Martin O'BrienFr Brendan McManus SJ shares his exceptional faith journey with Martin O’Brien
Brendan McManus SJ speaks his mind and bares his soul when we meet in Peter Faber House in north Belfast which he shares with other Jesuit priests.
He recalls how, at the age of 30 in 1992, he abandoned “a life of excess” to join the Jesuits.
“It’s definitely a prodigal son-type story,” he confides.
“I had the big job with Hewlett-Packard (HP) in England, a girlfriend, a sports car, lots of foreign travel but I had gotten carried away with myself and had forgotten who I was.”
Fast-forward 15 years to Dublin 2007 and Brendan had been a priest for five years.
He begins a homily with these words: “I feel like a fraud up here, my faith is hanging by a thread.”
It was then a very bleak time for the 52-year-old Fermanagh-born priest who has been based in Belfast as a spiritual director since his return from Canada earlier this year.
He was devastated by the suicide of Donal, his brother, “an incredibly special and kind person of deep faith” whom he loved dearly and who had been afflicted by depression for 20 years until his death in 2005 at the age of 42.
“He gave many of his possessions to the poor and told few that he actually had a PhD in construction engineering.”
Two things in particular appear to have made Donal’s death so unbearable. Brendan was “the bridge between him and the rest of the family”. Also, Donal’s death appeared to have been utterly avoidable because “it was as if he was in a swimming pool with lots of lifeguards”.
No liturgy
Brendan could find no liturgy for suicide in the funeral book when he officiated at Donal’s Requiem Mass.
“There is still no liturgy for suicide and that is not an accident – it’s because people don’t want to face the reality of it. A liturgy would not promote suicide but just allow people to deal with it better.”
Brendan has just written an amazing book, Redemption Road: Grieving on the Camino (Orpen Press) which tells the story of how he finally conquered his overwhelming grief and sense of guilt by completing the 500-mile long Camino de Santiago de Compostela as a solo pilgrim in memory of Donal in 2011.
It charts a remarkable 40-day journey and looks set to be translated into many languages at a time when the first-ever Jesuit Pope is making the Ignatian charism the subject of intense interest worldwide.
It is particularly noteworthy for the way in which Brendan explains how he drew on the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, to overcome what Ignatius calls “the desolation”.
The royalties from the book will be donated to Console, the national suicide charity which benefitted considerably from the funds provided by those who sponsored Fr McManus to walk the camino.
Brendan’s exceptional faith journey stretches from his upbringing in a comfortably off family of farming stock in the former Maguire chieftain stronghold of Carrickmacosker outside Lisnaskea to his life today as a spiritual director and prospective bestselling author.
A central part of that spiritual odyssey is Brendan’s gruelling camino pilgrimage.
He had been long equipped for it when as part of their formation he and a fellow Shandon Jesuit novice retraced the steps of St Ignatius from Loyola to Manresa in Spain for a month, begging for food and accommodation at every turn walking as much as 20 miles some days.
His camino culminated in him placing Donal’s Barcelona FC T-shirt on the altar in Santiago during the pilgrim Mass and in an emotional unplanned ritual, afterwards on the Atlantic coast a few miles away at Finisterre which means literally the “end of the world”.
Providence
One is not in Brendan McManus’s company for very long – and one hasn’t gone far into the pages of that book or various articles of his on the web – before one senses the hand of providence somehow intervening to make its presence felt and alter his life’s course.
The eldest of four boys and two girls who “went to Mass and said therosary religiously” he recalls “an idyllic childhood” which revolved around farming their 120 acres and herd of 100 cows.
His mother, Kathleen (80) was a “fairly strict” teacher at his primary school, St Ronan’s, Lisnaskea.
Tragedy struck when his father, Denis, suffered a massive heart attack becoming invalided for two years before dying at the age of 51.
It fell to Brendan, who had studied at St Michael’s Enniskillen, to postpone university to run the farm for two years before discerning that “farming was not for me”, although Donal – a keen farmer – was happier that they ran the farm together.
Brendan graduated in psychology from the University of Jordanstown and although initially drawn to clinical psychology and “a helping profession” that would have resonated with his Catholic upbringing he chose a different career in computers for what he now considers to be the basest of reasons.
“As a Jesuit, I can see it. Another value system was operating, I sold out for the money and the money was in computers.”
In 1986, aged just 24, having secured a Masters in IT at Loughborough University, he “waltzed” into a job as a software interface designer with HP in Wokingham at a salary of £30,000 (that’s £62,000 at today’s rates). His job was to test the software on prospective consumers. For a while “it seemed great.
“But I ended up in a very bad place personally with HP. The practice of my faith was just occasional and functional. Even though I had loads of money, a house, a girlfriend, the beauty is that something inside me rebelled and said this is not right. When I look back, from the Jesuit point of view, it was desolation.”
It was now 1989 and he went to a silent retreat at the Benedictine Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight.
One night on his own in the chapel “I got this insight – you have to get out of England, the lifestyle is killing you, literally”.
He floated the idea of a new life abroad with his girlfriend but she “wasn’t interested at all and the whole [relationship] fell apart”.
By then 27, he was interested in Canada “but as luck would have it” his CV found its way to a bank in Sydney which offered him a job as a design consultant at £45,000 per annum (£80,000 in today’s money).
Australia
In Australia he was determined to renew his faith. What had happened, I wondered?
“The Holy Spirit was speaking to me. Even though I was working I was looking to see if I could resolve this interior emptiness.”
He joined a Jesuit parish, was inspired by the preaching and the spiritual direction and recalls being introduced to the story of the blind man (Mk 8:22-26) which spoke to him.
He regularly visited the Jesuit novitiate “and felt at home there”.
After two years Brendan resigned from his positon and returned to Ireland to become a Jesuit novice in Dublin under the guidance of Fr Alan McGuckian SJ and the rest, as they say, is history.
Brendan had a girlfriend in Sydney, an Irish woman whose uncle was a Jesuit.
“She said a lovely thing to me, that I must go because if I stayed I would l never be happy with her thinking what I might have done.”
He accepted a celibate life “with my eyes open. I had a fair idea of what I was sacrificing and I knew it was irreversible for me”.
The Jesuits keep their priests on the move, a different assignment every two years or so since his ordination.
One that made a particularly searing impression was a relatively long four-year stint in Bogota, Colombia, which he suggested himself. “It was an eye opener, the chasm between very rich and very poor on either side of the city.”
However, saying goodbye I was most struck by what he said about how the camino had transformed him.
“I walked home a free man, at peace. I think about Donal differently now. I know he is with me in spirit and that he is with Christ, wherever he is.”