Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

11.00: Seamus Breathnach , (Anniv).
6.30: Margaret & Michael Joe Walsh, (Old Malt)., (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

If you can define a society by its celebrities, then we're a pretty superficial lot. A few are genuine heroes, but the rest are just famous for being famous - or sometimes infamous. But let us suppose that beneath the surface of our candy-floss celebrity culture are some truths about human nature trying to get out. What might they be trying to tell us about ourselves?

I suspect it is saying something about our need as a nation for certain singular personalities, for a tiny few with a bit of magic about them who stand out from the crowd. We need leaders and leadership. You will all remember the funeral of Pope John Paul, and the millions who flocked to Rome to be present at the papal obsequies. Here was a celebrity Pope if ever there was one. I always felt uneasy about his 'superstar' status. It didn't seem entirely right that the success of a religion should depend on the charismatic qualities of its leader rather the values it stood for. But that's human nature for you.

We are tribal animals with a herd instinct, and our ancestors no doubt lived and hunted in packs like wolves. And a wolf pack is a hierarchical society, lead by a top dog.

The classical world had its gods and goddesses, and the Mediaeval world its cults of saints. Every place had its shrines and sacred statues. They also provided our moral education, for they told us about the virtues we were supposed to admire and imitate. Similarly, up to the 1970s, we had public heroes, secular saints and gods if you like. Republics like our own will commemorate national heroes in prominent places. The monuments to Daniel O'Connell and Wolfe Tone are good examples. Some of you may remember that, in 1966, all our railway stations were renamed after 1916 heroes. It was seen to be a good idea at the time. But now we live in an anti-heroic age. We have celebrities instead. We don't erect statues to them, because we are universally cynical about them.

This is a culture in which certain things are now very difficult. It is very difficult, for instance, to get people to look at great figures from the past as having something to say to the present. This is Christianity's problem in particular, because it invites us to look back through the centuries to the lives of great men and women whose influence is still so enormous that we are incapable of appreciating it.

An obvious example is our own St. Patrick. He was responsible for nothing short of a revolution. And his revolution still trundles on after 1500 years! Sadly, he is commemorated now, in the main, by displays of crass 'paddywhackery'! In the face of this cultural 'dumbing-down', it is difficult to keep his authentic memory alive.

Difficult - but not impossible. The pendulum will swing back eventually. As a race we are tribal animals, hard-wired to a great need leadership of some sort. The old iconoclastic and egalitarian dream, with no princes or prelates - or celebrities - just doesn't correspond to human nature. The cult of celebrity points to a whole load of rubbish, and also points to a certain truth. It really was the Great Men (and Women) of History who shaped the world we know, with religious leaders first among them. And up there among the really great 'Movers and Shakers' is our own St. Patrick. Have a great weekend.

-Dick Lyng

Items of Some Interest

A Meditation on Motherhood

from 'The Prophet'

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters
of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
and though they are with you,
and yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love,
but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies
but not their souls,
for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit,
not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward,
not tarries with yesterday.

- Kahlil Gibran

Patrick: Yesterday and Today

Being Irish no longer has the inevitable implication of being anti-British. It is a sign of this new maturity that Ireland's rugby fixture with England in this year's Six Nations was held in Croke Park, a Gaelic football and hurling stadium that once excluded non-Irish games because of a bloody incident in 1920 when British forces killed 14 people - spectators as well as players - inside the stadium.

Despite the thaw in British-Irish relations, however, there is another kind of negativity at work in Ireland today. We are embarrassed about what we made of ourselves in the years since we claimed our independence back from Britain. Since the late 1990s we have set up a series of tribunals to investigate corruption in the worlds of business, politics, religion and health. Hundreds of millions have been spent on these inquiries, so much that people have begun to complain of an expensive plague of "tribunalitis".

There is no doubt that we need to learn from our past, and it makes sense to investigate past abuses of power. But it is not clear whether we are really learning from our past or simply demonising it. "This only confirms what we already knew" is a popular refrain when the findings of yet another tribunal are promulgated. And by deriding our past in an indiscriminate way we are also undermining ourselves. Our history has made us who we are, for better and worse, and we reject the past at the risk of rejecting ourselves.

The citizens of Ireland have been mistreated by church leaders, politicians, doctors, teachers, corporations and their own families. As a teenager St Patrick was enslaved and mistreated by the Irish. Yet he did go back and spent his life among the Irish. He returned to his former place of suffering with a heart free of the desire for vengeance.

Patrick did not demonise the past. But in contemporary Ireland we are inclined to deny that something valuable preceded us. We can be tempted to demonise authority, because so often it has failed us. We presume that by casting religious authority aside, we will automatically see a good and generous society sprout up in its place. But if the stability of tradition no longer anchors us, then in the words of W B. Yeats, "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world".

How can we return to the dark places of our past with torches of good news in our hands? First, we need to remember that the line between good and evil does not run along the frontier between the Irish present and past, but through each and every human heart.

We disparage our past and ourselves by the way we describe the Ireland that went before us as narrow, backward and repressed. Certainly there is much that is negative in the Irish past. But the people who lived in that Ireland were our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. Their lives, for all the mistakes they made, were worth living. They left us a rich legacy. We do owe them a great debt.

-The Tablet.

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