Sunday Newsletter
Masses Today
11.00 Rita & Michael Moten, (RIP).
- Masses Sunday, January 4th: 6.30 (Vigil) Maureen Lally; Donnachdh Manning (Month's Mind); 11.00: Joanna Neber; 6.30: William Morris.
- COLLECTION LAST SUNDAY: €2009.00.
- During the Christmas Holidays, (Dec. 26-Jan. 1st), there will be one weekday Mass only - at 11.00am. The Priory Office will open from 11.00-2.00 on December 29, 30 & 31. Our normal programme will resume there on Friday, January 2nd.
- FAREWELL FUNCTION: Don't forget the Farewell function in the Ardilaun Hotel for Rev'd Patrick Towers on Friday, January 9th. Tickets (€40) available in Priory Office or after all Masses today.
CHRISTMAS 2008, A PROGRESS REPORT!
- FLOWER POWER: Congratulations to the ladies who decorated the church. Visitors in particular have marvelled at its beauty. Margaret Cunnane, Margaret Cunningham, Mary O hIci and Kathy Ashmore did the needful. It demanded enormous work (and not a little skill) but you will agree that the end product is really beautiful. Thanks ladies.
- Our Communal Penitential Services (The Amnesties) seem to grow in popularity as the years progress. The Service at 7.30 on Monday 22nd was particularly well attended. With a bit more preparation and attention, that Liturgy has great possibilities. The Augustinian is renowned for its music. Yet, at the Reconciliation Service, we have a full Church and a 'dog's dinner' of musical accompaniment. (This is not at all intended as a criticism of the musicians present, rather of those absent!) We have a full Church. I feel very strongly that we are letting them down. The 4.30 Christmas Eve Service again clashed with St. Nicholas' 4.00 'Carols Around the Crib', and suffered consequently. Perhaps we should move our Service back 30 minutes next year, to 5.00? In that way, those who wish to attend the Carol Service (of whom there are many, obviously!) would be facilitated? Or is that too late?
- The Nativity Play was really wonderful, thanks to Pat and Feena. For me, this is the highlight of the Christmas Festival. Santa did his duty in the Priory after the Mass. He was his usual generous and jovial self. Thanks also to his ever so discrete helpers.
As I Was Saying...
So another Christmas has come and gone. The advertisements are now turning our eyes and imaginations to summer. We're great people for looking forward. Looking forward to Christmas starts in September, the January sales began in December this year, and the next excitement is a summer holiday.
We need to look forward, because today's excitement never quite meets yesterday's expectations. We court happiness in a thousand shapes, and the faster we follow it, the swifter it flies from us. The myth of the gold at the end of the rainbow. When we come near to it, either we fall short of it, or it falls short of our anticipation. It's hard to say which of these is the greatest disappointment. Our hopes are usually bigger than enjoyment can deliver.
So Christmas Day was on Thursday last. New Year's Day is on Thursday next. Hopefully you had a very happy time but perhaps we're all left with a sense of anticlimax, unfocused disappointments. If so, these disappointments match that of the people who waited for Christ's birth two thousand years ago.
They hoped for a political Messiah to drive out occupying forces, or for a heavenly power to wrap up history like a tablecloth and whisk the people of God to paradise. But God had other ideas!
The Messiah they got was unrecognisable as such: a baby in a stable. But some were led there by heavenly visions and signs, and we're told that shepherds and kings, rich and poor, knelt in homage and were changed, while the mother of the child pondered these things in her heart.
We have all encountered people and circumstances that led us to question the incarnation. If the incarnation were truly 'effective', would the innocent still be suffering? Would minds be so perverted and twisted that they would inflict violence on their fellow human beings? Even simple visits to the sick and the housebound leave us with much to ponder. We have all in our time met with people who had been stripped of everything to which we so often look forward - a home, a family, good health, and a happy Christmas.
Somewhere, in the nakedness which comes when our expectations are torn away, the ground of our heart appears where the Christmas message can flourish. It's ground we lay waste with our busyness and worry. But this is the message our hearts crave: - that we are who we are before the God who loves us, regardless of family, home, wealth or health.
Everything changes; everything passes; everything for which we hope disappoints us - everything except God's love. Only that love, offered to us in the birth of a child to a woman who held heaven in her womb, only that remains. Such love never dies, is never killed or overcome, shines always in the darkness.
Love like this is our bedrock and our salvation, our strength and even the font of life itself. Once we admit the possibility of love like this, we can stop looking forward to future excitements and accept the gift which is given to us here and now. Don't look away from Christmas just yet - the child has only just been born.
-Dick Lyng
The House of Christmas
There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.
To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
and all men are at home.
-G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Another Look at Christmas
"If God is dead, why do we miss him so much?" Would it not be more honest for unbelievers to simply refuse to enact something they do not believe in? Banish Santa, forgo the office party, work through the Christmas break. I know I risk being lynched by the retail industry, but Christians should demand that the celebration be given back to them and that it once again find its content in the coming of Christ.
It is interesting that Christmas has become the major celebration of a post-Christian society. However, Christmas is derivative of Easter; the appearance to the shepherds, the smelly manger, the escape to Egypt, all look forward to the disgrace of the cross.
However, for the secular Christmas this is all romanticised; instead of the obvious inversion of worldly values it becomes an object of sentiment. How cute the shepherds until you realise that they were the lowest in society, how charming the stable until you are suffocated by the stench of animal waste. The secular Christmas ignores the slaughter by Herod and the forboding of Simeon: "A sword will pierce your own soul too." The secular Christmas is a sanitised Christmas that is inhabited by fine wine and rich food. It steers clear of the real-life Messiah who will confront us and dispose of us. It is as shallow as that. It is no wonder we are bored with it!
The real Christmas is inhabited by seminal stories that haunt our lives. The infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke were written into the beginning of these gospels in order to set Jesus within a background of the faith of Israel on one hand and to lead into his ministry and death on the other. They are thus free compositions set in an historical framework whose purpose is to prepare the reader for an encounter with Jesus via the text.
While those who insist on historicity are tempted to discard these stories because they are so obviously "made up", the theologian will see them as profound expressions of the faith which points out the way. This is where we must give up our insistence on "did it happen or not?" and listen to the stories so that they may speak to us. For example, the virgin birth does not point to a nature miracle, but is a way of pointing to the divinity of Jesus displayed in his confrontation of what seems to us as simple common sense. In Jesus we discover something "other", something that we could not arrive at by our own ability, not by wisdom, logic or rationality. So the virgin birth is a way of telling us that this one does not owe his paternity, his origin, to normal sexual relations, even though we know that he must have. The story catches us by telling us something that could not be told in the expected way.
This is but one example of the richness of the Christmas narratives. The solution to our distress at Christmas? I have no qualms in telling you to make a start at understanding the content of Christmas, go to church, collar a clergyman, read Raymond E. Brown's magisterial 'The Birth of the Messiah'. I am not saying that this will be easy. It will take some effort, but who knows? Christmas may be different after it.
-The Rev Dr Peter Sellick, University of Perth, Australia.