Episode 4 City of Faith

I think there is something about Armagh as a place of ancient history

that gives it a very, very special atmosphere.

So you have the whole Celtic history here,

and then you have the Ireland of saints and scholars.

There's accretions of history in this place,

and I think it has a very, very special atmosphere because of that.

Even from when I was a child, I loved this city

because I felt it was a very sacred place to live.

And I love it when visitors come and say, "Wow! What a place!"

The discipline of sitting down and of saying our word,

our mantra, this is a difficult thing to understand when you begin.

We want to follow our thoughts, to come to new insights.

But when you meditate, you must transcend all thoughts

and be silent, still and humble in the depths of your own being.

Since 2007, I've been working part-time

as director of the Centre for Celtic Spirituality here in Armagh,

and we're now based at The Navan Centre,

which is about three miles out of the city.

-ALL:

-May this group be a true spiritual home for the seeker...

'It was envisaged, at the very start, to be an inter-church

'ministry because Celtic spirituality is bigger than any one denomination.

'Because it's pre-Reformation, it's pre-East/West split,

'it's looking right back at the very first church in these islands.'

No matter what denomination you belong to,

if you trace your roots back, I would say, Celtic spirituality

or Celtic Christianity, is the roots for us all.

THEY SING: "The Lord Is My Shepherd"

I think sometimes the preaching ministry is always associated

with sermons, and with preaching from a pulpit

and with theology, when actually what speaks louder

than anything is life, it's people's lives.

When you look at the life of Christ,

he wasn't preaching three-point sermons.

He drew his stories out of the ordinary life of people.

Ultimately, all of us have a vocation to live,

and, to me, ultimately that vocation is to become who you are,

to become yourself, to celebrate the person that God has made you.

And I think those are the things that are most important,

rather than preaching long sermons.

PREACHER SAYS PRAYER

I think, for us all, as the laity within the church,

we are the church, we have a huge role to play in the church.

We have a role in the office of Christ to proclaim a faith

to live our faith out daily,

and to share the good news of Christ with everyone.

Faith is in your heart.

It's something that I could not live without today.

And I struggle in my head to think how I lived without it for so long.

When your faith is very strong, you always have moments of doubt,

you always have moments of pain, just like our Lord had in Gethsemane.

One thing that we have to realise is that God knows a lot more than us

and he's in control, we're not.

Knowing, really, that I'm not alone, that Jesus and my holy mother

are with me day and night is the thing that keeps me going today.

I mean, life would be very empty if there was nothing after it.

If we said that it finishes and it ends here,

what was the point of it in the first place?

I can't live thinking that this is the be-all and the end-all of everything.

Everybody believes, nobody wants to believe that their loved one's

going to be taken to a graveyard, put in a grave and that's it, end of story.

Especially in Ireland, most people want to believe that, in some form

or other, that they'll meet up with this person again in the next life.

Some people that would be a long time in the funeral business,

you would often hear them saying that it's not a job, it's vocational.

I always had an interest in it.

Now what that interest is, I don't know,

would it be similar to what a priest would get a calling?

I really don't know.

Personally, I get a lot of satisfaction because you deal

with death, you deal with the deceased,

but you mostly deal with the living.

Through that, I see that people of faith, good strong faith,

accept that this is not really the end, but the beginning.

Like most Catholics in Ireland, your faith basically begins at home.

My father, the old thing with him years ago was

when everybody was bedded down at night,

the next minute the bedroom door opened and you got this skite of water

out over the top of you, he blessed everybody in the house at night.

And then later on in life, there comes then the stage of the teenage years,

and, as far as I was concerned, me and God were done with

because I was doomed anyway. That's the way I felt.

And then I got to a stage in my life where

I had to do something about the problem that had come about.

Alcoholism or whatever.

I was 22 years old then.

I quit drinking and I started my spiritual route.

My mother would have been a very strong woman, very strong faith.

Throughout many crises in her own life, faith would have helped her through.

Myself and my brother, my father,

would have somewhat shied away from it.

Up until 2008, it was maybe 15, 20 years

since I would have been at Mass or went to chapel.

I suppose in the run-up to 2008, the world was a wonderful place.

Everything in my life would have been going very well.

But the financial collapse, and because of some personal

health issues, I found I had hit,

I would say, emotionally rock bottom,

and I found myself in a very difficult place.

I was in London. My company was up for an award.

And standing alone in London,

just before heading to the awards later on that evening, I suddenly

found myself probably the lowest, probably as low as you could get.

I needed to find somewhere quiet,

somewhere where I could gather my thoughts,

and the only place that I could think of at that time

that was quiet and in the middle of London

was probably going to be a church or a chapel.

And, lo and behold, after 20 years away from the church,

here I was running back to it.

I got to Westminster Cathedral and the door closed behind me,

complete silence, and I looked over at the right-hand side

and I could see a line of people.

I couldn't figure out why everybody was queuing up.

And then I walked over and it dawned on me

that they were queuing for confession.

I got very emotional when I joined the queue, and I must have been

very emotional because people kept letting me skip the queue.

