Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

11.00: Eva Daly; (Anniv); Frances Biggs (Dooley), (Month's Mind)
6.30: Muriel Roche and Pa Morrissey, (Anniv).

AS I WAS SAYING.....

Two Irish writers made the news this week for different reasons: the centenary celebrations for the birth of Samuel Beckett began. And John McGahern, sadly, died at the relatively early age of 71.

Both, in their very different times and ways, 'enjoyed' an uneasy relationship with Irish society as then established. Surprisingly, for both writers, religion was inspirational. Beckett's debt to biblical sources is so obvious! His 'Waiting for Godot' has been described, with justification, as a modern rendition of the Book of Job. After all he did have a rather auspicious theological beginning, born as he was a good Protestant on Good Friday, April 13th, 1906! Perhaps not surprisingly, suffering and Calvary would remain central to his works.

Both Beckett and McGahern sought solace in exile. In Beckett's case, exile was chosen. McGahern's 'exile' was of a different order. For a start, exile was imposed rather than chosen. He was sacked from his position as teacher by his Parish Priest following the publication of his second novel, The Dark, in 1965. He moved to London to work on the buildings.

He never allowed this to embitter him. On the contrary, he claimed that he had "nothing but gratitude to the Catholic Church". This is in stark contrast to the reaction of other writers, such as Frank McCourt, to what they saw as the unhealthy influence of religion on their lives. In recent years, many Irish writers have decried a miserable childhood and are critical of the negative influence of Catholicism on their lives. Compare that view with the gentle opinion of McGahern:

The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book. At that time, there were very few books in the house. The only pictures we could see were religious pictures, the Stations of the Cross. The only music we would hear was religious hymns; and it's (the Church) all I came to know of ceremony, even of luxury - the tulips that used to come in the flat boxes when I was an altar boy, the candles, the incense.

McGahern is gone now. He once stated: "I don't think anything really ends, but takes different forms, and almost everything comes round again if we can wait." In that wonderfully patient novel, 'That They May Face the Rising Sun' the scene involving the preparation of Johnny's corpse for the wake is a masterpiece. We read: "The innate sacredness of each single life stood out more starkly in death than in the whole of its natural life." In the case of McGahern himself, we hadn't to wait for his death to recognise the 'innate sacredness' of his own life.

'That he may face the Rising Sun'.

-Dick Lyng

Items of Interest

No Baggage: The Quaker Way

Quaker graveyards are spare, austere. No black Italian marble with gold lettering; no fancy carved angels; but simple, uniform headstones, hewn from a local quarry, arranged in neat rows. Similarly, the inscriptions follow the Quaker tradition: no titles, no ascription of virtues, no recounting of exemplary deeds. Just the name and dates of the deceased.

I thought of the Quaker graveyard as I recalled one or two issues of the past week that threaten to disfigure our human communities because they are the result of the opposite tendencies to those at work in a Quaker cemetery. For we crave status and privilege, we want prestigious titles - wasn't that what the recent row in Britain over peerages came down to?

This is not peculiar to the West. According to a report in the China Daily this week government officials across the country there are desperate not so much for titles as the status that a chauffeur driven car brings. In 2004, apparently, the Chinese government spent a scarcely believable £3.5 billion buying official cars, and the annual running costs are currently exceeding the defence budget. But all attempts to restrain and reign in the extravagance have failed.

What is at work here is that ancient vice, which Christianity has always seen as the mother and father of all vices, self-conceit or pride. We show off, we look down on others - for self-conceit is above all a competitive vice. The satisfaction lies not in having - as with greed, say - but in having what others do not have; for if they did, there would be nothing to be conceited about. But while it is only too easy to see pride in others, we are not good at seeing it in ourselves.

The disciples of Jesus were not immune from this disease either. On one occasion James and John came to him and asked for a favour - to be able to sit at his right and left hand when the kingdom came. Christ replies by recounting how Gentile rulers lord it over their subjects; and then he says, 'But it must not be so among you.'

The temptation, however, is strong. So how are we to avoid the pride that results in such sillinesses as the craving for titles or the status of the chauffered car? What would make us embrace those Quaker virtues of simplicity, modesty, humility? Perhaps the only antidote is to understand how that kind of self-conceit is not just bad for relationships with others, but in the end destroys any possibility of our living a contented life.

-Rev Dr Alan Billings, BBC 4.

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