It is leading up to Christmas in a difficult year and so I wanted to write a little bit about fear and darkness and the path back to the light as well as the hope that things can be fixed and that life can and will get better. So, I thought about stories I know that reflect that and one which I am very fond of sprang to mind. It involves some of my favourite things (ghosts and chatting) and is a strange but uplifting little medieval Irish story of the undead, unselfishness and the power of hope and kindness. I hope this speaks to you as it has often done to me. When the abbot met the ghost The Irish annals are an important historical source for medieval Ireland. A record of wars, deaths, marriages and major events in Ireland over many hundreds of years. Much of the material included in them is what you might expect – deaths, raids, the rise and fall of kings etc etc - but some of it deals with events that are somewhat stranger… In the year 899 according to the Annals of the