Masses Today

6.30: Paddy Coogan, (Anniv)
11.00 Deceased members of the Colleran family.
6.30 Michael Burke, (Anniv)



EVENTS THIS WEEK






AS I WAS SAYING...

Halloween, and the onset of winter sharpens our awareness of time and eternity. November is the 'Month of Remembering', and not just for exclusively religious reasons. In Catholic folklore, it is the 'Month of the Dead'. But, as we shall see, very often, the act of remembering has a sharp a political edge to it.

We Irish are supposedly obsessed with the past, a truly 'funereal people' obsessed with death and the trappings of death. The late Pat Sheeran of UCG was himself obsessed with this supposedly Irish obsession! According to Pat, more than any of our Western peers, we have remained doggedly a 'funeral-going' people. Funerals still fill our churches. Die in England and the chances are you will have a lonely exit, ritually speaking at least. There, and in the States, death has been 'privatised'. (In the 1960s, Jessica Mitford addressed this issue brilliantly in her book "The American Way of Death.") But Irish society has insisted on publicly acknowledging death's awful reality. This practice is tightly woven into our way of life. However, despite modernisation, Irish society still remains a highly personalised web, where 'who you belong to' is of greater interest than 'what you work at'. This reality, rather than any inherent morbid psychic strand, may well explain the fact that our dead are central to our social and our personal concerns. Hence funerals are still immensely important here.

In support of his thesis that the Irish are an excessively morbid people, Sheeran pointed to the politicisation of death through the hunger strikes in the Republican tradition. What other culture has attached such political symbolism to the coffin, he asked. We saw further evidence of during the week with the dispute concerning the final destination of the coffin of the IRA victim Jean McConville. This politicisation of death and dying could not have taken place without the morbid predisposition of the Irish psyche. Sheeran surely has a point here. Traditionally the Hunger Strike has been a potent weapon in the Irish Republican arsenal. Death was (and still is) used as a immensely effective weapon in the ongoing propaganda war.

According to this school, Irish psyche functioned as a fertile infrastructure for a particular type of Catholicism, a Catholicism of the 'Valley of Tears' variety. The importance accorded by Catholicism to the Holy Souls fits neatly into our supposed psychic patterns. Catholicism does indeed have the ritual richness and flexibility to address the profound mystery of death and dying. But Catholicism's effectiveness in this regard surely has its source in universal human longing rather than in any localised cultural need. It is not just a sentimental or morbid reminiscence. No matter how brutally and systematically religion is suppressed, the belief in an afterlife persists. This is so obvious in Chinese history. The human heart needs 'to remember in hope'. The spirits of the ancestors are central there.

'Remembrance' has a stronger grip still on the British imagination. Remembrance Sunday is a sombre, sacred day. The Cenotaph is as central to British iconography as is the coffin to Republican imagination. The need to remember with pride is common to every culture. The act of 'remembering in hope' is profoundly Christian. This distinction is crucial.

-Dick Lyng.




VILLANELLE FOR AN ANNIVERSARY

A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard,
The atom lay unsplit, the west unwon,
The books stood open and the gates unbarred.
The maps dreamt on like moondust. Nothing stirred.
The future was a verb in hibernation.
A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.
Before the classic style, before the clapboard,
All through the small hours of an origin,
The books stood open and the gates unbarred.
Night passage of a migratory bird.
Wingflap. Gownflap. Like a homing pigeon
A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.
Was that his soul (look) sped to its reward
By grace or works? A shooting star? An omen?
The books stood open and the gates unbarred.
Begin again where frosts and tests were hard.
Find yourself or founder. Here, imagine
A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.
The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

-SEAMUS HEANEY (1939-)





LETTING GO

"In all our lives we meet situations where we have to let go, even if we don't want to. When somebody dies, when somebody betrays us, when somebody is unfaithful to us, it can be shattering, it can be embittering, it can poison us. But these situations give us choices. If we choose to let them go, we can be transformed. In this way, painful experiences can be fruitful and, despite the hurt, can be our opportunity to grow, if we can make that choice, if we can take that risk.

It is not easy to die to old ways, but letting go does more than break with some of our past and deplete what we thought was important. Every little death we die, every little letting go, turns us into something new. Every search, every new question about what is, forms and shapes us, and it brings new freedom, new life."

-Sr. Stan.




Oiche Shamhna

Four thousand years ago, our Celtic ancestors built Newgrange. It was "a house of eternity" for their royal dead. It is huge. On the deadest and shortest day of the year, 21 December, a shaft of sunlight travels the length of the passage, from a roof box above the door. The rays pan across the spirals on the boulder. For 17 minutes the chamber has light. Then, darkness. Not for another 12 months will sunlight warm the spirits of the dead in the depths of Newgrange. I was in this chamber once and will never forget the sense of being connected with the ache of those Celts to reach beyond death to some understanding of the afterlife.

In 1926, Howard Carter, the archaeologist, was working in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. He broke through to the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Inside the coffin he found the body of the king. On the forehead was a tiny garland of flowers, still coloured after 3,000 years. Pharaoh's young widow had put them there, as a gesture of belief in the afterlife. The year was 1342 BC.

This weekend always reminds me of the room in Newgrange, and the flowers on a pharaoh's forehead. 2 November is the Feast of All Souls. The Celts believed that the world was "out of time" between sunset on the last day of October and sunrise the first day of November, Oiche Shamhna. On that night the veil between life and beyond was drawn back and the dead mingled with the living. Normality was suspended. We could communicate with our dead.

In time, ease with the dead degenerated into fear of them and we filled the night with games to cover our fright. Halloween. The church reclaimed the night and created All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day. Not to squash the wisdom of the Celts but to fill out what they had vaguely believed. Not to mock Newgrange but to honour its suspicion that we do survive death. The Christians began to bury their dead in separate graves, not in huge mounds, to show that each life has a destiny. Over the graves they placed Celtic crosses.

The perspective changed. The ancient burial mounds were flat and hugged the earth. The Celtic cross pierced the sky. In Newgrange the sun travelled a narrow passage to pass pale light over the boulder in the chamber. With the Celtic cross, the circle connecting the arms was there all day every day. Carved in stone. Signs of eternity. I love this season. It is Celtic. Half superstition, half Christian. Who knows which is which? Who cares? These are the days that feed the soul and imagination.

They touch on the biggest question of all. What next? St. Paul gives the makings of an answer. He said we are people who live in a tent, until such time as we live in our real home. The tent we pitch where our heart and our ambitions and loves lead us. The tent, and our living in it, leaves its mark on the skin of the earth and in the lives we touch. At some point, though, we fold the tent and take up residence in a home prepared for us by God. A place where the sun shines every day, where flowers don't whither, where the birds of the air are known by name and the cross evaporates into the circle of God's eternal love."

-Colm Kilcoyne.




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