Kieran's Life and Ministry
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Kieran was born in Youghal in 1951. He was educated by the Augustinians in Dungarvan and from school entered the novitiate of the Order. After theological studies in Rome he was ordained in 1976 and came back to Ireland to teach for a while in New Ross.
However, he soon returned to Rome, where he studied Scripture at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. In 1989, he began his academic career as a lecturer in Scripture in the Milltown Institute of Philosophy and Theology. While there, he began his PhD studies in Trinty College Dublin, studying under Prof. Seán Freyne.
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He continued lecturing there, mainly on St Paul, but he also taught courses on the Gospel of John and the Wisdom Literature. When Milltown closed, he continued lecturing in other venues, including TCD, the Mater Dei Institute, the Priory Institute and the Dominican Lumen Centre. Later he also worked for several years for the Archdiocese of Dublin coordinating biblical studies.
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He published several books, including his doctoral research on St Paul (Pauline Persuasion) and a popular volume entitled Do We Still Need St Paul? His interest in the liturgy saw him write an important work on preaching intended for the clergy. Around 2015, he began work on his website, www.tarsus.ie, where he offered commentaries on the Sunday readings and a range of resources on biblical topics. Some of his commentaries were subsequently published as Hearers of the Word (Messenger Publications, 2022). They are a remarkable testament not only to his prodigious work rate and his scholarship, but they speak above all to his love of Scripture and his desire to make it accessible to the laity.
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This was in evidence for decades when we consider his thirty-five years of tireless ministry of the word, which saw him move easily through parishes all over Dublin and further afield, speaking to parish groups whether in the leafy suburbs of Donnybrook or in Finglas West, from inner-city Gardiner St. to Sandymount, from Arklow to Lusk. Along with his pastoral and academic work, he also organised countless trips to places of interest linked to the Bible. He brought many groups to Greece, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and the Holy Land.
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All the while, he was contributing hugely to the work of the Irish Biblical Association and the Irish Bible Society (being President of both bodies for more than one term). He also helped to found and organise the Ecumenical Bible Week in Dublin.
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During much of this time, he was based in the Orlagh Retreat Centre, where once again he sought to find ways to share the wisdom of the word with the hungry searchers and pilgrims who found welcome and sustenance there with the Orlagh community, and out of which grew the "Orlagh in the City Community."
Being Kieran, he did all this with his characteristic rigour and intellectual integrity, but also with a great pastoral sensitivity that was a genuine response to the plight of people who were trying to live their faith lives burdened by an inadequate formation that did not take their life experience seriously, and that failed to offer them a meaningful way into the rich fare of the Scriptures.
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Even Covid couldn’t put a stop to his biblical gallop, as he also became a founding member of the Tarsus Scripture School in 2020, which has grown and continues to provide an invaluable resource to people all over the country.
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When he was diagnosed with cancer in 2023 he continued his work with the same passionate enthusiasm.
His passing is a great loss not just to his family, his Augustinian Community and his wide circle of friends, but also to the Church in Ireland today.
May he now enter into his rest and enjoy the vision of God which he so faithfully proclaimed and lived.
" Life to me, of course, is Christ, but then death would be a positive gain."
(Phil 1:21)
Seán Goan's Homily from Kieran's Funeral Mass
When Kieran celebrated the Eucharist, he always invited the congregation to a moment of quiet after the readings so that they might notice what caught their imagination. Let us honour him now by doing just that.
We are all here for a funeral, a universal phenomenon practiced by human beings of every culture and place. However, Kieran would be quick to remind us that we are not here today to simply pay our respects to the deceased. He would say we are here for Christian burial - this, then, is not just about Kieran. It is rather a liturgy, an act of worship that presents us with an opportunity to reflect upon faith, what it was that helped to make Kieran the person we knew and loved, the person we grieve for today.
Back in 1953, Philip Larkin wrote a very telling little poem called Days:
What are days for
Days are where we live
They come, they wake us
Time and time over
They are to be happy in
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
It’s a simple poem asking a hard question – what are we here for? And Larkin is convinced that neither priest nor doctor can answer it because there is no reason – we are stuck with “days” and the unenviable task of trying to be happy in them!
I came across this poem when it was quoted by the philosopher John Cottingham in his very interesting little book How to Believe (Bloomsbury, 2015). He was challenging Larkin’s nihilism, and he went on to offer an answer to Larkin’s question, "What are days for?":
“The days that have been given us are for learning, for hoping, for growing, for waiting, for turning towards the good even in the depth of sorrow, for lifting up the heart in expectation and love. (p.143)
This is a faith response to the simple fact that we are alive, we are human beings, it is a way of affirming our humanity. We are all here as seekers of what is true, what is beautiful and what is good. Behind it is the idea that if we are faithful to who we are as seekers, then we can live fully human lives.
