- Next Sunday's Masses (September 12th): 6.30: Sylvester, Kathleen & Nellie O'Sullivan; 11.00: Jimmy Tully (High St.) 6.30: Joseph & Esther Creane.
AS I WAS SAYING...
More young men in Ireland die at their own hand than in car accidents. That is a shocking statistic. It is a cruel conundrum at the heart of modern Ireland: just when we achieved a level of affluence to meet our physical needs, other needs emerged that are far more critical, and far more difficult understand, let alone address. And suicide is such a shocking act. Families are devastated. The causes of suicide are as varied as the victims. Yet experts, like Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, agree that intense loneliness is a factor common to all suicides. Loneliness, obviously, is not a new problem. Human beings have always been lonely. However, it is the belief of many that today we are experiencing loneliness with a much greater intensity than ever before. Why? There are several interconnected reasons:
First of all, because of the amount of leisure time which our culture affords us, we have the luxury of being able to focus on our more interpersonal needs. Up until recent generations people simply had less time and energy to spare for their emotional and spiritual needs. Most of their time and energy had, of necessity, to be spent at long hours of work, often physical and tiring. They laboured, often inhumanely, to move themselves from 'rags to riches', economically and socially.
We, their offspring, are living in more affluent circumstances. As a result, we focus more on our emotional and spiritual needs - or we spend a lot of time and money trying to distract ourselves from them! them. We have the luxury, perhaps never before afforded a people, of being able to experience our loneliness in its utmost depth. Leisure time and affluence, because they have taken away from us the need to struggle to survive physically, have helped to throw us back upon ourselves and forced us to search for deeper meaning, interpersonal and spiritual. It has produced a 'higher psychological temperature'. This has allowed for a certain liberation of psychological energy, at least potentially so. However, the energy released by affluence and leisure is not clearly focused. Indeed it is experienced more as a restlessness, a driving force pushing us into things, a loneliness. It is no accident, therefore, that we spend billions on entertainment, on alcohol, on travel, or anything which promises to give us some respite from the restlessness inside of us.
In addition there is the fragmentation of our society. Our grandparents belonged to the 'extended family' where anonymity and privacy were rare. We belong to the nuclear family where privacy is a core value. We seek our own private life, with a private house, a private car, a private office, a private room, a private telephone, a private television, and so on. Then we wonder why we are lonely. We live in huge cities, among millions of people, and we relate, in a meaningful way, to very few; partly because in so many areas of our lives there is no longer any need to share with others. We seek our privacy and freedom with a righteous zeal, and often intensify our own loneliness as we attain them.
Modern advertising has left us with the impression that the riddle of loneliness can be solved. We are among the few who are missing out on life! But human beings have always been lonely. However, our loneliness today seems to be intensifying, swelling, into a crescendo which, in some cases at least, breaks the will to live. The only antidote is authentic community.
-Dick Lyng.
EVENTS THIS WEEK AND LAST
- CURA COLLECTION:
The Church collection this weekend is for Cura. This is a confidential support service for women, their families and all those distressed by an unwanted pregnancy.CURA offers support, counselling, ante-natal and post natal care as well as after care for mothers and their babies. It is a free service offered to everyone, irrespective of marital status or religious persuasion. While the protection and support of the unborn child is the first concern of CURA, the life and well-being of the mother is of equal importance. In establishing CURA, the Church was endeavouring to make present to the women of our time, the love, mercy and compassion that Christ extended to all who met Him during his life on earth. CURA - GALWAY operates a 24 hour telephone service, seven days a week. 091-562558. The office is open from 9.30 am - 5 pm Monday - Friday. Advice can be obtained on a wide range of available services
THE AGE OF TRANSIENCE
Some time ago my wife sent our twelve-year-old daughter to a supermarket just a few blocks down from our Manhattan home. She had been there with us a few times before. She soon returned, perplexed. 'It must have been torn down' , she said, 'I couldn' t find it.' Of course it hadn' t been torn down. New to the neighbourhood, Karen had merely looked on the wrong block. But she is a child of the Age of Transience, and her immediate assumption -that the building had been razed and replaced- was a natural one for a twelve-year-old child growing up in the United States at this time. Such an idea would probably never have occurred to a child faced with a similar predicament even half a century ago. The physical environment was far more durable, our links with it less transient.
