AS I WAS SAYING......
With the time-change last weekend, our days appear to have shortened dramatically. It is no coincidence that the Church calendar commemorates the Faithful Departed during the month of November. We marked it locally with a Service of Remembrance in the Church on Friday night last, and today we will celebrate Mass for our departed parishioners and fellow Augustinians in Forthill cemetery. Great crowds attend that celebration annually. It is a real celebration in that people insist on being there. They are engaging with something authentic, something deeply felt, something dreadfully sad, yet a sadness lightened by remembered love. On Cemetery Sunday, people confront the great questions of life and death, and the conundrum of sundered connections. Neither lashing rain nor rising floods will deter them.
These central questions banish to the margins the stupidities that now masquerade as 'ecclesiastical concerns'. Was the Cardinal Archbishop of Dublin slighted by Trinity College in the distant past? Was the Catholic population of Dublin slighted vicariously, as the Cardinal obviously believed? If so, should they not have been told sooner?! Was Archbishop Empey slighted by Des Connell? (Several Scriptural passages come readily to mind, but one stands out like a wagging finger: "A dispute arose among them about which should be reckoned the greatest......)"
These are the questions that now gobble up column inches and air-time. It is just not good enough to blame the 'Media' for this infantile carry-on. Unfortunately, the media doesn't have to invent this stuff. It is served up to them as material worthy of public attention. One can only hope that those among them with even a spark of sense possess sleeves sufficiently ample to accommodate the laughter!
People are crying out for guidance through the confusing and impermanent maze that life can be. Some dark corners of that maze could well yield to the kind light of the gospel. But where are the Christian leaders who can now hold and play that light effectively? Leaders in other places have done so with great skill and patent sincerity. Carlo Martini of Milan, and the late Basil Hume in Westminster are two examples. They spoke with authority, and that authority was firmly founded on two pillars: wisdom and humility. It is very difficult to sleight a humble man. I have tried it myself and it doen't work!!
Oliver Moloney has touched on this in a recent article: "In the light of my profound experience of pain, I have a far keener nose for what lacks authenticity. The concerns of our Church leaders are, in many respects, irrelevant to the real religious questions with which people wish desperately to engage: the meaning of life, the existence of God, the prospect of an afterlife, the significance of Jesus, the experience of salvation. These are the issues with which people are struggling. These are the issues they want to debate in a manner which respects their views, fears and experiences, and also their freedom to make up their own minds at the end of the day."
Maloney is right. All else is ultimately dross, material only for flagging dinner parties. Church leaders, above all, should know that. But do they? Like hell they do!! -D.L.
FATAL DISTRACTIONS
I think I will become a monk,
With bell and cell and little bunk,
Live a life of contemplation
Walled away from all temptation.
Spend my days with ink and quill,
And never have to pay a bill.
Reject the flesh and pub at night,
And then, perhaps, I'll start to write.
-Gerry Hanberry.
DEATH AND DYING
In the November issue of The Furrow, seven people were asked to address the following question: "Has the death of somebody close to you affected your religious faith? How, would you say?" Among those who replied was Brendan Comiskey, Bishop of Ferns, Wexford. This is his response:
"My mother died in a house fire, I lost four of my brothers within a space of five years, and two of my sisters-in-law died at a relatively young age, both from cancer. My father was ninety-three when he died. Although I grieved and wept many a tear at the passing of these family members, it was the death of a non-relative that had the greatest effect on my faith. Mary Moorehead lived across the fields from us. She was very old and I was very young, and we were close in the way that the very old and the very young can be close.I was about nine years old when Mary died. It was a long process and we all took turns minding her. She died on my watch. I was sitting by her bedside using a feather to keep her lips moistened. when Mary stopped breathing, I closed her eyes and put two coins on her eyelids, placed the blessed candle in her hands and a Bible under her chin to keep her mouth closed. I stopped the clock to record the time of death and opened the little window of her cottage to let her soul go home to God.
I decided to become a priest that morning. At no time afterwards did I think seriously of any other calling in life."
-Brendan Comiskey
SPUTNIK
Forty long years may have come and gone since, yet everybody remembers exactly where they stood in the chilly dawn of that November day. How eagerly we scanned the dim horizon until suddenly, with all the dramatic flourish of a shooting star, it appeared right over our heads. The Russian Sputnik, that very first man-made satellite was bleeping its flight path through the Irish sky.
The Class of 1957 was enormously impressed, standing on the front lawn of our boys' boarding school, not far from Dublin. There were some who vowed at once to become pilots; which at the time seemed a very logical first step. Others thought more in terms of Engineering with particular emphasis on rocket construction. But as I recall it, Research had the most enthusiastic supporters all fired up with important details such as the correct fuels to propel us into the heavens.
Not a whisper to be heard about that long coveted Double First in the Classics, Latin and Greek. A new star had arisen in the East whose name was Technology. Nothing from now on would ever be the same again.
-Sean Canning, on 'Sunday Miscellany'.SPEED MERCHANTS
"Is there a speed contest in some parishes on how short Mass should be?" asks an American friend who visited the West with her Irish-born husband last Summer. 'The new parish priest in Parish N. (naming the county Galway parish) must have the record.' she went on, adding: "I was almost floored at the co-ordination of taking the collection with other aspects of the Liturgy." And she concluded by condemning "the tacky crew of fellas standing barely inside the door," adding that her husband told her that it has always been like that!
Interesting how visitors see us, isn't it? -from Clio's Diary, in INTERCOM.