city of Rome, many hundreds of elderly men, all of whom were wearing the same ridiculous bonnets as the priests of Jupiter two thousand years before them, processed as bishops through Kodak flash photography into the basilica of the Vatican. A Pope who was as fat and wrinkled as a new-born baby had called a council in the hope that the word might be made fresh again. At the very same instant on the other side of the planet, the two contending warlords of the superpowers, two enemies with the same initial, Kennedy and Khrushchev, were preparing an apocalypse in a place called Cuba. I knew this because my father had come home early in his tuxedo from a party to put me on his lap half-way up the stairs and tell me that the world might end at any moment. I imagine the whole Mount Anville community, Mother Power and all the other powerful mothers in the convent, kept vigil here in this sacred space during that extraordinary fortnight of incense and plutonium, of Christ and Caesar, of terror and euphoria, praying intently and relentlessly before returning to correct copybooks and chart the necessary Montessori lesson-plans for the following morning.
Because the sisters of the Sacred Heart told me their dangerous story so well, I have come slowly to understand that the scenario I sketch of the Fall of October 1962, so far from being exceptional, is the wave-form of the ordinary world as well. Urgency and emergency are the norm. From day to day and from darkness to darkness, it is always a choice for each and every one of us between Egypt and Exodus, between cannibalism and communion, between the fist and the fingertip, between power and authority, between the Cuban missile crisis and the second Vatican council. At every moment of our mortal existence, in the midst of our fragile and afflicted lives, our break-ups, our breakdowns, our breakthroughs, we are called by the Lord of life to rise up from the dead again and again, to resume the adventure of our human mundaneness, to reach for a new vitality beyond all violence; to be imperfect, to persist, to perish and Passover, to appear again in a plenary form as one of God’s weaknesses. Sacred Heart sisters have witnessed to this in wonderful ways worldwide, and their testimony is true. I am only one of a multitude they have touched who has taken that testimony to heart.
The resurrection is the life and death of Jesus from the point of view of God. Because they have accompanied him on his way to Jerusalem and looked after him and ministered to him, the members of the Society of the Sacred Heart are entering inevitably into their own Passion Narrative, their own paschal eclipse, which can be crucifying. It may seem to some of them at times that the kindling has dwindled and the light is failing fast. Night vision is hard; night terrors are harder. If a vocation is a calling, then a calling can become a cry, even a cry from a cross. But the heart is sacred precisely because it can be broken. Heart-beat and heart-break, grief and grace, belong together in the mystery of love. On this Vocation Sunday, in the stillness and the silence of this sanctified spot, when each of us is invited to find a voice again, to speak up and to speak out, to utter the word and flesh it out under the shining future, that is truly the beating heart of the dangerous story.
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