Masses Today

6.30: Martin & Kate Cleary, (Anniv)
11.00 John Finn, (Anniv)
6.30 Muriel Roache, (Anniv)



Events This Week






AS I WAS SAYING...

Iraq dominates all. This is as it should be. It is a horrible business. It is horrible to contemplate the extermination of so many fellow human beings. Modern warfare is a particularly strange business. Or at least the manner in which modern warfare is conducted and reported is bizarre in its superficial normality. The notion of 'embedded reporters' has far reaching implications. We are back to the question Pilate posed: 'What is truth?' Are these 'embedded reporters' just another agent of the army in which they find themselves embedded? Is seriously biased reporting better than silence?

However, the correspondents and their respective contexts form just a small part of the overall of 'militarised communications'. Both the technology of modern warfare itself and the technology of modern communications conspire to deprive brutal slaughter of its real horror. It is not that they conceal the killings; but they desensitise the 'spectator'.

The American writer, J.G. Ballard has pointed out that, before the Gulf War of 1991, our images of war came in the main from combat newsreels and black and white photographs. Goya's 'Disasters of War' and Picasso's 'Guernica' scarcely match for sheer horror the Vietnam newsreel of a naked girl, skin stripped from her back, stumbling along a road from a napalmed village, or the first film footage of Belsen and Dachau. Satellite television now brings the realities of 'War on Iraq' not just into our living rooms but into our brains, with scarcely known effects on the imagination.

Modern newsreels, like those of Vietnam and the Falklands, gave us a convincing idea of what it was like to be a soldier, but the TV reports from the present Iraq debacle incite our imaginations in a wholly new way, urging us to become cruise missiles in person. Breath-taking super-technologies confirm every Rambo-style fantasy of battlefield omnipotence. The nose-cameras mounted on the laser-guided smart bombs plunge us through doorways and ventilation shafts, every hit a bulls-eye, stored away for future reference in the viewers memory.

Can the old-fashioned war artist with brushes and paint box ever hope to match this electronic video-game? The artists of the Second World War found themselves competing with the newsreel and the photograph, but these were recorded for the most part by men and women in the field of battle, who shared the danger and the panic. One gets the distinct impression that our 'embedded correspondent' is a highly protected specimen! I am not at all taking issue with this. But it does add to the artificial pall of normality that hangs today over the battlefield.

In today's world, only the poet can capture the sheer horror -and hence the humanity- that eludes the cameraman. Few have done so as effectively as soldier-poet Dale Carver:

He recorded minutely in memory
all that came to pass,
then, ill of soul, wrote poetry,
as a sick cat eats grass.

Slick euphemisms such as 'Smart warfare' and 'surgical strikes' deprive the victims of their humanity. We sorely need a few more 'sick cats'!

-Dick Lyng.




A PROUD HISTORY

By 941, when lightning brought down the Green Dome in Baghdad, the capital of the Caliphate had spread in all directions. A warrior's fort at first, it had by now become a prosperous metropolis with race courses and public baths, hospitals and law schools, marketplaces, zoos, and date palms beyond counting. Unlike many other cities in the arid Middle East, Baghdad was well-watered. Old descriptions make it seem a city green as Oz.

Baghdad in the 10th century had a million inhabitants. It was the most cosmopolitan place on earth, Jews, Moslems and a great variety of Christian sects and schismatic living in apparent harmony. In the tenth century, a contemporary historian referred to the city as 'the most animated debating chamber I have ever known'. In Europe at the time, where most people lived in huts, there was nothing to compare with it. Baghdad had 100 bookstores. And the grandest library assembled since the sack of Alexandria's. And the city University, "The House of Wisdom," where in 825 a man called Khwarizmi wrote a book of mathematics, the Hisab al-jabr, which would eventually give Europe the word "algebra," and more than just the word.

In 917, an ambassador from Byzantium was received in the city. An account of his visit has managed to survive. He had seen there, he reported, 10,000 gilded breastplates in the caliph's palace. And a pond of shining mercury on which floated golden boats. And a tree of gold and silver on whose precious branches birds of metal sang. There were, he added, 100 lions, each with an attendant, in the Baghdad zoo.

And then the city fell. Medieval Baghdad was not entirely sublime. Many plagues and floods and scarcities visited the city. Its dunghills must have stunk. And still its splendours shone.

Baghdad was destroyed in 1258. That year the Mongols came.





POINTS TO NOTE





Washing of the Feet on Holy Thursday

I introduced this topic here last Sunday. I referred to the centrality of this symbolic act the whole meaning of Easter. On that night we commemorate the institution of the Eucharist, the Body of Christ. The Washing of the Feet stresses the belief that WE are now the Body of Christ,. This stuff is not empty ritual; this touches real life. The Washing of the Feet then makes the essential life-giving connection between Eucharist and Service. Eucharist that doesn't find expression in Service is empty. Service that doesn't find expression in Eucharist is shallow.

Yet we find it increasingly difficult to get volunteers for this exercise. So the Liturgy Group has discussed alternative ways of securing volunteers and of conducting the ritual itself. The rule states that the twelve people 'selected' should be males, since they are representative of the twelve Apostles! (Talk about losing contact with reality!) In fairness, very few pay any attention anymore to that sort of chauvinistic stuff. We will attempt to draw as many of the congregation as possible into the ritual. But how can this be done with both efficiency and dignity? We will explain plans further as Easter Week draws closer.





EASTER HOUSES

During the last weeks of Lent
our play was earnest.
We'd hack sods out of the grass
and stack them among the trees
into four long walls.
The Easter house never had a roof -
what we needed was a place
where we could boil eggs outside.

After the battened-up heart of winter,
the long fast of spring,
life had come out again to nest in the open;
again, the shell was chipped from within.


-Moya Cannon.





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