Fr La Flynn offers a reflection at Easter.
Hello from Lough Derg and a very Happy Easter.
I have just one reflection I would like to offer you at this time. You will probably recall how it was that Patrick as a well-off and carefree sixteen year old suddenly found himself carried off by Irish slavers. All of a sudden he was bereft of anybody that he had even known and anything he had known as normal.
Later in his life Patrick would look back on the six years he had spent as a slave in Ireland as a special time in his life: a time when he developed a new relationship with God; and he came out of those six years with the beginnings of a sense of purpose to his life that would never leave him.
Anyone who comes on pilgrimage to Lough Derg seeks, I suppose, to recover something of Patrick’s experience in a humble way. A time when we step out of what is our daily normal in the hope of something new in our relationship with God and, perhaps, a new sense of purpose for the time ahead.
Here’s the reflection that I want to offer. What a pity it will be if we come out of all we have been through, in this time we have called ‘lockdown’, without something of lasting value to take forward. I think of the image of the oyster and how the pearl forms around that piece of grit that is unwelcome, that gets in there.
I hope it may not be that very long until we are able at Lough Derg to welcome people again to a little bit of ‘Lough Derg lockdown’, if you want to put it that way, but of course only for those who chose!
In any case may God show us what there is of value that we can take out of this long experience of lockdown.
Beannachtaí na Cásca ort. Slán go fóill.