Limerick priest’s new book is a reminder to ‘slow down, savour life’

HE is poet, priest and inner-city pastor. Now, Fr Hugh O’Donnell is once more spreading the good news that nature is life’s great gift and inviting us all to slow down and return to our connection with nature and with the earth.

“What happens to the earth and all its inhabitants happens to us,” says the man who taught for several years in the Salesian College in Pallaskenry and whose ancestors still have roots in East Limerick.

But he insists, his new book, launched virtually during the last lockdown, is “not preachy” although one section of it does focus on things we are doing wrong, “the negative side” such as wasting water, producing plastics, and ill-treating animals.

Instead, Fr Hugh says, it is “ a wake-up call, an opportunity to listen again to the One who speaks to us in the voices of creation.”

“It is a reminder of what we are missing,” he says simply.

Born in Crumlin, Fr Hugh’s interest in nature was sparked by walks in the countryside with his father and summer visits to Kilkenny grandparents where he said, he was out all day, enjoying the wonder of freedom. “You were a child of nature really,” he recalls before adding: “We have lost that sense of closeness with nature, with animals, with natural sounds”.

His father also gave him a love of poetry, his mother a love of words and in his 20s, now preparing for the priesthood within the Salesian order, he began to write, beginning with poetry.

He also taught for a while, arriving in the Salesian College, Pallaskenry in 1979 and staying several years. And for a number of years after that, he was part of the Salesian formation team.

But now, and for the past 17 years, he has been part of the Salesian team in Sean McDermott Street parish, in north inner-city Dublin.

But his strong connection with nature and what it represented followed him to inner-city Dublin and he jumped at a chance to do an MA in religion and ecology.

“It helped me to make the connection between faith and care for the earth. You can’t really be a person of faith if you are not caring for the earth,” Fr Hugh says.

He developed his ideas in Eucharist and the Living Earth and then began a series of short, prose passages or meditations he called Taking the Slow Lane.

Time to Call Home, he explains, builds on that. “It is the same idea of trying to get us to slow down, to notice things, to savour lives instead of rushing and racing.”

Time to Call Home is published by Veritas and costs €14.99