They must've thought I had a lot to tell the priest.

I obviously told the priest how long I'd been away from the church,

and it was the next four words that he said that changed my life,

and that was, "Welcome back, my son."

It's very hard to describe how I felt at that moment,

but I felt as if the weight of the world had lifted off my shoulders.

I phoned my mother and my mother had always been on to me for years

to keep going to a place called Medjugorje,

which, of course, I rebuked, but I found myself saying to her

that I had to get to Medjugorje quick.

She said she'd phone me back and she phoned me back within the hour,

and she told me that I was on the next flight out.

I landed in Medjugorje thinking to myself, "What am I doing here?"

Exceptionally nervous about it, exceptionally worried about it,

and towards the end of the first day,

I met a wonderful guy from Belfast called Sean Ellis.

Sean said to me, he says, "Come with me."

He says, "I'll show you the real Medjugorje."

For me, it was a whole different experience about faith...

..a very one-to-one experience, meeting different priests,

and other men, I would say, like myself,

who were there for all sorts of different reasons.

You meet so many people there that have so many painful stories

to tell you, that have had lives that have been shattered.

To sit and listen to the outpouring of sadness from them people,

and of grief, but also to listen to the outpouring of faith,

as to why they're actually there, and how they have got their lives

back together after different tragedies, really is eye-opening.

Throughout the rest of the week, I suddenly come to realise that

I didn't have problems in my life.

All I had was really just little puzzles that I had to solve.

For me, it was a journey that every day got better and better

until the last day I was here, when I didn't actually want to go home.

So in the space of seven days,

I changed from basically being a non-believer to not wanting to leave.

I think all of us are heavily influenced by parents and school

and church, more than we realise when we reflect back on it in later years.

All of that is the kind of parameter of your religious identity.

I was lucky enough to be brought up in a really good Christian home.

We were sort of in the middle of nowhere. There were four of us children,

and we had a nice childhood, running about the fields and just being part

of nature, and that was a very strong influence on me as well, I think.

One of the things about Celtic spirituality is that

the salvation that Christ came to bring is not just about human beings,

so it's about the whole Earth,

the whole of creation singing the glory of God.

We're living in an age where we have a big environmental crisis,

and again, this is something Celtic spirituality would speak to.

When we open the Bible, at the very first chapter of Genesis,

we read that everything that is, all things,

have come from this sacred, divine source.

God said, "It is good, it is good, it is good."

It was repeated five times in that first chapter of Genesis,

that God looked at all he had made and said, "It is good."

When we look out at nature and creation, it's like a sacrament.

It's a visible reminder of the invisible presence of God.

Everything is imbued with the presence of the divine

and everything is sacred.

Every experience, every person, is full of the presence of God,

so that's the experience that I feel is most important to me

about the Christian faith.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou

among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners,

now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee...

In the name of the father, and to the son, and to the Holy Spirit,

as it was in the beginning, as now and ever shall be, world without end.

Amen.

I think, at different times in life,

through it be the loss of a loved one, a child, a parent,

a friend, we all experience a degree of depression.

And of the father, the son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

'I'd previously lost two friends to suicide

'and I could never figure out why, and I could never figure out how.

'But I could suddenly understand where they were.'

'And all of a sudden you can, in life,

'have the rug pulled from under your feet and find yourself in a very

'difficult position in life that you cannot explain how you got there,

'through, probably most people, it's through no fault of their own.'

'I just needed to have time on my own

'to think about life, going forward.

'It's also important to step outside the world, almost,'

and Medjugorje is a little lifeline in this world.

I will try again to live a better life.

Help me to always remember that love,

Mary, my mother of our risen saviour.

People say that Our Lady sort of called people to come to Medjugorje.

I would have wrote it off, I suppose, initially, it's a load of old nonsense.

But it's like most things, when you come out you have to try.

I suppose you get to a certain stage in your life

where you ask yourself the question, "What's it all about?" and, "What's the whole meaning to it?"

Only he is your peace, your saviour.

Therefore, little children, do not seek comfort in material things.

I found myself, as being alcoholic,

I found that the small sin was a big thing.

It got into my head and it kind of multiplied.

You feel that you are beyond any form of redemption.

When you didn't have your faith to fall back on,

all these things were building up. You had no outlet.

You had no way of getting rid of that there.

And I find with the confession end of things,

that it takes away all those pressures.

PRAYER IN LATIN

I can off-load, and each time you do it, you find that you are more

aware of your pitfalls, you work a little bit harder on it.

It's a spiritual progress.

One of my problems would be, I wanted to be a wee bit

of a perfectionist so I would always give myself a bit of a hard time.

But I've come to see that there's nobody perfect and, I suppose,

to a certain degree, I thought I was perfect.

And I tell you one thing in life,

you get a fair battering emotionally if you go down that route.

But I don't give myself a hard time about that because within

our faith we are given the necessary tools to deal with those things.

I don't think there's any human being goes through this life without

going through some experience of loss or grief or suffering.

And it is through those that I feel the Christian faith has something

very important to say to that.

