Fr La’s weekly ‘Pause and Ponder’ from along the Pilgrim Path at Lough Derg. This week’s reflection is called ‘Banded Gneiss’.

Up at St Davog’s Seat with a group of pilgrims,

I cannot resist the obvious pun about these ‘nice rocks’.

On St Brendan’s Bed, bare pilgrim feet

meet and tread this banded gneiss. 

It provides St Brigid with her Chair

and the stones that rest beside her Well.

Banded gneiss is the bedrock all the way

from here to Ballyshannon –

legacy of a meeting, aeons ago,

between two of the earth’s tectonic plates.

The meeting modified the very structure

of rock laid down long before as quiet sediment.

What meetings, I ask myself, have most deeply

formed and transformed me?

Fr La Flynn, Prior

22 February 2021