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ESKER IN THREE SEASONS
A PERSONAL REFLECTION ON LIFE IN ESKER DURING THREE DIFFERENT CHAPTERS OF LIFE – AS NOVICE, PRIEST AND RECTOR
BY BRENDAN O’ROURKE CSsR
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IDYLLIC SETTING
It is 56 years this August since 11 of us, young men, arrived in Esker to begin our novitiate, our spiritual year. For the first month we had the companionship of six novices who were due to take vows in mid-September. The 11 of us in my year bonded quickly. Most of us knew each other from the Redemptorist boarding school in Limerick. Four of our group were new to us. The adjustment to the novitiate way of life probably was smoother for those of us who had been in Limerick. It didn’t seem to be very different from what we were used to. We even had as our novice master a man who had taught us history for our Inter Cert. He was an easy man to like.
Soon we were praying, gardening in the extensive Esker grounds, walking the countryside, attending Mass and singing at all the country church services. A real plus was that there was a swimming pool down the forest, and we made good use of it! We all received assignments for keeping the house in good shape. I was appointed sacristan. We were given old working clothes, all raggedy, and I loved gearing up and heading out to work in the eskers, cutting back the laurel bushes, weeding and tending to the flower beds.
As the evenings closed in we would walk around the eskers in the dark, and our novice master loved instructing us in the constellation of stars up in the beautiful clear skies, skies unaffected by any other lighting.
One of the brothers in the community taught me how to extend the life of the flowers which adorned the church. There was a furnace in the basement and if you held the end of the flower stalks to the door of the roasting furnace you sealed the stalks and so got an extra week or even ten days from the flowers.
Five of our companions left us during the year. The first to leave told me the day before his departure; he spoke of how he had struggled to stay but it had become clear to him that the life wasn’t for him. He was a very impressive young man and I remember thinking that he was so good that maybe it was me, not him, who should be leaving! With the other four who left, we did not know until the morning of their departure. That would happen on a Thursday morning just before they were brought to the train station in Athenry. Before we headed out for our morning walk, they’d come into
our community room, shake hands and say goodbye to each of us. Each time it was sad to see them leave. One in particular was a livewire, full of fun and mischief. I still remember the day he came into the community room to say goodbye. I was sure he was only messing. But gradually it dawned on me that Seán was really leaving. Imagine, I still remember that day, all these years later! He left a big hole in our group.
Over time we noticed that our novice master would disappear for the day after someone leaving. We gradually realised that he found the departures very hard to deal with. He would hide his upset from us.
We didn’t have TV, radio or newspapers. Someone gave us a record of the Beatles’ album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. We had it nearly worn away by the end of the 12 months!
We were allowed a total of two phone calls to family during the whole year. Due to a family business, I had grown up with a phone in our home, so phones were very familiar to me, yet, because of the restriction in the novitiate, by the end of the year the phone had become almost alien to me. It took me years to stop seeing a phone call as an emergency or crisis.
Christmas was very simple. Very few decorations. No gifts. Some extra food treats, and some free time to spend as we wished. We had cards and letters from home, and while we missed home and friends, somehow the simplicity of that Christmas celebration brought many of us closer to the mystery and deeper meaning of the Incarnation.
Most days were fully scheduled with activities but now and then we were allowed to choose what we spent our time at. A skill I learned during these times was touchtyping. It is a skill that has served me very well throughout the years. Teach Yourself Typing was my manual and teacher, from the ‘Teach Yourself’ series.
Fr Brendan with his parents on his profession day, September 15, 1968
As far as I can tell, we may have been the first group of novices who went away from the novitiate for ten days. It was like a summer holiday. We spent it in a summer house of the Redemptorists in Clifden, Co. Galway. Days of sunshine, cycling, swimming, tennis, sailing, praying, walking! We finished off by climbing Croagh Patrick. We went up in the afternoon, spent the night there, had Mass as dawn was lighting up Clew Bay, climbed back down and then walked into Westport to get a bus back to Clifden.
While in Clifden we were allowed to listen to the news on the radio. This exception was made because some days beforehand Pope Paul Vl had promulgated the encyclical Humane Vitae. There has been a lot of fallout from this. Our novice master was increasingly distressed by the criticisms being made of the pope. It would be some years later before we came to understand the significance of both the encyclical itself and the fallout.
Soon our profession day arrived, September 15, a celebration with our Redemptorist community and our families. Six of us took vows for three years. We were not to know that before the three years were up, we would no longer be six but three, and then, a year after that, we were reduced to two. On September 16, the six of us headed into Cluain Mhuire in Galway to study philosophy.
PARISH MISSIONS
The years passed and in September 1977, some months after ordination on June 5 (the first ordination in the chapel in Marianella, Dublin), I arrived back in Esker as a member of the community for 12 months, prior to returning to the Philippine Islands.