The high point, I suppose you could say, of the Christian year is

the crucifixion, followed, in two days' time, by the resurrection.

It's that call to hope, that out of the suffering comes new life.

I grew up in Armagh during, I suppose,

the worst of our current history, during those years of the Troubles.

I think, when you cease to trust, then fear takes over

and we lived in that kind of very apartheid way.

For me,

the ministry became very focused on being a ministry of reconciliation.

It's not just about loving people who love you.

It's about loving the folk that you might find very different from you.

But I think there's also a pathway of reconciliation with yourself.

In some ways, I think

in Northern Ireland we have a way to go on that because reconciliation

with yourself is about being comfortable with who you are,

saying, "This is who God made me to be and it's OK to be me."

We're all different, and for me,

I dream quite a lot and dreams have been very important in my life.

But I had a dream some years ago and I think it very much

changed my approach to how I saw my ministry as well.

I was walking down big, wide steps into a structure.

And at the bottom of the steps, there was all this dust and dirt.

I swept and swept away all this dirt.

And as I swept it away, this amazing floor began to be revealed,

in beautiful colours, with great symmetry and beauty.

The feeling was of huge joy and peace and healing.

I began to realise that that floor that

I unveiled was actually my soul, my own soul.

And it gets covered up with the dust and the dirt of living,

because stuff happens.

And about a year after that, we had a clergy conference.

A man came to speak, to address the conference who was actually

a psychotherapist from County Cork.

I told him the dream, and he said that my interpretation was good.

And he said, "Even better than that, you're lucky that all you needed

"was a broom to sweep away a bit of dust and dirt."

He said for many of the people that he worked with

as a psychotherapist, they had been through such abuse in their lives

that their sacred, authentic souls were covered up with concrete.

He said, "In my work, it takes me a long, long time to go

"through that concrete to unveil the beauty of their souls."

"It's all in there, waiting to be revealed

"and it doesn't matter how late in life you choose to reveal it."

He said, "It's all in there, intact."

CHURCH BELLS PEAL

I suppose, as an individual,

I wouldn't have been completely content within myself -

I suppose, a restless sort of a soul, and a certain emptiness.

We get thrown off course by lack of love in relationships, and death.

I had two sisters that died

within four days of one another in their 50s.

At the time when it happened,

and the practical aspects of being in the funeral business,

I initially was going to hand that over to someone else to do.

And then I thought to myself, well, the girls would probably have said,

"Who would do it better than yourself?"

I carried that out. And I suppose, at the time, it kept me fairly busy.

But I mean, the emotion that people go through with death,

one of them can be anger.

And at any times in my life

whenever I felt angry with the girls was because I wasn't praying.

I wasn't praying to God, I was giving out.

And I had no right to give out because life starts

with your birth, and it ends with your death in this world.

And you look outside of yourself,

the external pleasures of the world which...

once you try them for a while, they seem like your friend

at the start, and they end up becoming your greatest enemy.

I am a three-dimensional creature - mental, physical and spiritual -

and I wasn't tapping in on the spirit.

I would start my day, every day, with a few prayers.

Then I found, since I started that process that,

I received many graces, and I suppose the most important grace

is a bit of peace and contentment within yourself.

Coming back from Medjugorje was an experience of mixed emotions -

wanting to tell the world about the wonderful experience,

but I was exceptionally hesitant

because of the negativity that I knew I would receive.

Friends-wise, I suppose it was a shock to probably see a change.

All of a sudden, you're back at Mass, you've joined different faith groups.

With most true friends, they were very comfortable with that.

Some others did not take to it at all.

Religion is such a difficult subject to approach with anyone,

and your faith is a very difficult subject to talk about with anyone.

I think it's more so difficult for men.

I think the so-called un-coolness of it,

the macho element of not going to Mass.

In Ireland here, we seem to be very ashamed of it, almost.

So it's a difficult transition to come back from Medjugorje,

and wanting to embrace the church again, so much.

And yet still be faced with such negativity

here in Ireland about faith and the church.

When I came home, one of the first things that I realised was that

I actually didn't know a whole lot about my own faith.

I had seen a course advertised which was a degree course

and it was back to school, aged 39, for me.

MALE CHOIR SINGS

We know so little about our faith. We are so ignorant of our faith.

We make judgments on other people's faiths.

The thing that makes it tick for me, really, is the void being filled that

has always been there, the questions, the "why?" questions being answered.

Faith is a belief in the unseen.

There's some people that require the seeing of things

and flashing lights and all that goes along with that there.

I believe the miracles happen.

For me, the miracle with my own personal addiction with alcohol

and the obsession that I had with it.

And when I asked God for help with it, it was removed.

"Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

"If anyone hears my voice and opens the door,

"I will come in and sup with them and they with me."

That's a lovely image of the divine, the sacred presence,

waiting at the door of our hearts.

The spiritual search that we all have, the questions about

meaning, about life and all that, that is the knock at our hearts.

And when we open up to realising the sacredness of who we are,

that's when we invite in that sacred presence.