WE PAY A VISIT TO THE SERVANTS OF LOVE ON QUARANTINE HILL
OUR REPORTER DAVID MEDCALF FOUND A PEACEFUL, POSITIVE AND PRAYERFUL WAY OF LIFE BEING FOLLOWED ON QUARANTINE HILL
IT is a remarkable story, the tale of how a group of friends united in religious faith came together almost 40 years ago under the leadership of a charismatic individual.
The group moved around before settling in Wicklow and the leader died a few years ago ,but they are still together decades later with only a few changes of personnel, still united in their faith and still friends – the Servants of Love.
Their blue tunics have been a familiar sight around Wicklow town since 1990, though they originated in Dublin and passed through the West of Ireland and a remote part of Scandinavia before settling on Quarantine Hill.
I quite possibly may have encountered the current leader Gabrielle Kirby before, though I cannot now be certain.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, I had a job in an area of Dublin which was crowded with office workers during the day but which took on a seedy red light tinge at night.
One evening, I was detained late at my desk before eventually making my way out into the dark where I was accosted on Baggot Street by a pair of volunteers from the Legion of Mary offering prayers.
Gabrielle, from Beaumont on the north side of the city, may well have been one of the pair as she was active in the Legion at the time, patrolling the pubs and footpaths of the capital. I was in a hurry home and in no mood for kerbside Christianity, barging on and scarcely acknowledging these missionaries who had come at me in the gloom – and my response was quite typical.
‘The work we did was on the street, talking to young people about God, and that was how most of us met,’ recalls Gabrielle, ‘We did that for years but the young people were less and less interested.’
She was so concerned to spread the word of God that she was out and about hailing strangers in the streets seven nights a week for a while, one of several Legionaries who gave up their jobs to concentrate on religion.
They gathered around a Danish man called Kevin Jacobsen, eventually forming their own group which they styled Mary’s Followers of the Cross after they fell away from the organisation which had brought them together in the first place.
The split allowed them to adopt their own uniform, which is referred to as ‘the cowl’, and commit themselves full time to a life of monstic discipline, fellowship and chastity while remaining very much part of the Roman Catholic Church.
The shapeless, if practical. cut of the cowl marked a particularly profound switch for Gabrielle, who had been working as a dress designer until she received the call. Others in the select band included Veronica, Vera, Bernard, Séamus and Paul – all them part of the community on Quarantine Hill more than 35 years later, along with fresh faces Michaela and Maura, who have both been in the ranks since the 1990s. The original band of brothers and sisters began to live as a community at a house in Dublin where they reached the tough conclusion that the people they were reaching out to in the streets were not listening to them. They decided to embark on a more contemplative lifestyle together, bearing witness to their faith by working together rather than by seeking to convert those who did not wish to listen. ‘We signed up for the unknown and that was what made it exciting. We have faith in God as well as faith in each other.’ The pace was set by Kevin, their natural leader from the start, a man blessed with a gift for practical innovation as well as a vision of community life as Mary’s Followers of the Cross morphed into Servants of Love.
His particular expertise was in fishing as the inventor of a system for baiting long lines, prompting a move to be close to the ocean in Connemara and on the Aran Islands.
Gabrielle recalls, with some pride, that they made fish fingers for a while and they even set sail for the Faroe Islands, bidding to persuade the fishermen there to adopt Kevin’s ingenious long line system.
It was not until 1990 that they changed tack and settled down in Wicklow, by coincidence coming to rest in a fish factory, which had fallen redundant.
‘It was a huge clean-up job and we put a new roof on,’ she recalls of their arrival in the town, which was selected as being close to Dublin and suitable for a new enterprise.
The Servants had begun making films while in the West, but sunny days were few in Roundstone, which made outdoor shooting a problem.
The space available in the old factory-cum-warehouse above the quay in the port of Wicklow provided accommodation for everyone and offered scope for a host of activities.
The group had accumulated a large arsenal of tools, so they devoted part of the space to a workshop.
They had been making films and music,
so they created studios for sound and vision.
They had been exploring health and health food, so it made sense to invite the public to a café and food store under the Healthy Habits sign.
And they had their faith, so they have a meditation room which is at the centre of the community life throughout the week and open to all comers each Friday night.
The place has been modernised and refined over the decades, with each member allowed the privacy of a neat small cell made of timber, though Paul prefers his little caravan.
The cowl is part of the ‘rule’ by which the eight of them live their lives every day, with a modest mainly vegetarian diet and featuring the chanting of psalms.
‘Trying to see God’s loving hand in everything,’ is how Gabrielle sums up the regime. ‘We take the vow of the positive, extracting the good out of every situation.’
She stresses that the Servants of Love are part of the Catholic Church and several of them assist in distributing Holy Communion at Mass in St Patrick’s Church at the other end of town.
During their time in Galway, they met the late Bishop Eamonn Casey (‘a lovely man’) and they have also kept in contact with the church authorities of the local Dublin diocese since the switch to Wicklow.
The group members come together for prayers and mediation, and they also eat together in a splendid new dining area which overlooks the docks.
Their diet is strictly controlled and strongly influenced by Veronica, who has become an expert in the no meat ‘raw food’ which they favour.
GABRIELLE confesses that she does not love the taste of the incredibly nutritious wheatgrass smoothies which the Servants down each morning, but extols the buckwheat pizza as ‘yummy’.
Topped with courgettes, peppers and mushrooms, the Love Pizza is not quite raw, but is certainly slow food in a fastfood world, taking seven hours to cook at a temperature of just 42C.
The recipe may be found in ‘Raw in a Cold Climate: Vegetarian/Vegan Cuisine Created With Living Food’, written by Veronica.
While they are very much a unit, there is plenty of room for individual careers to blossom under the Servants of Love banner.
Veronica’s raw food – ‘nothing is cooked, though you can heat it up’ – speciality runs alongside the blending expertise of Paul as master sprouter who provides ingredients for the smoothies.
Séamus is a talented composer, arranger and composer, whose albums are distrib- utedut around the world, or purchased in theth Healthy Habits shop, just returned to baseba from a festival in Spain.
At her computer in an upstairs office, Michaela promotes positive psychology andn mental health, ever mindful of a loving andan daring God.
Gabrielle’s responsibilities include organisingor holiday retreats: ‘We are off to CreteCr on October 4.’ This is the 19th such expeditionex offering a mixture of sunshine andan mediation beside the Mediterranean, an attracting a mixture of regulars and newcomers.ne
She also designs cards bearing mottos suchsu as ‘ think big, plant a seed’ which sumssu up the spirit of optimism in which theth Servants of Love are imbued.
‘We are trying to change the world a littlelit at a time,’ says the leader. ‘It would be wonderful if everyone could see the positive.’po
She is happy that they have chosen Wicklow as the base for their global missioni and no regrets at giving up her business ne all those years ago as a dress designer.
‘ The Wicklow people are lovely and friendly,’fr she says, a well-known figure in theseth parts with her blue cowl. ‘If you go downdo the street, you have to say hello to 20 or 30 people.
The Healthy Habits centre in Quarantine ti Hill is set to welcome scientist Alex FlanaganFl on June 17 for look at how bacteria te can contribute to good health as part of the Irish Living Foods serie.
And be sure to keep an eye out for the ServantsSe of Love, Gabrielle, Séamus, Veronica, ro Paul, Michaela, Bernard, Maura and Vera, on YouTube – coming very soon.