CHRISTMAS COLLECTIONS
Out of sheer lack of something more productive to do, I returned to the Christmas Mass statistics during the week and ran the comparative grid over them. To facilitate comparison, I converted the £s of previous years to €s. Again, we should be cautious when equating 'takings' with attendance, but it's the only yardstick we have! Another matter to be noted is that for the last 2 years we have only two Christmas Masses (Midnight & 11.00am). In former years we had the 9.00am and the 12.15 in addition. Despite this reduction, there has been a consistent increase in the overall Christmas collection. The most dramatic increase this year is to be seen in the 11.00 Mass. As you will see from the chart below, the popularity of the Midnight Mass seems to have declined slightly. (My own perception was that the crowd at Midnight was up on last year!). Given all that has happened in the Irish Church recently, this turnout was truly remarkable. It was great to see such crowds.
YEAR 12.00AM 11.00AM OTHERS TOTALS 1987 660.26 615.82 387.27 1,663.36 1988 746.61 844.38 438.06 2,029.04 1989 789.78 749.15 424.09 196,302 1993 967.54 1,155.46 415.2 2,538.21 1994 905.32 1,079.28 505.36 2,489.96 1995 747.88 985.32 444.41 2,177.60 1996 1,015.79 965 693.28 2,674.07 1997 975.16 1,615.11 359.34 2,949.60 1998 1,333.22 2,606.77 286.96 4,239.66 1999 1,263.39 2,010.00 366.95 3,640.34 2000 1,276.09 2,628.36 370.76 4,275.21 2001 1,508.45 2,602.96 366.95 4,478.37 2002 1,954.13 2,728.67 None 4,682.79 2003 1,875.00 3,395 None 5,270 Increase -4.04% +24.41 +17.37%
AS I WAS SAYING...
It's a lazy time, an in-between time. There is a certain reluctance to resume living again after the 'unreality' of the Christmas festivities. It is a time for both reflection and resolution. I must confess that I lean heavily towards the former while resolutely shunning the latter! Resolutions, be they New Year or otherwise, simply do not agree with me.
It was difficult to ignore all the retrospective material in the newspapers in the course of the last week. Unfortunately, some days the immediate prevailed over the retrospective: the terrible earthquake in Iran, killing over 30,000 people, brought the old year to a tragic conclusion. And the New Year began with the killing of Archbishop Michael Courtney, the Vatican envoy on a peace mission in Burundi. These two tragedies seemed to symbolise the fragility of the human condition: we can be singled out for slaughter by one of our own, or nature itself can betray humanity with dramatic cruelty.
The killing in Burundi highlights the tragedy that is Africa today. That unfortunate continent is proving to be the Achilles Heel of humanity, from a political, social, economic and environmental point of view. Throughout the world, one billion people face chronic hunger. 24,000 die daily. 75 per cent of these are children. One billion people world-wide have no access to safe drinking water. Currently more than 40 million Africans are threatened by famine. Drought, flooding and economic collapse have brought on major food shortages.
Africa is still bedevilled by political instability and violence. With a handful of outstanding exceptions, the African peoples in general have been let down badly by their own political leaders. Perhaps their political development has been stunted by their colonial legacy. And they have surely been betrayed by their former colonial masters. Unscrupulous western arms dealers have found in Africa a ready market for their death-dealing surpluses. As a Vatican official made clear this week, the gun that shot Michael Courtney originated in the Europe.
To compound their political and social problems, the African people have now to contend with the most deadly scourge humanity has encountered since the Black Death: AIDS. 75 million people have been infected by AIDS during the last two decades. 26 million people have died from the disease. 80 per cent of the fatalities have been on the African continent. We who live complacent 'normal' lives find it difficult to absorb the enormity of the tragedy that is Africa today. We will make a special effort this year (under the aegis of the "Augustinian Hunger Awareness Campaign") to inform ourselves of the African dilemma.
