Parish Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: Ronan Duignan, Colman
12.00: Anne Curran, (Anniv).
6.30: Colman & Sabina Cooke & Mary Fahy, Whitehall, (First Anniv).

AS I WAS SAYING.....

Even a mildly secular society (such as our own) will hastily dismiss taboos as 'primitive'. Yet the OED defines 'taboo' as 'a prohibition or restriction imposed by social custom'. In other words, the sanction is social rather than legal or religious. (Is 'political correctness' a modern manifestation of the power of taboo?)

Taboos usually attached themselves to central areas of human experience: sex, birth, marriage and death. Many of the taboos (in the sense of communal disapproval) surrounding sex have disappeared over the last couple of generation. Some shocking taboos surrounded death too, particularly suicide. One of the milder ones was a 'prohibition' against the burial of a victim in consecrated ground. Again, I have failed to find any explicit church support for this 'taboo', either in old moral theology manuals or in Canon Law. The prohibition seems to have arisen independently of official teaching Church. (But of course, it was not less powerful for that!)

In recent times, psychiatrists and other carers, have urged a rethink of the positive role of taboos in society. For example the Professor of Psychiatry at UCD, Dr Patricia Casey has argued that removing the stigma from suicide could unwittingly send out the message to vulnerable people that taking your life is an option in certain circumstances. Taboos and sanctions serve useful functions in controlling social behaviour. "Those who speak of the removal of the stigma of suicide should tread very warily indeed," Dr Casey has written. The overall suicide trend was upward and last year over 444 people, mostly men, died by their own hand.

Furthermore, she claims that many younger people who took their own lives did not have any long-term psychiatric illness but rather were reacting to some immediate life-crisis to which they saw no solution. They believed this crisis rendered their life meaningless. The decision to die stemmed from a belief their life was only of relative value rather than of absolute value. This view (that human life is only of relative rather than of absolute worth) is radically new in Irish society. Dr Casey also pointed out there has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the suicide issue and aspects of this were most informative and welcome. "On the down side however, I wonder if by constantly talking about it we were desensitising ourselves and others to it and unwittingly contributing to its increase," she said. "I also wonder if by removing the cultural and religious sanctions against it we are unwittingly presenting it to vulnerable people as a real option?"

However, Samaritans' Paul O'Hare disagrees. "The removal of taboos is central to informed discussion. Not talking about suicide just creates myths." In truth, this is an area about which we know very little. But one thing we know for certain is that suicide is a growing problem.

-Dick Lyng.

By the way.......

THE GRANDEUR OF GOD

It was surreal to sit in the garden yesterday watching my tomatoes ripen while hurricane Katrina stormed on. The damage is still being reckoned but I can't get out of mind a troubling emotion that came as I looked at the satellite images - a sense of beauty. On the ground was havoc, and yet from above this rolling wheel of force, three hundred miles across, beyond all human control, was awe-ful in the original sense of that word, full of awe. There was pattern and symmetry, the rolling, ragged edges, the dense void of the eye. The misery it has caused is not its fault - it has no mind, no will, it simply is what it is, a raging turbulence of air and water. And the beauty, though short lived, is patterned like so many other dynamic systems in nature, a whirlpool, a galaxy, a storm of particles; all of them made of the tension between order and chaos.

We feared that Katrina was a monster and she has been.. Along the Gulf Coast there will be a massive clean up operation, homes and businesses to be rebuilt and casualties to be taken care of. No one would have wanted to be there, and yet some of those who saw it close up clearly found something awesome in the terror. The response to catastrophe in the Biblical tradition is to mourn, but also to worship. In parts of the Bible God seems to live in a storm; his home is the thickest darkness, he comes flying on the wings of the wind, he speaks to Job from the heart of the whirlwind. Perhaps most surprisingly there is in the Gospels the story of Christ peacefully asleep in the back of a boat while a tempest rages all around. To worship is to be humbled by the mystery of all this, to recognise the dynamism of God's creation in both calm and storm.

Much of our contemporary religion is about making us feel better about ourselves and trying to raise some hope for the future of our world. We want to be secure in this world whatever we think about the next. There are probably some well-meaning preachers planning their next sermon on what the folks of Mississipi, Alabama and Louisiana did to bring the hurricane on themselves and how it was that through divine providence some suffered and some were saved. We like to make patterns and find meanings and yet I only have to look at Katrina to realise that the creativity of God stretches us far beyond any spiritual comfort zone. The creation is terrible and beautiful and always has been. Even as we cultivate our back gardens we are under the eye of the storm.

The Rev. Angela Tilby (BBC4, Thought for the Day)

From Failure Up

Can a man grow from the dead clod of failure
Some consoling flower
Something humble as a dandelion or a daisy,
Something to wear as a buttonhole in Heaven?
Under that flat, flat grief of defeat maybe
Hope is a seed.
Maybe this is what he was born for, this hour
Of hopelessness.
Maybe it is here he must search
In this hell of unfaith
Where no one has a purpose
Where the web of Meaning is broken threads
And one man looks at another in fear.
O God can a man find You when he lies with his face downwards
And his nose in the rubble that was his achievements?
Is the music playing behind the door of despair?
O God give us purpose

-Patrick Kavanagh.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of man-
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began-
That the Dog returns to his vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
when all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
the Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

-R. Kipling.