To respect Brother Eugene’s wish that any writing about his life should have as its prime aim the Glory of God, this material, which is based on personal contact, phone conversations and some brief letters to the author, is copyright.
Anyone who wishes to download the material, in part, or even in whole, for reasons of personal spiritual development, is most welcome to do so. This permission applies for use in items like newsletters for use within religious groups or congregations. The author would appreciate notification of such use as it contributes to his knowledge of the benefits to others of his life and teaching.
Copyright © 2008 John Baptist Abrami
“THERE IS NOTHING BUT GOD Eugene McKenna, Carmelite, Mystic
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13th June 200 8
PART 1 BRONGLAIS HOSPITAL, ABERYSTWYTH
Brother Eugene, known to many of us also as Brother Joe (Joseph was his baptismal name) died peacefully just under two weeks ago, on Sunday 1st June 2008 in Bronglais Hospital Aberystwyth, Wales.
He had gone in simply for tests. There was talk of his being able to continue at his flat in Bow Street but with extra care. This was not to be. His condition deteriorated. For the 4 days prior to his death he had been unable to speak. Good dear friends were with him all this time. They occasionally spoke to him. Quite probably he could hear them but certainly could not respond externally. They held the phone to his ear at one point for me to speak to him. Did he hear? I could just hear his gentle regular breathing. This was to be the last of our many many phone conversations. This one a bit one-sided unfortunately, with me doing most of the talking – which is the opposite of what usually used to happen!
From Wednesday to the Friday he was in great pain, very agitated, sometimes thrashing about. Diamorphine administered on Thursday helped to calm him. Calm he remained till his release.
THE ROAD TO CALVARY
Brother Eugene, dear beautiful Joe, had suffered a great deal in his last few years with a breaking down of his health. His last year was particularly painful. In a phonecall on the 13th April he said,”I”m in very bad shape. I wouldn”t be surprised if I am dying. It depends on how much He [the Father] wants me to live…Having a shocking time….I”m not against the suffering, but it’’s not knowing what it’’s all about [that is getting at me].”
When I commented,”You”re having your Calvary,” he replied, in his typically blunt concentrated way,”I don”t know. I don”t care [ie it does not concern me]. It can go any day [my health could give way any day]…Only a year ago I was so fresh and full of life. Now so beaten. If I am to live it will be a long hard passage down to normality.”
I think Joe’’s memory was playing tricks here when he says he was “so fresh” only a year ago. His health, unless my time memory is at fault, was far from great even last year. I have mislaid my diary from that year, so I cannot check this.
Latterly he has experienced terrible loneliness. Nothing strange in the lives of deeply holy people. At core it was, I feel pretty sure, a sharing in that terrible feeling of abandonment that Christ experienced on the Cross. Whether Joe ever thought of it in those terms I have no way of knowing.
He ended this phone call on a humorously defiant note:”I”m going to the opticians on Thursday. On my bed. Flogged out…but I”m not dead yet!”
His mobility had been severely curtailed. Two weeks before (phone call 1st April) he informed me that he had been down to Aberayron “to buy myself some wheels”, to get around inside the house and out.
A RELIGIOUS UNLIKE ANY OTHER
Brother Eugene was born in Ireland in Clogher 18 November 1922. He was professed 8 September 1958, one year before my own profession in the same novitiate house of Aylesford Priory. He had lived as a Carmelite for 50 years. Each day totally dedicated to his calling.
I met him when I was a young priest. We were oth members of the same Cheltenham community. In him I discovered a dear, loving, wise companion in the life of Carmel. I had never met any religious, priest or brother, anything like him. Nor have I met any since. His guidance was sure. I found it worked because Brother Eugene spoke from experience. He did not begin to live a spiritual life after his entry into the Order. That entry had been preceded by a seven year period of intensive struggle with God to find his vocation.
I “left” the order to marry in 1980. I put “left” in inverted commas because the leaving was only a matter of space. I never left the Carmel which had taken solid root in my heart. Carmel is a place of the heart, not of where one lives physically. I never left that Carmel. The spiritual journey I began in my year at St Mary’s Carmelite Late Vocation College in Aberystwyth in the year prior to my Novitiate at Aylesford and that continued in Cheltenham with dear Joe as a wise Mount Carmel guide still goes on, enriched in ways I cannot claim to be able to assess, by his enlightened words. Not that he didn”t make the odd mistake. He wouldn”t have been human otherwise. With regards to me, he made only one.
A man who laughed a great deal
Dear beautiful Joe was a man with a great sense of humour. He was full of love for people. I have never met a man who laughed more and more easily than Joe. If he found you were interested in the things of God then he would open up with you and let you into his life as he thought appropriate. Not otherwise. But first and foremost – for that is the First Commandment – dear Joe loved God with all his heart and soul and mind and strength – which is why – when duty did not call him to be somewhere else, he always retreated to his room, to be with the One who is to be found there by those who seek Him. This “privateness”, to use a very rough word, is, perhaps, one of the reasons why his holiness and deep wisdom is still unrecognised by his confreres. It has clearly been in God’’s to us often puzzling Providence to keep this Clogher diamond well hidden.
