Fr. Pat McKinley C.C., from the Parish of Donnycarney, spent many years working with the Dublin Simon Community
They say (whoever they are!) that shopping centres are the new Cathedrals of our modern, busy, city lives, places where people come to worship at the altar of Mammon.
Shopping centres often remind me of why I chose to be a priest, as I watch people chasing around frantically trying to fill the holes in their lives as well as their shopping trolleys with stuff. My journey towards God, my experience of faith, my relationship with Jesus has taken many twists and turns, some apparently dead ends (but God can use even dead ends to whisper to us). I like to see my life (and everyone else’s) as one big adventure with God. My adventure has largely taken place in and around the people and places of Dublin’s Fair City.
I went to a V.E.C. secondary school on the northside of the city, where for the first time I realised that not everyone had the same loving, supportive home environment which I enjoyed. I loved the broad education for life I received there, supportive and encouraging teachers and a priest teacher who had an ability to connect and communicate with kids, no matter which side of the tracks they came from. The metaphysical poets (Donne and Vaughan) on our English Leaving Cert curriculum opened up the possibility that it was possible to have an intimate, loving relationship with God, rather than just praying mindlessly by rote to an old man with a beard somewhere in outer space!
With my new found ‘spirituality’ and the arrogance of youth I decided that I should ditch the ‘Mass thing’ as it just didn’t do it for me, I didn’t understand it, it was boring, I could do a better job… and then the voices began, a quiet inner voice which whispered challenge and question: have you ever tried to understand what’s happening at the ‘Mass thing’? Why don’t you go do a better job? I went to Mass one last time… and listened… and heard and was moved by the beauty of prayers I’d never listened to or tried to understand before. Slowly, Mass opened up new levels of intimacy with a God who is closer to us than our own heartbeat. Isn’t that what the Eucharist reminds us day after day?
I left school in 1983 (during the last recession) and was lucky to get a job with Dublin Corporation (now Dublin City Council) as an apprentice bricklayer. Working in the Housing Maintenance Department brought me literally into the heart of the city, into the heart of people’s families, into their homes, into their lives. It was great to connect with the Dublin wit, charm, sense of fun and community. But working in town also brought me into touch with another reality: poverty, crime, drugs, isolation and loneliness. With the idealism of youth I wanted to do something to make a difference and began to think about becoming a social worker. God was firmly part of the fabric of my life, he made my life different, maybe he could do the same for other people. The idea began to grow ‘become a social worker for God’. What about making a difference as a priest?
My studies for the priesthood in the Dublin Diocese began in 1985 (on my 20th birthday). I figured if I was drawn to the priesthood, it was my experience of life in the city and its people that had guided me, so that’s where I should serve. I spent four great years in Clonliffe CollEge, the last of them as a full-time volunteer with the Dublin Simon Community. That experience raised all sorts of questions for me about faith and priesthood, and at the end of that year I left the seminary.
I spent a couple of years working with children in care before returning to Simon to work as a house leader in one of their residential projects. Simon and its people, residents, volunteers and staff were an inspiration and a blessing to my life. Without being a religious organisation (although it is named after Simon of Cyrene) it was a place where the values of the Gospel were lived out by everyone involved: simplicity, ordinariness, good humour and care. How often we seem to judge people on externals, how often we avoid or condemn people who are different.
In Simon I met people who had nothing, but didn’t lack joy. People who have lost everything don’t have the luxury of self-pity. People who have lost everything don’t have to ‘put on a face to meet the faces that they meet’. In Simon I met some very broken people (alcohol, drugs, prostitution, and mental illness among their problems) but some of these people knew God in a way that I have no notion of. Some of Simon’s people were mystics, though they hadn’t been to a Church for years. Which raises a question for us: where do we see God? How can we claim to recognise him under the appearance of bread and wine if we don’t learn to recognise him in each other in all our brokenness?
Curiously enough my early Simon years corresponded to my years of sidelining God so I could indulge my new-found interests of ‘wine, women and song’! But God will use anything (even our sin) to try and attract our attention, and slowly I wearied of my own self-indulgence and discovered the truth of St. Paul’s words that ‘nothing can separate us from the love of Christ’. Where was that line when so many people were being raised in a faith that told them that nearly everything (especially if it involved joy/pleasure) separated us from the love of Christ?
That discovery of God’s never-ending presence and mercy brought me back into contact with the God who had never left me, despite my ‘fleeing him down the nights and down the days’. That God I believe is a God worth knowing, and my desire to share that experience has slowly but surely (God is very patient) led me back to the seminary and priesthood in the Dublin Diocese.
I was ordained in 2003 and love being a priest. The Church in Ireland, in Dublin today, is shaken to the core as we try to come to terms with the values of the Gospel of Jesus being turned on their heads for many years by priests and the Church leadership. Jesus was with the disciples in the middle of the storm, not in some paradise after it. He promised to be with his people till the end of time (not until we start making a mess of it). I still believe those promises. I hope you do too or, as Peter summed it up, ‘Lord to whom shall we go? You have the message of eternal life’. (Jn.6:68).