My first introduction to the Poor Clares: I knew of my grandmother going to visit the Poor Clares in Drumshanbo, because she lived not too far from Drumshanbo. I knew that it was a place that very often women went to when times were tough. For her generation the experience would have been of small peasant rural families, farmers, virtually all of whose children emigrated — in the case of my father, the oldest of her children, emigrating at 14. I think of the lost-ness of those women, and of those husbands too, men who found it very difficult to articulate their lost-ness. But they could do it through the grille in Drumshanbo because there was some kind of bond there that helped them to face into what they found difficult to face. My next experience is of going with my own mother to the Poor Clares in Cliftonville Road, in Belfast. Again over the ups and downs of raising children, in particular children with a handicap and children with illnesses, you knew you could trot to the hospital on the one hand, but on the other hand, there was always the extra insurance policy! You have been the people to whom they went, no matter what doctors were saying. There was always the gap, and you were the people who helped them to fill that gap, and you filled it for them with hope and with faith.

Not always was the news good, and very often you had to accompany people on a life’s journey which was not going to have a good or a happy outcome. I think of the thousands of mothers who came to the Cliftonville Road all during the Troubles, worried about their children, about their sons, about the paramilitaries, and dealing with bereavements through violence, and all the ups and downs that people experience in marriages and relationships, in the workplace, with drugs, with alcoholism. I think of the bell that rings so constantly in Ennis as men and women quietly facing into the most awful problems in their lives seek company on their life’s journey. There’s a lovely old Irish proverb that says: “Giorraíonn beirt bóthar!” — “Two shorten the road!” The truth of the matter is, and you know it better than anybody from your own life’s experience, is that you cannot go another person’s journey in life for them. But we can go with them, and being with them is a very, very important thing. To be able to offer somebody company on their life’s journey is an important thing.

A Hope-filled Innocence

There is no place better than in the contemplative convent to feel the pulse of what is going on outside. Often when I used go and see Mother Paschal in the Cliftonville Road, I would be shocked that she would know things that nobody else knew, she had it. I tell you that the S.A.S. and every single government intelligence service in the country know nothing about intelligence-gathering by comparison with the Poor Clares! It is the constant stream of people through the door, they bring the world in, it gets absorbed there. There is nothing that you are shocked by for you have probably heard it all, ten times, twenty times, a hundred times. So you live in a world of great hope, and a kind of a hope-filled innocence. It is an innocent world but not a naïve world. You are very knowledgeable about the world and about the capacity of the world to carry a lot of evil. But you are able to wrap that in the firm belief of our capacity to heal one another, to forgive, to be reconciled, and importantly to change. And these are important messages particularly in this moment when we need people committed to the work of healing, no matter how difficult a journey it is, no matter how fraught that journey is, no matter how long it is going to take. I know that you are going to play a very important role in that journey of healing, precisely because you have accompanied so many people in difficult life situations.

The commitment to contemplative life, in the face of what is really a very busy, in-your-face world, full of noise, full of tumult, is such a difficult journey not well understood by that mad busy world. But actually somewhere deep inside people it is deeply respected. One of the ironies I think, and maybe also one of the things that came out of the experience of the new convent in Belfast, was the realisation that a pragmatic world, a hard-nosed pragmatic world, would have said: “Why bother build a brand new convent, sure the numbers are going down, why would you bother?” But the people reacted by saying: “Actually we are going to bother, because it matters. It actually matters because economics is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about a perceived need that we think is met and only met by this form of life.”

One of the great things for me, as I look at the Poor Clares, is — here are women who have no source of income but that which is given to them, that which is given out of charity. And the fact is that it is given, it is replenished in each generation and continues to be given is such an important vindication of the work that you do. I think very many people were shocked at the level of response to the collection for the new convent in Belfast. It certainly opened up the eyes of some of the bishops and many other people to realise how utterly loved the Poor Clares are because the response was quite phenomenal. There had never been anything like it in the history of the diocese.

Charism of Clare

It is important to tell you how even our busy world needs people who make space for abiding peace and for quiet contemplation, and especially for making time for one another, looking out for one another when life brings its overwhelming sorrows. You have such an experience of dealing with that realm of life’s sorrows. There are lots of experts around who will know pockets of the overwhelming sorrows that people can endure in life, but very few people know them in the way you do because all of them come to your door so you have an overview of life that equips you so well to help where people are wounded and their lives are fragmented. It is good that you are there, they seek you quietly. They are not going to go on the Joe Duffy Show and say: “You know I am stuck in a waiting room in the Poor Clares and there’s a queue of 20 in front of me. What is Mary Harney going to do about that?” It is not going to happen! A pity in some ways! You are always there for them; they will go to you quietly and you will speak to them quietly, and, as I say, it will not be charted up anywhere except in the great chart of human goodness.

You Poor Clares have an unbroken line of service that goes way back to the 13th century. And so we know that for each generation of Poor Clares, wherever in the world you have gathered over those centuries, you faced into that world. You faced into it with one foot very firmly in that world, whatever that world’s demands were, and the other foot very firmly planted in the world of Clare, in the world of Christ. You try to bring the best of the charism of Clare to bear on the world around you; the active world around you has been a very important part of the charism of Clare and the experience of the Poor Clares over those years.

You know that when Clare and Francis back in their day made their decisions, they were not thinking eight hundred years down the line. We deal with what is around us to take the next steps that help us to get from this present moment to the next present moment safely. Importantly, you do so with the charism of Clare ferociously at work in and through your lives. I know that in this assembly you seek guidance, you seek to bring your individual wisdom, and your collective wisdom, to important deliberations. I am sure that what you come up with will be sure-footed and rooted in goodness. I hope that the decisions that you make and the insights that you come up with will help this Federation to flourish, but more importantly, in the broader way, help the Poor Clares to flourish through the next fifty years.

The Federation is composed of the seven monasteries in Ireland: Galway, Dublin, Belfast, Carlow, Cork, Ennis, Drumshanbo, and one monastery in Glasgow, Scotland, which was founded by the Cork Community in 1952. Each monastery retains its own identity and autonomy.