Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: (Vigil): Ellen & Eddie Reynolds, (Anniv).
11.00: John Murray, (Anniv).
6.30: Sean Cooke, (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

Michael Jackson was born a handsome, African-American boy, normal but very talented. At age 5, he and his brothers were the "Jackson 5". By age 11, he was a Superstar. At age 13 he went solo and had his first No. 1 hit at 14 with "Ben", a touching love song to a rat!

He first had plastic surgery on his nose in 1984. By the time of his recent death, had completely altered the shape and colour of his face through at least 20 surgical procedures. However, as the surgery multiplied, so too did his dissatisfaction with the results. For a time, he took to wearing a mask in public. Nevertheless, to the end of his life he retained his own plastic surgeon as part of his extensive entourage!

Meanwhile, French President Sarkozy had some strong words for Muslim women: "We cannot accept in our country, women imprisoned behind a mesh, cut off from society, deprived of all identity. This is not the French Republic's idea of women's dignity." The burka, he said, is not a religious symbol but a sign of subservience. He spoke for many in the West. With our emphasis on sexual attractiveness, hiding a woman's body is unpalatable. Some feminists have claimed that such dress renders a woman invisible.

And yet there are others that powerful Western people do try to render invisible. London law student, Riam Dean is suing the U.S. clothing firm Abercrombie & Fitch. They made her work 'backstage' because her artificial arm didn't fit their public image. She was told she broke the company's "Look Policy", a 45-page handbook which stipulates that staff must represent a 'natural, classic American style.' It instructs them on how to wear their hair, and how long they should wear their nails (a quarter of an inch past the end of the finger). Shoppers entering the new Savile Row shop are greeted by two bare-chested young men, clad in low-slung jeans and flip flops!

Riam was told that 'beauty lies in perfection rather than in diversity'. Certainly, society regularly reinforces this idea. Look how singer Susan Boyle has been treated. She was dubbed 'the Hairy Angel'. And she has since undergone a revamp, remoulded into a more acceptable version of what a singer should look like. And then, again, there's Michael Jackson!

The Galway Diocesan Pilgrimage went to Lourdes this week. Most people make the journey, not in the expectation of a cure, but because the town is the reverse of normal life. They feel empowered because the sick and disabled are at the centre of things, where their needs matter more than those of the supposedly physically perfect and where they aren't invisible. It is a place where, as Christ urges us, the last will be first and the first last. I visited Lourdes three times and I loved it. Ironically, I found Lourdes to be the healthiest place on earth!

-Dick Lyng

FESTIVAL REVIEW

We were due to hold our monthly Steering Committee meeting on Tuesday night last, June 30th. However, we decided instead to use the gathering to review our Summer Festival, held last weekend. (Experience has told us that, unless we do the review in the immediate aftermath of the event, all is quickly forgotten and a good opportunity missed!)

The attendance was our largest yet, due no doubt to the beautiful weather. We sold 66 individual tickets and 69 family tickets. In a sense, we were victims of our own success. We ran out of food! To those who were left without, we apologise. We could have done with more tables and chairs. That problem can be addressed easily enough.

Our crowd management left a lot to be desired. Some of this confusion is traceable to our 'Family Ticket'. This ticket was intended to admit a couple and some small kids. Not everybody took that narrow viewpoint! So, for next year, all kids (accompanied by parents) will be free, and there will be just one type of ticket: an individual ticket costing €10. (The issue is not money, but organisation.)

Patrick's Brass Band and the Karaoke girls were excellent, as was the face-painting and the crazy golf, thanks to Mary, Feena and Gerry respectively. Thanks also to Tony Freeney, Grealish family, Tom Corcoran, Griffins Bakery and other local businesses who generously sponsored the event. All in all, a great show and thanks to the wonderful helpers.

Battle For The Human Heart

"Children appear the unintended victims of two enormous forces at large in the world. One is economic, the other technological. The ratcheting up of competitiveness in the global market place means that today's generation of parents has to work harder and longer to maintain the same standard of living as their parents. Consequently they have less time to spend with their own children. Mobility means that fewer families have relatives nearby to help with day-care, and too many families live in neighbourhoods where they are afraid to let their play outside unsupervised.

So today's children spend much time on their own. One way they fill that time amounts to an unprecedented experiment with the world's youth: never before in human history have so many children spend to much time staring at a video monitor. Whatever is on that monitor, it does mean they are not out playing with other children. And the way we have passed on social and emotional skills is in life: from our parents, relatives, neighbours and peers. This transfer of basic life skills simply does not happen as well as it used to."

-From "Emotional Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman.

Wish You Were Here

[Going off to camp for the Summer used to be confined to the Scouts. Not any more. This year children can go to an atheist camp, subsidised by Richard Dawkins. His purpose is to instill in youngsters anti-religious ideas and to teach them that fairy tales and legends are contrary to rational thinking. Strawberry, aged 8, who has been to one such camp, wrote a letter home to her mother...]

Hi Trish. Lyra, and Ekow,
the facilitators here at the Dawkins Really Fun Rational Summer Camp, said wouldn't it be a nice thing to email our carers and tell them all the rational things we did today. Chazza said no he thought it was a rubbish idea and anyway his carers, Josh and Pete, were away at the Olympic Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender diversity working group. But Chazza is just a smelly boy and thinks in outmoded stereotypes. Ekow told him to go to his Toynbee Tent and think about all the poor Christian children who lived in fear of Mother Teresa and falling over the edge of the Earth.

Please don't let on that you're my mum when you come to collect me as I've told everyone that I've got two daddies like Chazza.

This morning we played "Imagine". First we imagined that the Tooth Fairy didn't exist. Then we imagined Jesus didn't exist. It would be much worse if the Tooth Fairy didn't exist as I've got a wobbly one and I want €1 for it.

Lyra asked who else didn't exist. Daisy said Princess Diana and Father Christmas and Hitler and Our Lady of Lourdes and Osama bin Laden. We all sang "Imagine" by John Lennon. Afterwards Chazza said he thought "Nothing to kill or die for" was not a rational aim because when people died they stopped being, so they wouldn't mind being killed, and if there was nothing to die for, what would happen if an evil fundamentalist Christian came to kidnap him? Wouldn't Josh and Pete want to save him if it meant they might get shot?

Lyra said if he went on like that he'd have to return to the Grayling Hut and learn his body mass index tables.

This afternoon we went canoeing. I said canoeing was smelly and irrational. Ekow said we should be grateful that it was such a lovely afternoon. I said mummy said there was no one to be grateful to for the weather because it was an inevitable consequence of nuclear fusion in the sun. Ekow asked who mummy was. I said whoops I meant daddy number 2.

We landed on an island and heated water with a portable solar panel. Then I fell asleep and I had a funny dream. A man in a white coat sprayed us with stuff that dissolved away everything that wasn't rational. Then instead of my new Gap Kids pointelle cropped cardigan I was wearing a brown nylon jumpsuit. And the man in the white coat said I had to stay at the Dawkins Really Fun Rational All-year-Round Camp and never go back to my carer. So I shouted I don't want to be rational. Then I woke up. You won't tell Ekow and Lyra, will you, Trish?

-XXX Strawberry (in The Tablet, 4 July, 2009).

On Reaching the Age of 85!

Gone are the days of youth
No more returning.
This is the simple truth,
No point yearning.

First it's the eyes that go,
Then it's the knees;
Then comes the cruellest blow,
Brain starts to freeze.

Hideous the body grows,
Face even worse;
Time to turn up one's toes.
Ring for the hearse!

-Dolly Eltenton.

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