FARMING NUNS OF GLENCAIRN ABBEY
In a world filled with technology and noise, just a few miles outside Lismore is St Mary’s Abbey, home to 29 tractor-driving, farming Trappist nuns with no mobile phone signal – and it’s this peace and tranquillity that ensures it’s still attracting recru
They say God works in mysterious ways, so it seems entirely fitting Ireland’s only enclosed order of nuns is tucked away in a mobile phone blackspot. Just a few miles outside Lismore, Co Waterford, the order of 29 tractor-driving, farming Trappist nuns are shrouded in solitude and simplicity.
After driving down a winding lane into the monastery in the dip of the Blackwater valley, I’m greeted by the smiling abbess, Mother Marie, at the front door of St Mary’s Abbey. She ushers me towards a neatly set table with tea and homemade ginger cake in the curve of a bay window.
Opposite is a long bench which was once topped by a heavy trellis-like wooden grille though which black-veiled sisters greeted visitors from the outside world until it was taken down in the wake of Vatican II in the late 1960s.
‘Women became enclosed because the monks felt they needed protection probably from the 9th or 10th century,’ explains Abbess Marie referring to plundering Viking raids as she nods towards the bench. ‘That’s why they had structural protections like grilles built in. Then it became a value because they had a lot of peace and silence and quiet and time for study and prayer.’
Older sisters have spoken of missing the complete silence with the stricter code relaxed. But she adds: ‘We’re still careful. We don’t speak in the cloisters or in the refectory or the church unless we have to. It’s a common effort to maintain an atmosphere of silence so we can have a continuous mindfulness of God.’
In the rolling fields around the monastery, the contemplative, Cistercian nuns can be found mucking in with just about any task which comes to hand on the 200-acre farm from driving a tractor to cleaning solar panels, from making communion hosts to sheep shearing.
‘It’s contemplative but our sleeves are rolled up and we get stuck in as well,’ says Sr Michelle, who helps out with cooking.
It’s a unique way of life which has been captured by photographer Valerie O’Sullivan in a beautiful coffee table book, A Year in the Life: Glencairn Abbey. In previous lives, the nuns in Glencairn had careers in professions like banking, horticulture, computer programming and nursing along with impressive sporting prowess – former All-Ireland camogie star Sr Lily runs the farm.
Lily was the brains behind the nuns going green and cutting down on expensive heat bills by growing elephant grass they feed into their new boiler imported from Poland, which tallies with the Cistercian tenet of being kind to the environment.
‘We just put a bale on a tractor, push it into
the burner and light it up and it heats the house and the water,’ says the Abbess. ‘Lily is in charge of the farm and Liz and Mairead help her with minding the sheep and whatever.’
But all work stops when an electronic buzzer sounds seven times for the prayers that punctuate the rhythm of their day.
The exotic-sounding church services of Vigils, Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline start before dawn at 4.10am and finish in the evening just after eight. The Sext prayer ritual just before lunch is beautiful to witness.
As the Cistercian sisters file into the church, one of the younger nuns goes up a back stairway and pulls the ropes to sound the bell in the stone tower. The order, clad in white habits with brown scapular tunics cinched in at their waists with brown leather belts, gracefully and swiftly drift in, taking their places in wooden pews under light-flooded stained glass windows.
During their pure-voiced singing of the psalms in the high-raftered church, the sisters bow ritualistically in unison for the lines praising the Lord as part of the simple ceremony, which lasts around 20 minutes. At other stages, the nuns turn in almost choreographed synchrony to face the tabernacle during the service, which consists of just one reading amid the choral prayers.
Sr Liz explains you just ‘drop tools and go’ when the prayer bell rings. As we stroll around the farm, she points out Bob the miniature pony, who is among the order’s pets along with their sheepdog, Rex, while herds of sheep and cows graze around the fields.
Several times during the walkabout with the novice nun – who is suitably dressed in well-worn jeans and an old jacket – the Aretha Franklin refrain of Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves runs through my head. There’s the obvious catch-line but the order seems to truly embody the essence of the famous chorus with its self-sufficient way of life. Liz, a former IT specialist, remarks how they are protected from the social media phenomena which exploded before she joined five years ago at the age of 40. She says matter-of-factly: ‘We’re just cut off. You can’t even get mobile phone reception down here. It’s not by any deliberate choice, it just happens we’re in a valley with a terrible reception.
‘We have pagers to be contacted, which is old technology, and that’s deliberate. There’s one phone for the farm and one for when people go out to appointments. We don’t need phones.’
