Roscrea Abbey and Glenstal Abbey

Sunday went as usual and I did some more reading resisting the temptation to go to the organ recital at Westminster central hall! Liz went to meet Louise at Westfield. Some of the choir were die to sing at St Paul's cathedral on Monday for the evensong to mark the anniversary of A & M but it was moved to Southwark cathedral. The demo at St Paul's caused it to be closed on health and safety grounds - £20,000 a day being lost but of course if the cathedral was free... yet again the church comes out looking bad. Later in the week Giles Fraser resigned as he was not prepared to condone the use of violence to eventually remove the protesters. Good for him! Monday we set off for Gatwick Liz having been up to Glyn close again as she found there were no lights on. The Aer Lingus flight went smoothly and we landed in heavy rain. Took taxis to go and see Joe and he appreciated it. At 3 p.m. we met up with a large collection of nuns and a few monks for the coach ride to Roscrea. We quickly settled into the routine of early rising for Lauds at 7.30 a.m. and sung vespers and Mass. There were talks in the morning and we skipped the afternoon workshops to do some work and reading. Having the computer was a bonus as I was able to read this week's lecture notes. We were staying in the Gate house and had to share a bathroom and our ceiling leaked at one point. There were 5 of us in the house. 63 attended in all the biggest ever with particularly strong representation from the Carmelites and Poor Clares! It was good to see old friends again but we still miss Fr Mark. Abbot Richard worked tirelessly to make sure eveything went well. We were exposed to a lot of Irish music including Mass settings for the new texts some of them adapted. John O'Keeffe was an irritating conductor regularly forgetting to tell us which page we were on! Fr Senan Furlong from Genstal taught us Gregorian chant very well. Ronan McDonagh promoted his CD and his music which was hardly congregational lovely as it was. There were some very interesting chats about how badly women are treated. The outing was to Glenstal Abbey on a lovely day. This was a treat with a hilarious guided tour, Byzantine icons, scrumptious cream tea and Byzantine style chants from the monks and lovely organ playing. Vespers was a listening event for some reason - it was in Latin. Odd as the Abbot had said they were looking forward to hearing our singing! Thursday evening we had supper with the monks many of them very elderly - their organist is pretty dire with some bad habits. Fr Alban made up for this and Sr Anna played the oboe beautifully at one of the Masses. We returned home on Friday having been giveb a lovely book about the abbey stained glass "Lumen Christi"