First inter-faith minister ordained in Mayo
By Tom Gillespie
THE first inter-faith minister in Mayo has recently been ordained.
Rev. Gerardine Lennon from Castlebar will serve the west, nationally and internationally, celebrating, commemorating and contemplating life’s milestones from the cradle to the grave for those of all faiths and none.
Gerardine was ordained in July as an inter-faith minister, part of the One Spirit Interfaith Foundation which was started 40 years ago in America by a Rabbi, a survivor of the Holocaust. Their aim is that nobody would be excluded or persecuted because of their religious or spiritual beliefs.
Gerardine said: “My life’s journey has been one of spiritual enquiry. I work at Lough Lannagh Village in Castlebar (www.loughlannagh.ie) which hosts groups, families and individuals on holiday, for sports bootcamp as well as conferences and religious and non-religious retreats.
“I was encouraged at a retreat to become an inter-faith minister by several guests who said: 'You are doing this work anyway’.
“A retreat organiser wrote: 'She understands sacred space and inner healing from the inside out’.”
As a minister she can conduct baby blessings, ceremonies and rituals, community spiritual ceremonies, funerals, legal weddings, rites of passage, and spiritual counselling.
She continued: “The process involves time focusing on your vision of the ceremony. This is a living and evolving process of deep listening, reflective feedback and at times silence, bringing clarity of thought and focus for you, creating a unique sacred ceremony for you and your witnesses.
“Life’s milestones can also bring up some emotional baggage. This is natural, and I deeply care and love being of spiritual and psychological support to you.
“In awakening this, we explore options to bring peace and reconciliation for you. This is called the ministry of spiritual accompaniment.
“These services can be offered in areas of ritual, healing and ceremony creation, eulogy, birth, marriage, death and life changing, transition reflections and preparations. My mission is to be love in action in celebrating, commemorating and contemplating life’s milestones with you, honouring your spirituality.
“Sometimes you could have someone that would talk about something that’s really traumatic to do with violence or rape and for some reason people seem to be able to talk here. But there is joyful stuff as well, christenings and all sorts of things.”
Gerardine continued: “I wear a stole and what it shows is that we are all cut from the same cloth and everyone is aligned to a particular religion or a particular faith path. But we are all part of the same thing and for me I call that ‘love in action’. Some people call it the universe, some people call it spirituality.
“Some people are really uncomfortable with that language. Some people don’t like it. So for some people their spiritual practice might be will I go out into nature. I like to hill walk and I like to hear the sound of the birds singing.
“That is counted as a nature-based path. So when a person says they are non-religious or I don’t align to a fixed church it does not mean they are not spiritual.
“I found it quite liberating to hear that and I had a great understanding of the reverence that takes place in different faith paths. But sometimes in our rigidity that’s what causes the conflict between them. We would tend to call those our learning edges.”
Gerardine and her husband, Paul Lennon, moved to Mayo from Bermuda in the 1990s to take over the running of the Lough Lannagh Village complex in Castlebar.
She went on: ”I would work with and honour people of all faith paths and none. I hadn’t planned to do this but Lough Lannagh hosts lots of things and we deal with tourists. What I was told was that in a way you and your staff are in a type of ministry here because we deal with people that can be here for joyful events but they can also be here for very painful ones.
“That can be whether they are on a retreat, maybe someone has died in the hospital. Anybody in hospitality deals with a lot of stuff. We wanted to make sure that we were nurturing, honouring and holding a presence for whatever the person divulges to you.
“We had a seven-day retreat here and I decided to do it. There were three inter-faith ministers on it. During it one person said I should be an inter-faith minister because I was doing this work here anyway.
“I was still dealing with guests. We love and accept people as they are. We try not to discriminate. It kinda felt right for me and it resonated because I knew I did not want to be a psychotherapist. What was the healthiest way to deal with this from my point of self care, also for our team here and for the guests.
“When I was doing the course, and also with clients that were here, we would have a lot of international travellers and a lot of guests who have different faith paths and sometimes they would gather here.
“This course went into the main faith paths. It is not that we are experts in it but we have an understanding of them.”
She said another aspect of her work as minister is spiritual counselling and spiritual accompaniment, adding: “What I tend to say is when you look at people at work there is always talk of emotional intelligence but there is also spiritual intelligence and it is not something that people are necessarily talking about but it is part of every aspect.
“What I learned from the course really was, for me, that anything I do is ‘am I love in action here’. As I walk tenderly on this earth am I love in action, am I honouring and in reverence to you. What I found was there is so much in common with the faith paths.
“Another aspect which I didn’t expect was part of the work was to do ceremonies. It was looking at the options for the different type ceremonies that you can have. Some of them can be for deliverance in healing. What I tend to do is that I help people celebrate, commemorate and contemplate life’s milestones. I honour it based on your beliefs system. It doesn’t matter what I believe in.
“The only thing I have to do when doing something officially is to say that I am an inter-faith minister. But I am not going to evangelise to you my beliefs system because that can shut people down. I do believe in God and I know some people don’t. But I can work with both.”
She explained: “From the point of view of my ordination I am Reverend Gerardine Lennon but I am not into titles and labels. To me all people are in a wholearchy. It is not a hierarchy and the organisation I am with are not set on running sole. There are ethics I have to work to. There is a complaints procedure if they need one.
“Being called reverend is that I walk through this life with reverence and from the work ordained that is that you honour the ordinariness in life. It is very humbling.”
At her first funeral she said the family did not want any religion at all. It was very last minute, as the person had passed away on Christmas Day.
She spoke to them the night before and she was at the crematorium the next day.
“But I have to keep training so I have recently done training in children’s funerals which was quite a hard one. My ministry is to help people in their certain milestone in life.”
Reverend Gerardine Lennon can be contacted on (086) 8109587, email info@gerardine.ie or visit her website, www.gerardine.ie.
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