There was a period of adjustment when she first joined as a postulant on the Feast of the Epihpany in 2013.
‘You’re like, where’s my phone? I’ll just check my emails, she laughs while patting her pockets. But it wears off you, you’re immersed in a different culture and you have so much to do.
‘The community carries you. You’re taken along by the routine and the structure. It’s like you’re praying and you haven’t even thought about it.’ In the Glencairn Abbey book, she describes how her mother referred to her vocation as the ‘bombshell’ but family and friends were supportive. ‘Needless to say, they didn’t see me as someone who’d join the nuns – any more than I did,’ she says.
The nuns, who exude good humour, only leave the confines of the monastery for essential errands. ‘We don’t really go out,’ said the Abbess, ‘Sometimes we go out for shopping, but we get a lot of stuff in. We go out to the doctor or the dentist or meetings with the Cistercian order or some sisters are studying theology, so they go up to the colleges for exams.’
Mother Marie always harboured a vocation for a monastic life but after qualifying as a nurse and heading for seven years to a mission in Guatemala in the 1980s – which has one of the highest murder rates in the world – she turned to a life of prayer.
She says: ‘Sometimes out there in Guatemala, it was so desperate. There was children dying all the
time. I used to think, the only answer to this is prayer. No matter what we’re doing it’s not easing the pain even though you would treat a few people. There were crowds of people and so many murders and people missing, just so much suffering. Even before I went there I knew I would end up in a monastery. I left after seven years and came here.’
The sisters speak of being inexorably drawn to the life of silence where they go deep into the scriptures during hours of daily study which is called Lectio. Sr Michelle, who came to the monastery in 1997 at the age of 29, doesn’t feel she is missing out on life.
‘Not really missing…,’ she ruminates before adding with a smile, ‘It’s similar to when someone gets married to one person. You’re don’t say you’re missing the rest of them in the sea. You’re just really happy because you have found your place.’
The timetable prayers starts with Vigils at 4.10am. It’s when Sr Michelle feels closest to Christ. ‘It’s keeping watch in the night. There is a very strong sense of God’s presence. It’s palpable.’ Lights are turned on for the service but afterwards the sisters carry out what they call Lectio Divina, which is the study of the scriptures in the early morning silence before the dawn. The physically demanding nature of the daily prayer rituals only fully hit Sr Michelle when she was diagnosed with breast cancer three years ago.
‘I became more aware of that. I had played hockey and was very sporty and very fit,’ says the Sister, who grew up in London where she trained to be a nurse.
After developing pneumonia during treatment, she decided to go home to her mother, a retired nurse, for seven months to recover. ‘My inner timetable got a little bit lost,’ she says of her return last year. ‘My energy levels aren’t the same any more so I pace myself, I do a full day from 7 to 7.’ The structured day is ‘freeing’ although she adds: ‘This life still throws up curve balls and surprises.’
Making communion hosts and greeting cards along with farming have kept the order of 29 sisters self-sufficient. Abbess Marie explains the nuns have a frugal life, but they are fund-raising for a new guesthouse building where people wanting to experience the Benedictine way of life come for short stays.
‘Generally, we live off what we make. We live simply,’ she says but lists off bills like heating, health insurance and running their cars as the biggest expenses. ‘We don’t eat meat or buy clothes. We wear the habit. We make it ourselves.’
Although the monastic habit is not completely uniform. ‘With a pair of socks you can express your individuality,’ says Sr Michelle, laughing, ‘Some people wear jazzy socks.’
With vocations generally down among religious orders, the enclosed order of 29 nuns has had two recent recruits. Both started on the same day five years ago.
‘We have two young ones still in first vows,’ says Abbess Marie. ‘We have a postulant from Co Tipperary and a girl doing an observership and I think she is fairly sure,’ she says of the student who is trying out the monastic life among the order for a number of weeks.
She attributes the increased interest to people’s yearning for a relationship with God in modern Ireland. She says: ‘We are meant for a relationship with God. ‘When people let it go they try to fill it up with all sorts of things, drink, travel, drugs, you wouldn’t know… We can only have full happiness when we are in that relationship.’
Driving out to the top of the hill with the farm behind me, the phone signal bars pop back on my phone as I exit the gates back into the noise of 21st century life. I gaze back a little longingly before hitting the road back home.
A Year in The Life: Glencairn Abbey by Valerie O’Sullivan is available now, priced €24.99