Parish Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: Thomas & Josephine Staunton, (Anniv)
12.00: Ann & James Sharkey, (Anniv).

AS I WAS SAYING.....

With the clock going back, our days appear to have suddenly shortened. It is no coincidence that we honour the dead during November. We marked it locally with the Church of Ireland community on Wednesday night last. Today we will celebrate Mass in Forthill cemetery. Great crowds attended on Wednesday, and will do so again today. People know that they are engaging with something authentic, something deeply felt. Here we confront the great questions of life and death, and the conundrum of sundered connections with a sadness lightened by remembered love.

It is a commonly accepted cliché that we Irish are obsessed with the past, that we never forget. It is also said, incidentally, that we are a 'funereal people' obsessed with death and the trappings of death. Unlike the USA, and the rest of western Europe, the Irish are still a 'funeral-going' people. Whereas the English-speaking world has steadfastly 'privatised' death, Irish society has insisted on publicly acknowledging its awful reality. This practice is woven into our way of life, to the way we think, feel and act. However, despite accelerating modernisation, Irish society still remains a highly personalised web, where 'who you belong to' is of greater interest than 'what you work at'. This reality, rather than any inherent morbid psychic predisposition, may well explain the fact that our dead are central to our social as well as our personal concerns. Hence funerals are immensely important to us as a people.

Some cultural observers hold that the Irish are an excessively morbid people. The late Pat Sheeran from UCG liked to note the 'politicisation of death' through the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland. 'What other culture has attached such political symbolism to the coffin?' he asked.

Traditionally, the Hunger Strike has been a potent weapon in the Irish Republican arsenal. Death was used as an immensely effective weapon in the propaganda war. (Admittedly, Sheeran was writing before Islamic suicide bombers intruded!).

According to this school, the Irish psyche functioned as a fertile infrastructure for a particular type of Catholicism, a Catholicism of the 'Valley of Tears' variety. The importance which Catholicism attaches to the Holy Souls fits neatly into our supposed psychic patterns. Catholicism does indeed have the ritual flexibility to address the profound mystery of death and dying. But I would argue that Catholicism's effectiveness in this regard has its source in a universal human longing rather than in any localised cultural or ethnic need. This is not just maudlin sentimentality. The human heart needs 'to remember in hope'.

'Remembrance' has a stronger grip still on the British imagination. Sunday next will (as always) be a solemn, sacred day when the fallen will be remembered with pride. The Cenotaph is as central to British iconography as is the coffin to Republican imagination. The need to remember with pride is common to every culture. The act of 'remembering in hope' is profoundly Christian. This distinction is crucial: faith brings to full Christian expression what must have started out as a vague cultural suspicion! November belongs to all.

-Dick Lyng

Incidentally....

Why can't we all stand at the same time?

Questions about posture at Mass are frequent. Occasionally, they come with a plea for standing for the Eucharistic Prayer or for more kneeling - the first often stated with liturgical reasoning, the second with the criticism of Vatican II.

For a start, standing is the accepted posture for the introductory and concluding rites of Mass. But it is also the posture for the prayer after Communion which brings up the objection that people will then have to sit for announcements and, maybe, a collection before again standing for the conclusion. But what is so difficult about standing for a prayer and then sitting?

Standing is also given for the prayer over the gifts to the end of Mass but this allows all sorts of variants. Why not settle for what most of us are used to but stand for the preface, that is, from its opening dialogue to the end of the Sanctus. Some dioceses already do this. It could easily become the standard for the country.

-Fr Paddy Jones, Director of Liturgy Centre.

Autumn Churchyard

Do not search for me down among the marble headstones
where rooks on November branches
make gathering cry for the dying year.
Do not look for me where summer's leaves
decay on waves of winter grass.
Do not imagine me as you last saw me;
pale, bruised and empty of life,
I am not here.
But see the shaft of sunlight
which spots the grey dark lake of late November
on the heather hillside of Donegal.
Or listen to the thrush squeeze out the last notes
of its sunny summer song.
Or hear the laughter as I splashed water on my sister's face
on the sun drenched beach that summer before I left you.
I go on playing not where winter withers
but where spring
is eternal.

-John McCullagh.