However, all is not bleak by any means. The Cold War has been over for almost 15 years now. Europe is moving inexorably towards greater integration, with Ireland at the hub for six months! That horrible nuclear threat has receded. Even 'rogue states' like Libya have come to recognise that conventional politics is, in the long run, the most effective weapon to hand. Politics seems to have run into the sands in Northern Ireland. Yet we should not lose sight of the fact that, a mere 20 years ago, up to 400 people were dying violently in the province every year. It is a time for counting our meagre blessings too!
Have a happy, peaceful and healthy New Year. Thanks for everything
-D.L.
THE NEW YEAR.
My research tells me that the celebration of the new year is the oldest of all holidays. It was first observed in ancient Babylon about 4000 years ago. In the years around 2000 BC, the Babylonian New Year began with the first New Moon after the Spring Equinox. The beginning of spring is a logical time to start a new year. After all, it is the season of rebirth, of planting new crops, and of blossoming. January 1, on the other hand, has no astronomical nor agricultural significance. It is purely arbitrary. The Babylonian new year celebration lasted for eleven days. (I wonder if this is the origins of our own 12 days of Christmas?) Each day had its own particular mode of celebration, but it is safe to say that modern New Year's Eve festivities pale in comparison.
The Romans continued to observe the new year in late March, but their calendar soon fell out of synchronisation with the sun. In order to set the calendar right, the Roman senate, in 153 BC, declared January 1 to be the beginning of the new year. But tampering continued until Julius Caesar, in 46 BC, established what has come to be known as the Julian Calendar. It again established January 1 as the new year. But in order to synchronise the calendar with the sun, Caesar had to let the previous year drag on for 445 days.
However, in AD 567 the Council of Tours abolished January 1 in favour of March as the start of a new year, varying the actual day to coincide with the Spring Equinox. New Year celebrations lasted for several days. The first day of the new year was moved back to January 1 with the advent of the Gregorian Calendar by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.
From the very beginning, the Church was openly hostile to New Year celebrations. But as Christianity became more established, the church began having its own religious observances concurrently with many of the pagan celebrations. New Years Day soon came to be observed as the Feast of Christ's Circumcision. (This feast was dropped in relatively recent years in favour of Mary the Mother of God). In fact January 1 has been celebrated as a holiday by Western nations for only about the past 400 years.
The tradition of using a baby to signify the new year was begun in Greece around 600 BC. It was their tradition at that time to celebrate their god of wine, Dionysus, by parading a baby in a basket, representing the annual rebirth of that god as the spirit of fertility. Early Egyptians also used a baby as a symbol of rebirth. Although the early Christians denounced the practice as pagan, the popularity of the baby as a symbol of rebirth forced the Church to re-evaluate its position. The Church finally allowed its members to celebrate the new year with a baby, which of course came to symbolise the birth of the baby Jesus.
-Dick Lyng.
WALKING ON WATER
Perhaps God is not the shore
on which, like grounded boats, we end
our journeying;
perhaps God
is the ocean we step out on
through death, into our origins.
The sea surrounds us in the way, we hope,
Gods care surrounds us;
out there, shark bodies
are long and lissom as a whip;
there is brill, black sole and the breadcrumb flesh of crabs
tasting of the essence of sea;
here ravens are riding the air above us, groaning;
and somewhere, circling offshore
there is a seal in mourning, its great love lost;
save me. O Lord, when the waters take my soul.
-John F. Deane.
MEMORABLE QUOTES
- "Its better to be wanted for murder than not to be wanted at all." -Marty Winch.
- "A thing of duty is a boy forever." -Flann O'Brien (on the perennial youthfulness of policemen).
- "Never descend to the ways of those above you." -George Mallaby.
- "I'm not living with you. We occupy the same cage." -Tennessee Williams.
- "We shared the skunk - why not the mink?"- Wife borrowing mink coat from her husband's mistress.
- "Pinter, Osborne, Arden and Wesker were the four hoarse men of the new apocalypse." -Tom Stoppard.
- "We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while we boast to the others." -L.P. Smith.
- "He was born with the attitude towards all attractive women that a fisherman has towards all the trout in the stream, and he never saw any reason to change it." -Rex Stout.
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