-Alvin Toffler in 'Future Shock' .
Absence
On my own I swore I'd settle calmly down:
Hours later, plans threadbare, my mind hovers
Uneasily; again I wander the evening town,
My aloneness grazed by each pair of passing lovers.
Halved, my life is now unreal, as though,
Rootless, the everyday events are tossed
Around in uncompleted reverie; in midflow
You left a sentence, the conversation's theme is lost.
We too have myths, symbols, a world of our own,
A universe of tangled memories, hopes and schemes;
Counterpoised within that dovetailed zone,
We share our chosen take-for-granted dreams.
Without you, my love, too many thoughts unspoken,
Words are babble, a sacred thread is broken.-Micheal O'Saidhail.
LAYMAN'S VIEW
My three children go to Mass with me every weekend. The two boys say nothing but my younger daughter tells me, quite often, that Mass is boring and asks me when it will be over. 'When you' re eighteen,' I feel like saying. I hope they will continue to attend Mass with me until they reach adulthood. Then they can decide for themselves.
Sometimes it occurs to me that not only has Mass, as currently 'celebrated' , little to offer children, it doesn't appear to do much for adults either. A look around most churches reveals vacant faces and quiet indifference. And I wonder what motivates me to go there. Habit perhaps, continuing a tradition inherited from my parents? A desire to identify with something outside myself? Some vague religious sense? A need to believe in a life after death? I'm not really sure.
Like many people in Ireland I inherited a blind, unthinking Catholicism. Religion was all about rules and regulations, rosaries and litanies, fasting and abstinence, denial of the flesh and of the world. We were assured it was important but it was a heavy, depressing burden in our lives. We were even slapped in school on Monday for not attending the 9.30 children's Mass on Sunday. The reactionary counter-reformation spirit had survived long after it had served its purpose.
The Second Vatican Council, under the guidance of John XXIII, changed everything. It took people out of the stuffy, dark Jansenistic parlour where we felt oppressed and uncomfortable and brought us into a modern living room with large windows and bright colours, a place where we could feel at home. Change is always painful and over the years some older people have become nostalgic about the past. They feel that their faith and their Church have been undermined. They long for past certainties, the faith of our fathers, the old hymns, the catechism, the Latin Mass and all the other religious rituals. I understand their anxieties, but do they speak to the future?
-Joe Coy.
Quotable Quotes
- "I can sympathise with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about someone else's happiness." -Aldous Huxley.
- "Playing snooker gives you firm hands and helps to build up character. It is the ideal recreation for dedicated nuns." -Luigi Barbarito.
- "How few of his friends' houses would a man choose to be at when he is sick. " -Samuel Johnson.
- "Many years ago I chased a woman for almost two years, only to discover that her tastes were exactly like mine: we both were crazy about girls." -Groucho Marx.
- "I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already well catered for within the scope of any domestic establishment." -Alan Bennett.
- "My definition of marriage: it resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them." -Sydney Smith.
- "It takes a woman twenty years to make a man of her son, and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him." -Helen Rowland.
THE DARK AGES?
Some of you may remember the horrible villain from the film "The Name of the Rose", the inquisitor, Bernardo Gui. A recent study of the real Bernardo Gui has tallied up all 633 sentences he imposed between 1308 and 1323. During that time, 136 people were ordered to wear crosses on their clothes at all times, 307 people were imprisoned for life (over half of these sentences were later commuted), and 41 people were handed over to be executed by the state. Other sentences included performing pilgrimages and going on crusade. Not a single witch was burned by Bernardo, despite Hollywood' s claim. Now, one could hardly claim that Bernardo was an amiable, humane sort of chap, or that the Inquisition was really a Carnival that got slightly out of hand. Yet with over 500 executions in the United States since 1990, and 3,670 people on death row, one sometimes wonders which period is more deserving of the epithet "The Dark Ages".
A Priest's Prayer
"Dear Lord, so far today, Lord, I've done all right. I haven't gossiped, haven't lost my temper, haven't been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish or over-indulgent. And I'm very thankful to you for that.
But...in a few minutes, Lord, I'm probably going to need a lot more help because I'm going to get out of bed."
-(A Canadian bishop.)
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