Masses Today

6.30: Gerard Colleran, (Anniv)
11.00: Thomas Lenihan, (Anniv)
6.30: Kathleen Lynott, (Anniv)

AS I WAS SAYING...

The centenary of the birth of Patrick Kavanagh, modern Ireland's most overtly religious poet, is celebrated this week. He was born on the 21st of October 1904, in the village of Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan. He remains to this day the most popular and the most accessible modern Irish poet. His father was a shoemaker and had a small farm as a 'fall-back'. Kavanagh's formal education didn't extend beyond the primary school. He left at the age of thirteen, and became an apprentice shoemaker. He gave it up 15 months later, admitting that he didn't make one wearable pair of boots. For the next 20 years, Kavanagh would work on the family farm before moving to Dublin in 1939.

Kavanagh's interest in literature and poetry marked him out as different to other people in his local place. In a society that was insular and agricultural, a man's worth was measured by the straightness of the furrow he could plough, rather than the lines of poetry he could write. Yet Kavanagh was solidly grounded in the ordinary; the wet clay of Monaghan clung to his boots throughout his life.

Seamus Heaney, another countryman and northerner, has consistently acknowledged his own personal debt, and Irish poetry's debt to Kavanagh: "Kavanagh's great achievement was to make our subculture -the rural outback- a cultural resource for us all. He provided us with images of ourselves." In fact it is difficult to believe that Heaney's 'Station Island' wasn't written with one eye on Kavanagh's 'Lough Derg: A Poem.' Both men had made the pilgrimage several times in their youth.

Kavanagh himself was clear in his belief that 'poetry has to do with faith, hope and sometimes charity!' Of his 253 published poems, no fewer than 138 include explicitly religious themes, images and allusions. Consequently, his poetry has been referred to variously as 'religious', 'mystical', 'sacramental.' In my judgement, the latter term is the most satisfactory in that he refines from the raw elements of this world the vision of a benign God. Kavanagh sees the divine in the human, the eternal in the historical. As Tom Stack points out in his work on Kavanagh "The sacramental vision does not tamper with or twist the integrity of God's creation. A sacrament is not some 'holy thing' arbitrarily imported from outside our universe." Yet it would be a mistake to hijack Kavanagh as a Catholic propagandist or even as a Catholic apologist. His vision is too universal to be colonised by any particular creed. His 'theological' insights are given as coincidental 'asides', by-products of, -rather than central to- his poetic energy. Nevertheless, many of his poems are explicitly religious, such as 'Worship':

To your high altar I once came
Proudly, even brazenly, I said:
Open your tabernacles I too am flame
Ablaze on the hills of Being. Let the dead
Chant the low prayer beneath a candled shrine,
O cut for me life's bread, for me pour wine.

It is good to see that his work is still deeply appreciated. May he continue to 'cut for us life's bread, to pour fine wine.'

-Dick Lyng.

EVENTS THIS WEEK AND LAST

THROUGH MOSLEM EYES

(A few fanatics have given Islam a bad name. The Muslim month of Ramadan is being observed at present. This reflection of an ordinary Muslim on the practice of fasting shows us a more gentle side of Islam.)

Around the world, Muslims are now launching themselves upon a period of old-fashioned austerity. During the month of Ramadan, from dawn till dusk, my fellow-believers will avoid food, drink, and marital relations, and not a few other delights.

Fasting, of course, is hardly a Muslim invention; in fact, in assorted forms, it looks like a universal religious habit, followed not only in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, but in Hinduism and Buddhism as well. And the point of it in all these traditions is roughly the same. We are in the world, but are not quite of the world. By temporarily cutting ourselves off from absent-minded, instant gratification, we are reminded of our dependence on God's provision, and of the stillness of heart known only by those who have mastered their passions.

Real religion tends always to be counter-cultural, and in our times, nothing could be more retro than refusing the pleasures of the table. Our culture has blundered into the assumption that if a sensation is pleasurable, and brings no obvious harm to others, then we should have as much of it as possible. What else is there, after all?

Well, there are signs all around us of where this can lead. We shy away from talk of spiritual decay, but cannot quite ignore the more visible consequences of incessantly giving way to our desire for sensation. Those consequences are getting more serious all the time. In recent times, the western world has woken up to the dangers of obesity. A conference in London this week learned that 65 percent of the American population is obese or overweight. It's 22% in the UK, but rising, or, perhaps I should say, swelling. And in Ireland 13% claimed to be obese, 34% overweight.

Part of the problem, obviously, is a fatty, greasy diet, which is spreading like an oil-slick around the world. MacDonalds, much lambasted by parents of obese teenagers, is so worried about the image of fast food that it plans to swap its golden arches logo for..... guess what? A question mark!

But it will take more than corporate rebranding and side-salads to slim us down. We need to realise that somewhere in the last few decades we have lost our old-fashioned belief in self-restraint. A media-driven, advertising-saturated culture is not well-equipped to restore it. Advertisers may tell us to eat differently, but they will never tell us to eat less.

At 5.00am each morning, lights will come on in windows all over the world, as Muslim families rub their eyes and sit down to a pre-dawn meal. Fasting is hard work. Yet religion is, after all, about giving us the discipline to be moderate, to be neither ascetics nor hedonists. In today's unbalanced world, that is a gift worth working for.

-Abdal Hakim Murad

COMING EVENTS

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