Beyond the Walls: A Monk's Journey to Wholeness

BEYOND THE WALLS, A Monk's Journey to Wholeness is the extraordinary story of Sean Buckley, a cloistered monk 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 witnessed by focusing on social justice issues. Everywhere Sean went he helped people, from beginning a self-sufficient community in the jungles of Eastern Luzon in the Philippines (for which he was punished by his Order who sent him to India), to the feeding of the poor and 'Untouchables' in India for three years, to helping integrate his parish school in Georgia, as well as bringing them soccer and Shakes-peare. Later as a parish priest in San Francisco in the late 60's, he helped feed the poor, homeless, and counseled the Hippies in the Haight-Ashbury District. Along the way the reader will see and feel Sean's personal struggles to honor his feelings and intuition. In addition to teaching Shakespeare and the great English and Irish poets and writers in San Francisco and Ventura, California. Sean taught Irish language and culture and delighted parishioners in San Francisco by delivering sermons in Tagalog to his Filipino parishioners as well as in Irish to the Irish community on St. Patrick's Day. In BEYOND THE WALLS, the reader will feel the poignancy and same sadness that Sean felt when he realized he could no longer be Christ-like and serve people's needs as a priest. Even after realizing how Church dogma and rules relegated priests to a narrow role that actually disconnected them from the people's daily life they were to serve, Sean still tried for years to serve both the Church and his growing intuition and spiritual development. Though eventually excommunicated, Sean long before had already moved beyond the Church's constricted role for priests. BEYOND THE WALLS is a timely and universal book for many people from different faiths and cultures. In the 21st Century the issues the author confronted are ones that many readers will relate to in the present period: 1) The Catholic Church, as well as other religious institutions disconnect from the people they serve by focusing on dogmas and by not adapting their rigid rules to meet the changing times and the spiritual needs of their people;