Kieran embraced his life as a pilgrim seeker and he loved that life right to the end for he always trusted that the Spirit of the God in whose image we are made was with him on his pilgrim path. So when he carefully chose the readings for today he did so because each of them affirms aspects of the journey he lived so fully.
The reading from the Book of Wisdom is taken from chapter 7 and it marks the beginning of a remarkable section of the book where the author contemplates the mystery of our existence through the lens of wisdom. So, it is appropriate that that reflection should begin with the simple fact of our mortality, our common humanity. We are born of our mothers, we live and we die. This is who we are. So, the writer faced with the mystery of our humanity then says in the next verse: “Therefore I prayed and understanding was given me, I called on God and the spirit of wisdom came to me.”
These words speak to me of Kieran.
As a religious, a priest, and a scholar, he never settled for easy answers to life’s difficult questions. Like his heroes Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, he used his undoubted intellectual gifts to try and make sense of our human story, and he did it with great humility. Like his heroes, he didn’t believe he was the first or the only seeker. He grasped the value of the tradition of faith that he shared with those who had gone before him, but it wasn’t for him a dead weight to be simply adhered to. It was rather a living word that brought him again and again to contemplate the mystery of God, which we can only access through our everyday human existence. So, in the second reading from Paul’s magisterial letter to the church in Rome, Kieran brings together words from chapters 5 and 8 to present us with the absolute core of what we believe as Christians. The life, the death and the resurrection of Jesus is not the telling of some long ago, one-off intervention by a faraway God to finally sort out the human race by showing us how to get ready for heaven. Jesus of Nazareth is the living word made flesh, he is the human being the writer of Wisdom was speaking of, and in his humanity from birth through life, in death and in rising from the dead, he is showing us the face of the living God. And this face is the face of infinite love. Our becoming human means learning to trust that we are indeed made in the image and likeness of God that God whose love has been poured into our hearts through the Spirit that lives in us. What does that mean as we navigate our life’s journey? It means there is nothing that come between us and the love of God made visible, present, real in Christ.
Kieran has been kind enough to offer us a visual of what these words mean. He chose the image of the risen Christ on the front of the booklet you have in hand. May I suggest that this stunning fresco is a symbolic rendering of the meaning of the words of St Paul. It is to be found in a church in Istanbul. I was privileged to be in that Church with Kieran last year when he took that photo. Here is Christ risen, reaching out and lifting with some force lost and suffering humanity, proclaiming to us that death and darkness is not God’s will, light and life is. I will never forget turning around in that church and seeing Kieran caught in a moment of contemplation – his eyes were dancing. I approached him and said, “Kieran, you are beside yourself,” and he said, “How else could you be!”
It’s no surprise that Kieran should have chosen the beautifully crafted Emmaus story for our Gospel. For here we see the pilgrim seekers walking away because the path is too hard, and yet that is precisely when they encounter their friend, who comes to them as the stranger on the road and who gently brings them to understand their journey in a way they simply didn’t dare to imagine. While the culmination of the story is that they recognise him in the breaking of the bread, that would not have happened had their hearts not first been burning as he explained the Scriptures to them on the road.
In Kieran’s long and fruitful ministry as an Augustinian priest, he walked the Emmaus road with so many people. He set so many people free from tyrannical images of God and superstitious ideas of faith. All of us here today have reason to be grateful to God for sending him to us as a brother, an uncle, confrere, guide, scholar, mentor and friend. He was all of those things and more. All the while he was simply being true to his humanity as he understood it in the light of faith. He loved his life, he lived it to the full and we are all of us blessed because of that.
I began with a nihilist poet, so I think it is only right to end with a poet of faith. T.S. Eliot summed up the human journey in this rather Augustinian way:
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring shall be to arrive where we started
And to know the place for the first time.
Kieran allowed himself to be drawn by love, he listened in the midst of all life’s joys and sorrows to the voice of this calling. He enjoyed the places the journey brought him. He loved learning, music, art, architecture, archaeology, literature, history. Above all he loved people, he loved to sit down at table and break bread, to laugh, to console to challenge, to comfort and to encourage.
Now Kieran, with the drawing of this Love you have arrived at the end of your exploring and you are coming to know yourself in the fullness of your beautiful humanity enveloped in the infinite love of God. Enjoy this Eternal NOW but please don’t forget the rest of us who are following behind and missing you.
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