It was 12 months of parish missions, school retreats, and novenas. We were a strong team of missioners and I loved every minute of the very busy year. Most months we only got back to Esker once or twice for an overnight or two – time to do our laundry and write letters – and then off on the road again. The year passed very quickly, and I said goodbye once again to Esker, not to return to live there for another 33 years!
CARING COMMUNITY
In July 2011, I took up my appointment as Rector of Esker. This time my stay in Esker lasted eight years, two four-year terms as rector. For the first four years, I was also the youngest in the community. Age was showing in all our houses. However, one of the blessings was the staff of men and women employed by our Esker community. Then, within months of my starting in Esker, the Redemptorists employed an Esker manager. His responsibility covered staff and the whole Esker site: monastery, church, retreat house, youth village, the extensive Esker grounds, maintenance and security. This gave my Redemptorist team the time to focus on care for our priests and brothers, many of whom had health issues, while at the same time we could attend to the pastoral care of the people coming to church and to the people coming to activities in the retreat house and youth village.
I remember those eight years fondly and with gratitude. The community was a happy one, a prayerful one, and a caring one. It was a community that was close to the people of God.
Over the eight years, we buried six of our members. Our beautiful cemetery was filling up with our friends. One unusual addition to our community in the summer of 2013 was the arrival of my mother! With the goahead of the community, I was able to invite my mother, then going on 91, to move from Wexford to live with us in Esker. It was a way of combining being rector and son. While it meant Mam losing the independence of her own home, the plus was that she felt warmly welcomed by the community and staff and came to love her time there. I have to admit that I did remind Mam every so often that I had the paper to show that I was the boss. That cut very little ice with her!
A strange thing was that during those years, of all the Redemptorist priests and brothers who died, for various reasons, each and every one of them ended up dying in hospital rather than at home in the monastery. The only one to die in Esker, in her own bed, surrounded by Redemptorists, family and Esker staff, was my mother. We waked Mam in the monastery for some hours and then brought her to be waked and buried back in Wexford.
As I look back on the illnesses and deaths of our priests and brothers, I remember how they were so fully cared for by our staff of nurses, carers, community members, members of their own families and their many friends. The Redemptorist community in Esker was a very open and welcoming community. Family and friends were welcomed to visit, to stay and to join us for Eucharist and meals. And it was not a welcome of duty. It was heartfelt.
Celebrating an outdoor Mass at Esker with the Cana community, assisted by a deacon from France
The author’s mother trying out her driving in the grounds at Esker!
Visit of the Icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help to the Esker community in April 2016. (L-r) Patrick O’Keeffe, Brendan O’Rourke, Mike Heagney, Denis Luddy, Adrian Egan, Seamus Enright, Tommy Byrne, Clem MacManus, Phil Hearty, Mike O’Flynn, James Casey, Jimmy Buckley, Dermie O’Connor, Seamus Devitt
Fr Brendan on the steps of Esker Monastery on the first day of his novitiate with his classmates Leonard Martin (RIP) and Jimmy Doyle, Fr Paddy O’Donnell (the novice master) and Fr Paddy McGowan, director of the Redemptorist Boarding School in Limerick
The first man to die during my eight years had a very close bond with his many nieces. So, we had the inspiration to invite them to wheel his coffin from the church along the Esker pathways over to the cemetery. They were delighted and honoured. That family involvement became the practice for all subsequent burials. It never ceased to move us all.
Esker had many celebrations and events throughout each year. There were the buses of young people arriving for retreats in the youth village. Early summer signalled the Solemn Novena when not only the church but the monastery corridors, and everywhere else, were filled with young and old for the nine days. Often there wasn’t a spare chair to be found! It was a time of prayer, of petitions and thanksgivings, the Mass, Our Lady, the late Brigid Corrigan doing magic on the old Esker organ, and it was a time of a community gathering, chatting, laughing and catching up on the news since last year.
Then there was the bake sale followed swiftly by the family fun day. Later in the summer neighbours, families and friends of our priests and brothers buried in our cemetery arrived for Cemetery Sunday. In mid-December each year a healing mission, a week of prayer and reflection, saying goodbye to the old year, preparing for Christmas and welcoming the new. The last day of the mission, the Esker priests and brothers serenaded the congregation with a Christmas hymn, ‘Tu scendi dalle stelle’, composed by our founder St Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, a hymn still sung in Italy today.
Eight years pass swiftly! In the early months of 2019, I began to prepare to leave Esker. A new rector had been appointed. I left Esker with a deep fondness for the place, for the community, the staff, and the good people of Esker. I have been blessed to return many times since then, to meet everyone and to walk the eskers!
