Hello
Welcome to my website - a creative way to meet you and offer you the fruit of my ministries and memories these many decades numbered. No doubt, it will live on beyond me, if only as an echo of human gratitude and amazement for the gift of being able to be grateful and amazed.
It has been a joy to assemble this web archive with the help of good friends and web creatives. I hope you will return to this beautiful site over and over, as I shall, to remember the many gifts given and now shared with you.
Sister Kathleen
My Story
Composing a web biography that offers some authentic introduction to the friends and strangers who will make their way to these pages is quite challenging. It needs to be more and less than a litany of the seasons of one’s life, their happenings or discoveries; it needs to be a modest revelation of the reason for one’s life. And for me that reason is very simple: to praise. So let this be my preface to what is a kind of memoire: a gathering up of the traces that time and events, people and the gorgeous Earth have inscribed on / in this existence named mine.
So here is where it all begins:
Undergirding this webpage you can see the emerald island of Eire boldly surfacing the north Atlantic, the westernmost
rim of Northern Europe on the European continental shelf, part of the Eurasian Plate.
This is where - as poet John O'Donohue would say - the clay of my self was given. Dark, rich, ancient clay of the island of saints and scholars, of poets and playwrights, of nuns and monks and natural naturalists.
And of justice seekers and freedom fighters; of mournful loneliness and generational rage; of deep wounds and an on-going search for healing wells and holy wells; of music and myth and magic and all of that. This is what I feel to be my native home though I have never lived there.
Yet, somehow my heart and soul live in the memory of something most elemental - of bog and glen, of river and stone, of moss and animal kin, and the tender lyricism of everyday speech. All that. And more than that. And more...
This Eire of my imagination, of homing desire, is the spiritual paradise longed for in the perigrination of my ancestral monks who took to their curraghs and set out on the sea to find "their place of resurrection." (Thomas Merton)
From this sacred island all my ancestors came forth, and from nowhere else it seems. They came alive with all their names and stories completly unknown to me, yet I research them. From this island my mother Bridget came forth, and my father Patrick, and all their lineages before them. From the West they came forth, from Connaught - from Leitrim and Sligo, from Roscommon and Mayo and God knows where else. Beautiful people. Beautiful beleaguered people - living on in me.
My mother's people came from Knock, to which God's Mother came one rainy night the evening of Thursday, 21 August 1879 near the gable wall of the local church where my grandmother would be the parish musician in her time - Kate Dignam who would become Kate Noone with her husband James in Ballyglass East, Loughglynn.
Her mother, Ann Moore was alive at the time of Mary's visitation, living in the field adjacent to the church, but she was not among the witnesses who were few and largely members of one family.
But our family benefited from the religious revival Mary brought to that little hamlet as they offered hospitality to the droves of pilgrims who began to visit the place for the grace She upwelled in that space.
I have walked with my sister around that chapel and knelt in that church many times many years later and treasure the curious and merciful visitation of Mary to my people - the survivors of the Great Hunger and the violence and impoverishment of colonialism, of evacuation and eviction and the desperate poverty of so many kinds...
The Great Hunger lives on in the psyche of my tribe in so many ways: hunger for peace, hunger for justice, for poetry and music and beauty. Hunger for God. That hunger most of all...