‘We need to break out of buildings to be a light in our communities.’ Photo: by Jessica Johnston on Unsplash

‘We rely as always on the Spirit and our conscience to guide us.’

Meeting with approval: report from Ireland Yearly Meeting

‘We rely as always on the Spirit and our conscience to guide us.’

by Valerie O’Brien, Colm Hefferon, Padraic Murray and Bairbre Nic Aongusa 2nd June 2023

We gathered in the Dominican Retreat Centre, in Tallaght, West Dublin. Tallaght was a small village in the 1950s, but has grown to be the third-largest town in Ireland. Máel Ruain founded a monastery there in 769CE, and it was a place of pilgrimage for a thousand years. The four pillars of Dominican Life are: prayer, study, community, and preaching, and this neatly captured our theme for 2023: ‘Building Community Together’. It also gently reminded us that there are few ideas or aspirations that are novel to Christians over the past twenty centuries.