Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Dom Mark-Ephrem Nolan . March 25, 2005

Read more of Kim Lawton's interview with Dom Mark-Ephrem Nolan, superior of the Holy Cross Benedictine Monastery in Rostrevor, County Down, in Northern Ireland:

We are monks, and our community is a monastic community which simply seeks to lead the Christian life, living by the gospel, held by the rule of Saint Benedict. We came across to Northern Ireland from France in response to a specific call addressed to monasteries of contemplative life which grew out of a document called "Vita Consecrata," or "The Consecrated Life," and that is the result of a meeting which took place in Rome in the early '90s which brought together monks and nuns, basically Catholic religious, but also with Orthodox and Protestant representations -- representatives from the Anglican Communion, as well -- who were discussing the reality of consecrated life in the Church today.

Photo of MARK-EPHREM NOLAN

One of the things that was asked for was that contemplative monasteries should seek, where possible, to establish new foundations in countries where Christians of different confessions of faith were to be found, but who have difficulty living side by side. It didn't take much imagination to see that Northern Ireland entered into that category.

I'm originally from Northern Ireland but lived as a monk in France from 1979 onwards. Our community at Bec was sensitive, therefore, to the question of Northern Ireland, and already in the mid-'80s we had sent two monks to live simply a hidden life of prayer in this country at the height of the Troubles, interceding for peace and for Christian unity.

So, our monastery was founded, and in our foundation decree it is very clearly stated that the specific vocation of this particular monastery is to live the Benedictine life according to our charism, but with a specific mission to contribute to reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants in a land literally stained by the blood of Christian brothers and sisters. It's, if you like, a gesture of communion.

I think it's important for the Church in Ireland to have such gestures of communion from outside. I suppose the danger of suffering for all of us is that our suffering can make us somewhat self-centered, and it's important that our vision be widened.

We're a community; five monks came across from France. I was born here, but the rest of the community is French, and that, in many ways, has been a great asset, because the community is perceived as not carrying as much baggage as many other Christian communities in the country, and that leaves us freer. And I think it also leaves people somewhat freer in approaching us.

We came across to be monks rather than to do ecumenism, but we have, I suppose, a very extraordinary ecumenical ministry. Recently, a Church of Ireland priest visited, and he was leaving just as people were pulling up for a service, and cars were coming from all over the place. He said, "It's quite extraordinary -- five men who would take themselves off to live at the bottom of a mountain, who don't advertise that they're there, and so many people are attracted day after day."

Many people come to the monastery to share in the life of prayer of the community -- not just for a service, but for some days of retreat -- and it's very consoling for us to see that nearly half of those who would frequent and make use of the monastic guesthouse come from other Christian traditions. That's even more striking because there wouldn't be in Ireland a tradition of those of the Protestant denominations going for spiritual retreat. For many of them it really is a discovery and, because they are here, an occasion to meet with people whom they would not meet with otherwise.

I suppose our community is really integrated into the life of the local community and the wider Church in the local community. For example, the first time we went to sing the Office in the Church of Ireland parish church, to have found Catholic people who came because the monks were going there, people who had lived in this village for over 70 years but who had never gone into that church building. For them, it was an occasion to discover something that had literally been on their doorstep.

I remember one Holy Thursday, standing up to preach at the celebration of the Lord's Supper. I had no idea who would be there as the congregation would gather, and I was struck to see how many people in the congregation I recognized to be people from other churches who had chosen to come and celebrate with us their memorial celebration of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday evening. It struck me, because in the text that I'd prepared for the homily, I had spoken about the fact that sometimes we only have to walk a few hundred yards to literally journey a few hundred years. In many senses, I think in this situation in Northern Ireland we live in a mentality that goes back a few hundred years. Positions are very hard, and language that is used resembles the language that would've been used at the time of the Reformation. People haven't moved on, and to have seen that literally some people had just walked a few hundred yards in the village to come to celebrate the Lord's Supper with us was a sign that people had moved a few hundred years.

I think it is sometimes very hard for people from outside this country to measure to what extent people's lives have been deeply, deeply affected by the Troubles. I remember once coming home from France. We don't have a parish ministry, and so, in fact, I've only ever celebrated one marriage service. It was my own sister's, and it was an interchurch wedding.

