Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: (Vigil) John Joe Conneely, (Market St.) (Anniv).
11.00: Richard & Jeanne Byrne, (Anniv).
6.30: John Gavin, and family, (Anniv)

As I Was Saying...

John Updike (76), died on Thursday last of lung cancer. He was born in Pennsylvania, where his childhood was shadowed by psoriasis and stammering. His mother encouraged him to escape his sense of isolation through writing. He is now acknowledged as the most perceptive, descriptive, and prodigious American writer of the last century.

He had over 80 books to his credit, including novels, poems, short stories, essays, reviews, and children's books. (See examples of his prose and poetry below). His most famous work is his five-volume Rabbit series, so named for obvious reasons: ("Rabbit, Run"; "Rabbit Redux"; "Rabbit Is Rich"; "Rabbit At Rest"; and "Rabbit Remembered"). Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike poked gentle fun at his restless contemporaries.

But it was his 1968 novel, "Couples" that created a sensation with its portrayal of the complicated relationships among a set of young married couples in the post-Puritan suburbs. They are sociable, articulate and unhappy; ("America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy," he wrote later.); they enjoy sailing, basketball and skiing; they play word games in the evenings and adultery all the year round. Slipping in and out of affairs, they and their rituals are observed by the baleful eye of their self-appointed ringmaster, Freddy Thorne. The immense sorrow weighing on Updike's people seemed rarely to come from anywhere outside a small circle of friends. His people's wounds are self-inflicted, they are always hurting one another. An implicit moral insight will find explicit expression in "The Coup," (1978), "that in America a man is a failed boy."

The Moral Right excoriated Updike as 'a hedonistic pornographer.' Not for the last time, his critics missed the point. "One thing that's given me courage in writing," says Updike, "has been this belief that the truth, what is actual, must be faced and is somehow holy. That is, what exists is holy and God knows what exists; He can't be shocked, and he can't be surprised."

Updike was born a Lutheran and remained faithful to his roots. "When I haven't been to church in a couple of Sundays I begin to hunger for it and need to be there," he said. "It's not just the words, the sacraments. It's the company of other people, who show up and pledge themselves again to an invisible entity." Humans are religious because of profoundly pressing human concerns, said Updike: How did I get here? What am I to do here? What is my final destiny after here? Religion in the institutional sense consists of the human traditions, symbols, liturgies, and communities that help interpret and celebrate this personal sense of Sacred Presence. Humanity's personal religious experiences have given rise to the institutional forms, and not the other way around.

Wonder and fear are the engines of religious consciousness, he wrote: 'Wonder at the world and fear of death!' "It is consoling to think that if not every detail is the will of God, there is a kind of will bigger than your own. You can't change everything. You have to accept the world as it is." Updike had made his peace. Rabbit is at rest, at last.

-Dick Lyng

Parish Happenings

Annus Horribilis

This year was never going to be an easy one for the Church in Ireland. The Cloyne debacle has yet to reach its denouement. The report of the Ryan Commission into the horrific abuse suffered by children in church-run industrial schools is due out later this year; the findings of the Irish Government's Judicial Commission into the handling of abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese are expected to be presented soon. Neither will make for pleasant reading.

So where now for the Church? Compared with other European countries, the Church in Ireland is in a relatively healthy state. While vocations to the priesthood have plummeted, Mass attendance has remained relatively high. While nowhere near the heady days of the 1970s when the Church could boast of attendance figures as high as 95 per cent, a number of recent surveys and opinion polls have found weekly Mass attendance has stabilised at between 47 and 48 per cent. The figure rises to just below 60 per cent when you include people who attend Mass at least once a month. Theological colleges are churning out hundreds of graduates every year, while a network of schools makes the Church the main provider of education in the republic.

The most immediate consequence of the scandals has been the loss of the Church's moral voice. Fewer people look to the Church for leadership and a hierarchy consumed by dealing with child abuse is rarely in a position to offer a prophetic voice. A recent document highlighting the human consequences of the global economic crisis, for example, went largely unnoticed.

But the Irish will continue to celebrate their rites of passage with the Church and raise their children as Catholics with various degrees of fervour. Many people's Catholicism is synonymous with their Irishness, and even those who don't regularly practise would baulk at any suggestion that they are not Catholic. As the legendary nineteenth-century Archbishop of Tuam Dr John MacHale observed: "The bishops and priests of Ireland might lose the faith, but the people never will." We shall see.

-Michael Kelly, The Tablet, January 31st, 2009.

Tedium on Sunday Afternoon

"She was to experience this sadness many times, this chronic sadness of late Sunday afternoon, when the couples had exhausted their game, basketball or beach-going or tennis or touch football, and saw an evening weighing upon them, an evening without a game, an evening spent among flickering lamps and cranky children and leftover food and the nagging half-read newspaper with its weary portents and atrocities, an evening when marriages closed in upon themselves like flowers from which the sun is withdrawn, an evening giving like a smeared window on Monday and the long week when they must perform again their impersonations of working men, of stockbrokers and dentists and engineers, of mothers and housekeepers, of adults who are not the world's guests but its hosts."

-From 'Couples', (1968) by John Updike.

SEVEN STANZAS AT EASTER

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

...

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

...

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

© -John Updike.

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