Events This Week
- RESTORATION COMMITTEE MEETING: The Restoration Committee will meet as usual on tomorrow, Monday night at 5.30. We are meeting the architect, Richard Hurley, on Wednesday next, January 29th at 2.00 for a presentation on the development of matters to date. So it is vital that we assemble tomorrow to prepare adequately for the presentation. By the way, those committee members who haven't got a copy of the relevant chapters from the work 'Liturgical Guidelines for the Construction and Renovation of Churches' should contact Dick Lyng for the material. Familiarity with these excerpts will be very important preparation for the Wednesday meeting.
- DISRUPTION: Due to the renovations mentioned above, the church here will be closed for a period, at least for the month of August. The only ones who will have their plans really disrupted by this are the couples who have planned their wedding in St. Augustine's for that month. Of course we regret this disruption and the great inconvenience caused. We have managed to track down all the people involved with the exception of one couple: Rose Kelly & Dara Keogh. We have neither an address nor a contact number for them. (The booking must have been made over the phone). If any one of you reading this item is aware of the identity or whereabouts of such a couple, please let us know immediately so that we can contact them. The wedding day can be traumatic enough without having the church doors closed in your face on your big day!! Obviously, the sooner the better.
AS I WAS SAYING...
Thursday's Supreme Court decision on the rights of immigrants caused a considerable amount of controversy. I don't intend to contribute further to that controversy here. But, as with every group, these immigrants contain their own share of tricksters and chancers. I'm sure that some would not hesitate to use babies as passports! However, before we sprint for the high moral ground, we might reflect on our own relatively recent history and the centrality of emigration in that history. This reflective exercise should sensitise us to the plight of the strangers in our midst, since our ancestors too (and indeed contemporaries) were so often strangers in so many cultures. But the exercise should also alert us to the extent to which things have improved here over the last 15 years.
It is almost beyond belief now to think that four out of every five children born in Ireland between 1931 and 1941 had left Ireland by the end of the 1950s. (F. Tobin, "The Best of Decades: Ireland in the 1960s". Dublin 1984. Page 156). This trend continued right up to 1990. According to the Central Statistics Office, between 1982 and 1990, 253,000 people emigrated from Ireland. Sadly, mass emigration still blights the lives of an entirely different set of human beings in our day.
It could be argued that those who left in the 1990s were better equipped to deal with a new environment than were their predecessors of the 1950s. They were better educated and more aware of the realities of life. Television has shown them the world. Or at least that was the popular perception. Nevertheless, that perception can be misleading.
Their predecessors of the 1950s knew what a pick and shovel was. They had the skills required. They carved out a new life for themselves with these instruments. Many of those going abroad in the 1990s had come from less muscular backgrounds. Despite education and television, many of them were incapable of making their way in another culture. We were dealing once more with the classic division between the haves and have-nots, between the privileged who can choose to go, and the victims who are forced to go.
However, the powers-that-be would have us believe that those who emigrated have freely chosen that course, or that emigration is a result of "population excess". This is utter rubbish on both counts; the majority of our emigrants were economic refugees. They did not go of their own accord. They have been forced out by political and economic failure. Many of those forced to emigrate experience homesickness, loneliness, depression, anxiety, fear, disorientation, health problems. The loss was ours, but the pain was theirs. Emigration jolts the rhythm and routine of life. Emigration is more than a search for work. It involves loss of the familiar, of the family, and loved ones. But memory keeps us in contact with the past, with parents, with loved ones, places, traditions and events. This causes pain. But a person without a memory is impoverished. This is the dilemma of the emigrant: to abandon one's roots, or to live with the nagging toothache of the constant exile.
The refugees and the asylum seekers in our midst are facing all these problems and many more besides. Even when enlightened by our own troubled history in this regard, we can barely imagine the trauma that has befallen them.
-Dick Lyng.
"Quote, Unquote........ "
- "Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is dead' to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive." -G. K. Chesterton.
- "A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep." -W. H. Auden.
- "It is easier to get an actor to be a cowboy than to get a cowboy to be an actor." -John Ford.
- "We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death." -Nathaniel Hawthorne.
- "There never was a good war or a bad peace." -Benjamin Franklin.
- "Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come." -Carl Sandburg.
- "I'll dispose of my teeth as I see fit, and after they've gone, I'll get along. I started off living on gruel, and by God, I can always go back to it again." -S. J. Perelman.
- "Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home." -David Frost.
- "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books." -Sigmund Freud.
Double Standards
Two women friends met after many years.
"Tell me," said one, "what happened to your son?"
"My son? The poor, poor lad!" sighed the other. "What an unfortunate marriage he had. He married a girl who won't do a bit of work in the house. She won't cook, she won't sew, she won't wash or clean. All she does is sleep and loaf and read in bed. The poor boy even has to bring her breakfast in bed, would you believe it?"
"That's awful! And what about your daughter?"
"Ah! Now she's the lucky one! She married an angel. He won't let her do a thing in the house. He has servants to do the cooking and sewing and washing and cleaning. And each morning he brings her breakfast in bed, would you believe it? All she does is sleep for as long as she wishes, and she spends the rest of the day relaxing and reading in bed."
-From "Taking Flight", by Anthony de Mello.
Gravy
No other word will do. For that's what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. "Don't weep for me,"
he said to his friends. "I'm a lucky man.
I've had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don't forget it."
-Raymond Carver.
An Alternative View........
"Feminist challenges to the political system made their way, inevitably, to the Christian traditions. From the 1960s on, a growing number of feminist writers began to identify the many ways in which women had been banished to the margins of society, and especially of the Church. They exposed the misogynist assumptions that underpinned the works of many of even the most revered of Christian authors. These 'texts of terror', in which women were vilified, cursed, shunned and degraded have formed an important part of feminist theological reflection.
Accounts of women as 'the devil's gateway' (Tertullian), as 'a misbegotten male' (Aquinas), or as 'not really the image of God, save in her capacity as helpmate' (Augustine) abound in the classic texts of Christian tradition. These texts may sound quaint or even amusing to us today; but feminists insist that their legacies endure in the blatant sexism of contemporary Christian churches."
-Linda Hogan in "Christian Perspectives", (Dublin 2001).
Greatest ever.....
The "greatest Irish person of all time" is the founder of an order of nuns, according to an Irish newspaper opinion poll. Sr Nano Nagle beat two former presidents of Ireland, Mary Robinson and Eamon De Valera, and the literary giants, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce in the Sunday Tribune survey.
Nano Nagle was born in 1718 in Cork. She was educated in France and joined a Parisian convent, but returned to Ireland to work with poor Catholic children. She opened Catholic schools in Cork - although they were illegal at the time - which educated hundreds of children. In 1775 she founded an Order known subsequently as the Presentation Sisters. Today they number 3,500 in 27 countries, including 106 communities and 960 sisters in Ireland.
-The Tablet, (18 January, 2003)
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