Roshi Frank De Waele, Niamh Barrett, Ginni Stern and Dee Kerins warmly invite you to join us for a five-day international Bearing Witness retreat in Ireland, from May 26 – May 31 2025.
Stillness and recollection are at the core of this retreat, in the unifying spirit of the Three Tenets of the Zen Peacemakers. As pilgrims, we bear witness and listen to the soul of unfathomable places.
*Q&A/Information session*
On Wednesday, March 12th Roshi Frank and Niamh Barrett will host a short Zoom presentation/Q&A session about the retreat.
19:00 - 20:00 UTC
To register click here
In this five-day Bearing Witness retreat, together we will remember those women and children who were institutionalised in Irish mother and baby homes. Religious-run mother and baby homes formed part of a nexus of institutions which were active during the twentieth century in Ireland. A system of secrecy and concealment arose from an extreme religious and, consequently, wider social condemnation of sex and pregnancy outside marriage. Unmarried women who became pregnant were deemed to be ‘fallen’ and, along with their children, experienced grave abuses of their human rights, while the men who fathered these children faced no such consequences. Ireland is still coming to terms with how its wider society perpetuated this shame and how it enabled the systems that arose to contain and conceal it.
On our retreat a range of responses to this time and place and the echoes that linger into the present day may be evoked. Retreatants are gently encouraged to make space for those inner parts which feel anger, grief, numbness or shame, or whatever else may arise. We may find that it’s possible to open to the question - which parts of others and ourselves have we banished behind high walls?