A spiritual biography
Some day a full biography of his life may be written. It deserves to be. It may, however, not be in God’’s plans. His Father kept him hidden except from those who were fortunate enough to meet him – who were fortunate enough by God’s grace to recognise what he was worth – and were anxious to draw on the living ever-growing stream of enlightenment that flowed deep inside him and regularly broke to the surface. “Enlightenment” was a favourite word of his. A key concept. Absolutely crucial because so little used or, worse, so little experienced in the Church today.
This biography will be mainly a spiritual one. It will incorporate the few biographical scraps I possess, but will above all lay out his wisdom, the word I prefer rather than the phrase “his spiritual teaching”. Why? Because it is not his teaching. It is what he learnt from the Spirit of the Father and of Jesus. And as I indicated above, its main aim is to speak of the God Joe gave his all to discover.
A Carmelite Mystic
If the word “mystic” means anything of closeness to the Trinity, of burning love for God and people, of deep spiritual enlightenment and experiences, this Carmelite Brother Eugene was a mystic. He was blessed with a number of visits from the Mother of Jesus. Her gracious visits to him came as a total surprise. He commented, “I did not even have a particular devotion to Her. I was focussed on the Father.” On one occasion, he told me, (phone call 1 April this year) she said to him:”I have come to you because you love me.” His characteristically simple unassuming comment on that was:”Could she have said anything nicer?”
The tenour of their conversations seems to have been personal between Our Lady and Joe. There seems to have been nothing in them along the lines of “messages” for the wider Church. Had there been, it is inconceivable that Joe would not have made sure to pass them on to someone. Nonetheless the fact of these conversations needs to be recorded because what God gives to any one soul is always to the benefit, some way or other, sooner or later, of all his children.
It only occurs to me now as I re-jig this section that there was a message for the wider Church here – and particularly for religious and priests and bishops. It is simply the life and spirit and enlightenment of this lovely Irish farmer, cum roofer, cum Carmelite brother.
A Man Ahead of his Times
Brother Eugene was not a religious who was abreast of his times. He was way ahead. Where he was, the Church he was born into has yet to reach – and it will be an enormous struggle of restoration and renewal achieved only by the action of God and his mighty Spirit and with the (costly) co-operation of people dedicated to God’’s infinite Mercy and Love: people who live in that Mercy and Love and empowered and guided by it. It is beyond human power – which alone can achieve nothing in the spiritual sphere.
I had to work hard on him to get details of his life out of himHe resisted giving me what I wanted because, he said, his life did not matter one jot. . “It is the living God who matters. I would like you to write about Him,” he replied with emphasis. I eventually got a few scraps out of him by stressing that talk about him was the same as talk about the living God he cared so much about. Some knowledge about his life and thought and experience would only help people who were keen to work towards a living knowledge of the living God – not the empty useless god fossilised in soul-less religion. He agreed.
A Time that has Turned its Back on God
It was an on-going painful awareness in him – the indifference to God, the “black ignorance” of God – his phrase – that characterises our time.
“How did we get into such a mess?” he asked me on more than one occasion, though that was, for anyone who knew his thought, a rhetorical question. He knew the answer.
He repeatedly made an assertion that took me some time to see the meaning of:”There is nothing but God.” This was his definition of the name of Yahweh – “I Am Who Am”. I take this powerful phrase to mean “God alone truly is.”
However, I may be making the mistake Joe repeatedly warned against: trying to understand God with the mind, the intelligence.
Only the Spirit can give understanding (enlightenment). “There is nothing but God” came to Joe through enlightenment. My “God alone truly is” is what my mind finds makes sense. I am only too willing to discover, through the Spirit’s grace, that his more absolute statement is right as it stands. I in no way want to weaken what the Spirit enabled Joe to see with such evident clarity.
He spoke frequently, in recent years, about our prayer needing to be prayer “from eternity to eternity” – another idea that initially puzzled me, hardly able to understand what it might mean. Enlightenment came slowly for me, and it is still not completely clear. And it will not be completely clear until the Spirit of God opens up its full meaning.
Like the previous concept about God, this was not a thought he got from books or “the scholars” as he used to call the professional theologians, but from his continual contact with the living adorable Trinity.
The Spirit Alone Gives Light
He never tired of reminding me where I would be able to find this enlightenment. The only “place” to find it.
Not in books.
Not in “the scholars” as Joe called them.
In one place and one place only: in God’’s Holy Spirit, sought and followed in love, in sincere determined living of the Gospel.
