Seán Buckley

Beyond the Walls: a Monk's Journey to Wholeness Seán Buckley 2.º edición

ABOUT THE BOOK BEYOND THE WALLS, A Monk's Journey to Wholeness is the extraordinary story of Sean Buckley, a cloistered monk in Ireland for eighteen years, a missionary in the remote jungles of the Philippines for twelve years and with the Untouchables in India for three. He also served parishioners in the U. S., in Georgia at the height of the Civil Rights movement, as well as serving the poor, homeless, and Hippies in San Francisco in the 60's. Spanning three continents and witnessing the history of several time periods and cultural revolutions, the reader is taken on a whirlwind of sights, sounds, and cultures. The people that Sean met along the way come alive. The reader feels he or she is right there with Sean in his tireless work for social justice for the people he served for much of his life. Sean's wit and feel for the people are so vivid they jump off the pages. BEYOND THE WALLS begins as Sean is leaving the eighteen years of cloistered life as a monk when he felt his spiritual development wasn't growing enough. He also felt a strong desire to work with the poor directly. He recalls on the ship to the Philippines, the 'baptism' in violence of his childhood, seeing his father, an I. R. A. freedom fighter dragged from the kitchen when Sean was only 4 years old, never to be seen again. Only later did he find out his father had been tortured, rounded up with other I. R. A. prisoners, and blown up in what is now called the famous Ballyseedy massacre of 1923. Sean's mother had to take her five small children and go live with her brother. This is where Sean grew up, in a thatched hut with only a dirt floor and no running water. BEYOND THE WALLS is a compelling story of one man's struggle to reconcile all that he was taught by the Catholic church of that time period, with his growing spiritual awareness, his need for emotional connection to the people he served, and his desire to help correct the poverty he witness