I remember coming home to celebrate that wedding, and there was a family gathering in Belfast. Nephews and nieces had arrived from Canada and various places. Everyone was there, and I basically needed to have my head cleared for half an hour to go and prepare a Sunday morning homily, and I went out for a walk on a beautiful Sunday morning. Belfast, a bit like Jerusalem, is a city surrounded by mountains, and I remember thinking of the psalm which speaks of Jerusalem, "the mountains surround her," when I heard a shot. And then another shot rang out. I suppose foolishly, my reaction had not been thought through, and it was to run in the direction of the shots. I saw a man falling to the ground; I didn't know who he was at the time, but it transpired that he was a Catholic layman who had been at early morning Mass. And that morning, loyalists had decided, in a tit-for-tat shooting, that they were going to kill a Catholic because some Protestants had been killed earlier in the week. I didn't know who the man was. I went across and knelt down beside him. A doctor had stopped her car, and we found ourselves, both of us, there with him. I found myself praying, "Father, forgive them. They know not what they do," the words of Jesus dying on the cross.

The following week, I was celebrating an interchurch wedding, a sign of hope that people can love across the divide. But it's true that we, since we've been here, have met so many people who have been affected by the Troubles. One young man has been spending this past few months living with our community. As a two-year-old boy, he didn't realize all that had happened in his family home. His father was driving the children to school, and his father was a well-known figure in the Catholic community, a professor of medicine in the local university. Loyalists had decided to shoot at that car and killed his brother, who was 12 years of age; in fact, he was a student at the same school that I attended, and we were both in the same year, though not in the same class.

The eve of the opening of this monastery, we decided to have a communal act of repentance. This monastery has been placed under the patronage of the Holy Cross, and I know that some confreres, abbots on the continent, said to me, "That's a very hard patronage to have placed your monastery under." What made us place the monastery under the patronage of the Holy Cross was the realization that so many Christians have experienced the bitterness and pain of the cross. But the cross is also, in the light of resurrection, the tree of life, the tree of hope, and we were very much guided by that text of Saint Paul where he talks of [how] our peace comes through the blood of the cross. I think that's at the heart of the monastic vocation -- a ministry of compassion; to be with people who have suffered, who are suffering; to be a sign of the presence of Christ, a consoling presence; and I think we have a ministry to one another to comfort and console one another.

On the eve of the opening of this church, it was the Catholic and Protestant bishops who together carried the icon of the cross into the church building, an icon which in many ways sums up the vocation of our community. Instead of the usual inscription, "Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews," on that cross is the inscription from John's Gospel, the prayer of Christ on the eve of his Passion: "May all be one." If you look closely at the figure of Christ on the cross, his side is not yet pierced by the lance. He is depicted as still living, his passion for the unity of the Church.

What was striking was to see so many people in that congregation, Protestant and Catholic, who had been bereaved tragically through the violence which has marked our land. You discover people, and you don't know what they have gone through, and then at some stage, you are led to realize that they have lost a son, lost a parent maybe 20 years before. People come to the monastery for a time of retreat, perhaps people with whom the community has simply established links of friendship, and then you discover that they have lost their livelihood, their business because they simply could no longer start again, having been bombed out maybe five times in a row. There's one man who comes regularly to pray with our community who had a flourishing hotel business and who practically has nothing today, because it just came to the point where he could no longer start again to make his livelihood and he gave up. Perhaps he's found another way of life, perhaps he would say a greater life; but there has been so much pain and suffering as well.

Photo of MARK-EPHREM NOLAN

We try to widen our hearts to the dimensions of the world in which we live. The monastery, while it is a place apart, is a place which is also at the very heart of the Church and at the very heart of the world. As we gather several times a day in this church to sing the psalms, we are giving echo to the cry of the world. You know, one has only to read the most poignant words that we come across in the psalms, even those words which speak of our enemies and our conflicts, and to be able to pray those words in a true spirit of solidarity -- in Christian terms, "compassion" -- means that our hearts are beating to the rhythm of the hearts of people around us.

For us it is quite natural to be concerned with the life of all of the churches and, therefore, to specifically name the ministers and the congregations of the other churches of this area. A psychiatrist came one morning, a Catholic layman. He said to me, "You have no idea of the bombshell you drop when you name the Presbyterian minister and the elders in the congregation." He said, "People just have never heard that before," to be able to name the clergy of the other churches. Now, for us, that seemed natural. You don't have to be that intelligent to go and read a church notice board and see who the minister is and be able to name people like that. Many will say to us, "That is such a courageous act, and we simply couldn't do that in our church, because we know we would be putting people against us. They would say we shouldn't be praying for them, or we can't be praying for them."

But I suppose it's good to have the liberty that we have, to be able to do that. Yesterday was the feast of what we call the Chair of Saint Peter. It's a celebration in the Roman Catholic Church when we think of the specific ministry of the See of Rome to preside over the charity of the churches. But this year we lived that celebration in the context in which we find ourselves these days, with the Anglican primates' meeting in Dromantine, and our concern should be the unity of the Anglican Communion today as a Catholic, praying community, because they are part of the body of Christ, and the credibility of the gospel depends on their unity within the Communion as much as unity between our churches.