A request If you had the good fortune to meet this unique carmelite brother, Eugene, and would like to pass on to me your memory, whether it was just as a lovely friendly brother, perhaps down on the farm at Aylesford, or in Cheltenham or in Aberystwyth or Bow Street in Wales (or anywhere else for that matter!) or as a spiritual father, I would love to hear from you. I want to gather as many personal memories of this loving totally God-centred man as I can, to add to mine.
Write – remembering, please, to put your address, and anything about yourself (eg age) or the situation that would help to explain the recollection you have of him and the impression (or, more importantly) the impact he had on you then and/or subsequently. I cannot promise to acknowledge your kindness by letter, for I work full time and have little spare time for writing. I can promise that I will treat your confidences with respect and gratitude. I will thank you by first name only on this website. If you don”t want even that acknowledgement, please say.
Write to this address: John Baptist Abrami, 120 The Tideway, Rochester, Kent, (UK) ME1 2NN
Amended 17th June 2008
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17th June 2008
PART 2
TIME FOR THE TRUTH
Over the past four days, I have thought a great deal about what I have written in Part 1. This reflection has forced me to come to one conclusion. It is this. The long struggle this lovely man endured in his Order and in the seven years preceding, all that he learnt from the God he sought with a steely determination and a single-mindedness born out of love, all that he suffered especially in his last years – all this absolutely demands that the truth be told clearly.
The outline in Part 1 says a lot succinctly. But it needs to be expanded. I would be failing if I shirked the task. His death calls for it.
It is a simple fact that no Carmelite knew him as I did. Which is why the task falls to me. He was a father to me in the Spirit of God. It is therefore a filial duty, not just a brotherly one.
I realised last night that my debt to him is something I simply cannot quantify. What would have happened to my health and, more importantly, to my calling as a Carmelite priest had God’s Providence not put him my way? I have no answer to that question. I have always known that my debt to him was huge. Last night I was enabled to see that with even greater clarity and certainty.
A prophet sent by God
That Joe was a prophet is beyond doubt. He learnt from God. What he learnt he passed on. Where his confreres are concerned slightly different wording has to be used: what he learnt from God he tried to pass on to them. He failed. They would not listen. They did not listen at the beginning. They carried on to the end refusing to listen.
Was it because they did not want to understand? Or because they could not understand? Or a combination of the two? I am not going to judge. I do not know the answer. They do, perhaps. God certainly knows. I am simply registering the fact of it.
It was proved by what transpired at his funeral Mass. The preacher gave what was obviously the agreed “line” on Joe, for all the brothers there assented by their silence. The preacher simply gave a handful of trivial incidents from his life. These ended with the comment that, during his time in Cheltenham, Eugene became more “aloof”. This was expanded by saying that his way, the way he proposed to them as Carmelites was “hard”. The preacher then rounded off this eulogy with something quite inconsequential that I do not remember. We were handed a trite pic ture of this holy man, this beautiful dedicated soul who had been graced by God with visits from the Mother of his Son.
Not a word about his holiness. His lifelong dedication. The terrible suffering of his last years. And – perhaps most horrifying of all – not a word about the visits of Mary to this chosen soul! Silence. In an Order supposedly dedicated to the Mother of Jesus, whose lovely wooden statue is on the wall behind the sanctuary where all this took place. Looking on. How? In sadness? In anger? Probably the former .
The picture he tried to leave his listeners with: of an ordinary religious, nothing much to write home about, perhaps cringing slightly at the ripe language he heard at Cheltenham when he joined the community’s skittles team, growing more “ aloof” as time went by, following, proposing a “hard” way that his brothers could not follow. This is obviously the agreed view.
A horrendous distortion…born of what? Ignorance? Jealousy? Incomprehension? Those involved know the answer.
Did you think, brother Carmelites, to bury the memory of his holiness by burying him? Did you plan that, by your silence, the knowledge of the visitations from Heaven should be likewise buried in the soil of the Aylesford earth that holds its Carmelite dead? Do you realise, brothers of his, that this is what you, in fact, tried to do?
Brother Eugene, Joe, did not know the meaning of the word “aloof”. He abominated the attitude. “Hardness” – he never practised that in his life.
Love. Care. Concern. Those were his ways. “Cringing” at ripe language? What a foolish assertion. Before entering the Order he worked among the toughest roughest men for years as a roofer, all over the country. He was well used to rough language.
“Hard” language would never drive Joe away.
But not even Christ could deal with hardness of heart. There you may find a clue to what you used spin to present as “aloofness”. If he retired to his room earlier than some other community members – it was either his duty to God as a religious or the hardness of heart that he encountered in his community or their lack of interest in matters spiritual. Never, never, this alleged aloofness. I knew the man. I was there. He has never been any different.
You failed in your attempt to present that false, distorted picture. Simply because there was one witness at this – it has to be said – travesty of a funeral Mass who knew the truth. And spoke it.
Providence organised it that, even in death, Brother Eugene could not be silenced.
To be continued