Novena to St Dominic 2024 - Day 7
Published by Dominican Nuns Ireland in Reflections (Dominican) · 6 August 2024
Tags: st, dominic, novena, to, st, dominic, feast, day, patron
Tags: st, dominic, novena, to, st, dominic, feast, day, patron
Novena to St Dominic - Day Seven
Novena Prayer
O wonderful hope,
which you gave to those who wept for you at the hour of your death,
promising that after your decease you would be helpful to your brethren;
fulfill, Father, what you have said and help us by your prayers.
which you gave to those who wept for you at the hour of your death,
promising that after your decease you would be helpful to your brethren;
fulfill, Father, what you have said and help us by your prayers.
V/: You shone on the bodies of the sick by so many miracles;
bring us the help of Christ to heal our sick souls.
bring us the help of Christ to heal our sick souls.
R/: Fulfill, Father, what you have said and help us by your prayers.
V/: Blessed Father Dominic, pray for us.
R/: That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
Reflection
Friendship
6th of August
Before Saint Dominic died in 1221, he sent friars to Oxford. From there, three years later, the first Dominican brothers came to Dublin and Drogheda and the Order spread throughout Ireland. This year, our Province commemorates the 800th anniversary of the Dominican presence in Ireland, so I would like to share with you about the first Irish Dominican brother I met thirty-five years ago in in Minsk (Belarus), my friend Father Damian Byrne.
I met him only once in my life, but I have been marked by his simplicity and wisdom, and most of all by his friendship. Like Saint Dominic, he easily won everyone at first sight, and that capacity for friendship is profoundly rooted in our Dominican identity.
St Tomas Aquinas described our relationship with God as essentially one of friendship. We are baptised "in God’s friendship" - in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are not simply God’s servants, or slaves, we are his friends. Our preaching should, above all, be a preaching of God’s friendship for us, a generosity without limits. Our system of government should not be merely an exercise in cold, calculating democracy, but the living of that mutual generosity.
Father Damian Byrne was such a wonderful Dominican because he knew about that type of governance, and what that generous friendship meant. There is no real friendship without kenosis, and that is our joy. He remains in my memory as a religious of the Order: poor, austere, missionary, silent, and a humble preacher and imitator of Saint Dominic. He was a man of prayer. Every day he took the time to be alone with God. He used to say that the nuns were vital to the Order because they reminded us that we were all contemplatives.
Father's life was profoundly simple, and he hated show. Like Saint Dominic, he enjoyed the immense liberty of poverty, the freedom of travelling light, with just a bag over his shoulder. Whenever he went on his encouraging visits to the sisters or brothers of the Order, Father Damian spoke of the need to share faith, hope, love, but also to share houses, institutions, possessions. We are preachers, he would point out, and our only baggage is the Word of God - which, he often noted, we do not carry, but rather, it was He who carries us as we preach in His Name.
Father Damian always brought Saint Dominic to people, because everywhere he found Dominic's presence in his sisters and brothers. At his time the new Dominican mission fields were opened in Korea, Kenya, Honduras, and Indonesia, among others. They were the years of crumbling communist regimes through Eastern Europe. During this time, Father Damian's visits and encouraging letters helped that new, post-communist spirit to take flight among the Dominicans. This was the spirit that enabled the long-hidden treasure of faith to come to light again, and to share in the renewed ministry of preaching in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Ukraine and many other places.
Father Damian undertook important meetings in St Petersburg. On his way from Ukraine to Russia he visited our smallest community of Dominican Nuns in Minsk (Belarus), and as ’midwife’ assisted us at the time of our ‘ birth’. It was also the moment of our friendship. I remember that my sisters left me alone with him while they were cooking dinner, and I do not know how, but he asked me some questions and I was answering him without my knowledge of English and his of Russian. He had ears to listen and eyes to see. At the back of our wooden statue of St Dominic he found the Horarium of our day and asked me how do we lived it.
Father Damian give us a wonderful advice to have Mass everyday together. (Some of our sisters were still working or studying, and we were attending Mass separately.) He underlined that unity and community come from Christ!
In his ministry at home and abroad, like so many of his brethren, he encapsulated that spirit of mission and zeal that enabled the Province of Ireland to branch out in new preaching projects in India, Iran, the West Indies, and Argentina. Through his life, spent generously in the service of others, the torch of his preaching burned steadfastly to the end of his days. It was his way of living the radical generosity of Jesus, who gave himself to us completely, even unto death. That was his expression of the generous friendship which is the life of God. Today we give thanks to God and St. Dominic for all our Irish Sisters and Brothers.
"Super montem excelsum ascende", get you up a high mountain.
(Text based on the book ‘To Praise, to Bless to Preach’)
(Artwork: St Dominic, Detail from 'The Mocking of Christ' by Fra Angelico, Convent of San Marco, Florence, Italy)
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