You ask how we pray. In a sense, for us it's quite natural, and that can be liberating for other people for whom it is not natural -- to see, well, they can live like that.

I suppose the monastery's vocation is to be a parable of communion. It's not that we speak of our policy, or that we say, "This is how it should be," but we are simply seen to live and pray as we do. That speaks to people. I'm not the first to say it, but action speaks much louder than words. Our whole way of being transmits something. We talk of Benedictine life as being "truthful living." Saint Benedict talks of an honest way of life which he presents to people. The reality is, I think, there are some people who can have a discourse of reconciliation and peace and Christian unity, but one's not really convinced, because you realize that perhaps it is just words, or it has to be said. But I think if we pick up where people are really living, and if people are really living reconciliation -- or trying to -- then that encourages others on the way.

The word "monk" means someone who's living alone, but there's also, then, that notion of oneness. I think, as monks, we are striving; it is, Saint Benedict says, that spiritual combat day after day to live as a reconciled community, as reconciled beings. If we're doing that, if those words of Saint Paul are true, that the life and death of each one of us has its effect upon others, mysteriously, the fact that we are trying to live interior conversion, reconciliation with our brothers day after day -- brothers we didn't choose, brothers whose legitimate differences we have to recognize and accept and rejoice in -- then that speaks to the churches.

I spoke of the text of Saint Paul, where he speaks of peace coming through the cross. The message of the risen Christ in practically all the resurrection appearances is, first of all, "Peace be with you." But that risen Christ presents himself and speaks that message of peace, showing the wounds on his hand, on his feet, in his side. We are, there's no doubt, a marked people, a scarred people, a wounded people. But I think, by the power of God's grace, those wounds can, in fact, become signs of resurrection and new life, and this new life is real new life. It's authentic. It's not saying, "The past didn't happen, what I went through isn't there." I have seen people whose lives have been totally transformed by the pain and suffering they went through, people who had no contact with others from what we call "the other side of the house" -- various ways that exist in Ireland to speak of people of a different tradition. But, in fact, it was when they were bereaved that they suddenly realized that the pain and suffering they were going through, people on the other side were also going through.

One man's only son was murdered, and that evening the police inspector said to him, "You must be the man who's suffering most in this town after what you've gone through today." And he said, "I'm sure the father of the man who murdered my son, if he knew what his son had done today, would suffer even more than I'm suffering." That particular man felt through that a call do something for others. As he says now, he has 700 or 800 children, because he's looking after a network of orphanages in Romania. So I think new life can come through.

Another Christian pastor, who spoke here on the eve of the dedication of this church, realized on the day when he buried his brother and sister-in-law that the only text he could preach on was the word of Christ, "Father, forgive them." But his ministry changed completely, radically, and he found that he was given a whole new message, which was the fundamental message of the gospel, the message of reconciliation, to proclaim. There are many cases like that, where people have, through the pain and suffering of the cross, come into an experience of new life and dare to do what Christ did -- to offer their lives so that others may live.

The resurrection scenes are quite often the gathering of people -- the Emmaus story, with the two disciples walking along the road trying to make sense out of suffering and not knowing what had happened in the past days. But Jesus comes and joins them on the road, helps them to speak together and make sense out of what's happened, and then reveals himself when they sit down and break bread. There are people like that whom we have been privileged to accompany from another side of the community, who have come to a time of sharing together and then have been able to sit down to the meal of friendship together and meet. I think we need to create in a country like this, where there is so much fear and suspicion -- one has only to see even on the political front, there's so much suspicion of the other side -- but we need safe places where people can come and tell their story.

I will tell you the story of a meeting that took place in which, at the end of the weekend's gathering, people were asked to say, "Would you like a prayer request with others who've been here with you for the weekend?" And one young girl said, "I would like to ask your prayers for someone who will be sentenced in the courts tomorrow. I would ask your prayers for him and for his wife and for his children." After the meeting, the person who was chairing it, a friend of ours, an Anglican priest, said, "Who was that person? Is it someone close to you?" She said, "That person is the man who murdered my father. I know our pain as a family, but I can only imagine the pain of his family, knowing that they're going to lose him."

The word "reconciliation" is for many people a difficult word. And even in our Northern Irish conflict, the word "reconciliation" has been used in so many ways. When we produced a little flyer on the life of our community, I showed it to a Christian pastor, a retired bishop who has all his life been involved in the work of reconciliation. He said, "I think, perhaps, you should take out the word 'reconciliation.'" I said, "Why?" And he said, "Well, people are kind of tired of that word now, and it is a word that people are having difficulty with."

As a community, we wondered, should we take it out? Was there something that was escaping us, and perhaps we needed to modify our way of speaking? But we decided we would hold it in, and the reason is that it is in those terms that Christian theology has spoken of what has taken place through the saving death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. There's a Eucharistic prayer which is used in the Roman Catholic Church for special occasions in the domain of reconciliation, and it speaks of enemies uniting hands in friendship, people who were separated from one another coming together.

To speak of reconciliation talks of the fact that we were once one. Something has been broken to tear us apart, and the call for us is to bring together again what is, always was, and should be one.

You know, the covenant was marked in the Old Testament to draw up our contract. We'd break the stick. You kept your part, I kept my part, and we brought the two together, and that was the sign that we had the covenant: they matched. Even in our situation here, quite often we talk of the "two communities" in Northern Ireland. I don't think we can think of the "two communities" in Christian terms. Perhaps you have got two political communities, but you can't talk of two Christian communities. There is one Christian community, which is divided within itself, and our call is to be reconciled in Christ Jesus and to come back to where God intended us to be, where he holds us and we are pulling away from.

Orthodoxy is a very new phenomenon in Ireland. That's because of the growth of immigration. Many more people are coming to live in Ireland from outside Ireland, especially in the Republic. So you have a growth in the Orthodox community. Catholics and Protestants in Ireland are quite unfamiliar with the whole notion of icons. There would be a strong Protestant reaction to icons -- the fear of idolatry and the whole notion of images.

It is important to lead people to understand what an icon seeks to do. An icon is not something we look at, but something we look through, and we are invited here to enter into a meditation of the resurrection. And if we are living a meditation of the resurrection, we will be doing so in the light of the sacred scriptures, helping people realize that what the iconographer seeks to do is to open the scriptural message to others, to give them a key of understanding. I think that has in many ways opened the minds and the imaginations of many Christians of the Protestant tradition with whom we have contact.

Photo of MARK-EPHREM NOLAN

In our monastic tradition, we emphasize quite a bit what we call "lectio divina." It's the very center of our monastic spirituality, the prayered reading of the scriptures. That's probably what makes the monastery a fertile ground for relationships with Christians of other traditions, especially Protestants who come from an evangelical background -- to see that our spirituality is Christ-centered and Scripture-based. Once they've discovered that, they come to see that the iconographer, in fact, has sought to put into artistic form the fruit of his lectio divina, his praying of the scriptures. Then they can appreciate the icon, and they see that it's not something that we remain attached to but, rather, something that we seek to look through, and through it not only to see but to hear the message of the risen Christ. For the context in which we find ourselves, that message is the Easter message of peace, peace and reconciliation.

Christ is depicted as trampling underfoot death and the powers of the underworld, pulling Adam and Eve, man and woman, forth from the regions of darkness, the regions of death, forth from the tomb literally. ... Jesus risen from the dead, walking on the road to Emmaus, opened for those disciples the whole message of the scriptures. They read from the law and the prophets, and he explained the sense of his suffering and their suffering in the light of God's word and gave them, essentially, a message of hope. Their eyes were opened. They recognized the risen Lord. New hope, fresh life was given to them.

And with that, they went back to Jerusalem, the place they were walking away from, and they testified to their brothers, "Yes, we have seen the risen Lord." They were able to say, "And, yes, he's come to visit us, as well" -- disciples who were locked in that upper room, fearful of fellow believers, keeping the doors locked to keep people out. Christ came and stood in their midst, as well. ...

The message to those who come to this place is that they are welcomed by the risen Lord. And, in fact, it is the risen Lord who is welcomed in them.

Saint Benedict is very strong in the Rule which he wrote for monks. He stresses the importance of seeing Christ in others, the importance also of others seeing Christ in us. He has that beautiful line: "All those who come to the door of the monastery are to be welcomed as the person of Christ himself." Our fresco of the risen Christ is right there beside the entrance of the monastery, and it's reminding us that Christ presides over all our encounters. We're all a bit like those disciples of Emmaus when we meet with one another. Jesus is there, invisible, within our midst.

I know a Carmelite monastery in France where above the door they have written the words taken from the First Letter of Saint John: "We have known Christ, and we have placed our faith and trust in Him." I think the image that's at the entrance of our monastery is saying that we have encountered the living Christ, and we believe that the risen Lord is in our midst. That's what we want to share with those who come to the monastery -- that life of the risen Lord who is the one who brings us forth from darkness and brings us forth from the shadow of death, who gives new hope to people who have suffered and who is there with his message of peace.