Sunday Newsletter
Masses Today
6.30: Joe Dolan, Bowling Green, (Anniv).
11.00: Gerry Colgan, Maureen & Michael Kieran, (Anniv).
6.30: Bryan Flaherty, (Anniv)
- Masses for Sunday, February 22nd: 6.30: (Vigil) Pattie & Catherine Flaherty; 11.00: Tom Tierney. 6.30: Sarah & Josie O'Toole.
- COLLECTION LAST SUNDAY: €1,644.00.
- BAPTISM: Amalee Meehan and Dan O'Connell will present their son and heir, John, for baptism at the 11.00 Mass today. Amalee is daughter of Seighle and the late Gerry Meehan, Salthill. We hope you all enjoy the day and that John will have health, great happiness and a long life.
- RECENT DEATH: Pray for Eimear Cunningham (40) of Derry City whose funeral Mass is celebrated there this Sunday morning. Eimear, who suffered from MS, is niece of Cathal Cunningham. May she rest in peace.
- The Galway branch of the Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind collected €470 outside the Church last weekend. They asked me to convey their gratitude to the congregations.
- NOVENA: The annual Novena at the Cathedral continues until Tuesday next, February 17th. The Cathedral staff are grateful to those who supported the novena in any way, whether through helping out during the sessions, or simply through their presence. Thanks to one and all.
- A VOCATIONS WORKSHOP will be held next weekend, February 20th, 21st and 22nd, 2009. It is being jointly arranged by the Dioceses of Galway, Clonfert and the Archdiocese of Tuam. Contact Fr. Diarmuid Hogan at 091 524853, or Fr. Niall at the Augustinians here.
- SAMARITANS: The Samaritans are in search of new volunteers to help out with their services. They will hold two Information Meetings on becoming a Samaritan volunteer. The first will be held on tomorrow week, Monday, 23rd February at 8.00 in the Galway Bay Hotel, Salthill; the second on Monday, 2nd March at 8.00 in the Quality Hotel, Oranmore. The Samaritans' vision is for a society in which: (1) Fewer people commit suicide; (2) people are able to explore their feelings; (3) people are encouraged to acknowledge and respect the feelings of others.
As I Was Saying...
Every February, chocolates, flowers, and gifts are exchanged between lovers and aspiring lovers, and all in the name of St. Valentine. But he fails to feature in the official calendar of the Church. So how did his name come to be associated with this annual 'mating ritual'? St. Valentine's Day contains vestiges of both Christian and pagan tradition.
One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those who had wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.
While the story is charming, it can't be true. Until the fourth century, the Church forbade its members to bear arms, and a Church ceremony for marriage did not develop for another five centuries! So the whole Valentine saga is mythological. But a myth can be far more powerful than a story that is literally true. Myth is transmitted from one generation to another, expressing some aspects of that particular community's self-understanding.
Successive generations will inhabit that myth, giving it their own 'spin'. For example, the Students' Unions in all the third level colleges are celebrating Valentine's by organising what they have rather subtly named a 'Shag Week'. The promised treats will include a sexual health quiz, an Ann Summers Party, Speed Dating, photo exhibit, condom games to increase familiarity and comfort with condoms, and one of the highlights of the week will be the Pretty In Pink SHAG Ball.
Between 2004 and 2009 there was a five-fold increase in STDs in Galway. The church believes that the teachings of Jesus bring health and wholeness. His message is 'salvation itself' because it is deeply rooted in human reality. But this conclusion flies in the face of today's culture which treats sex as just another bodily function. Since sex is supposedly value-free, 'sex education' is reduced to mere medical and technical information. The psychological and spiritual dimensions of sexuality are ignored. Damage is inevitable. But who will say this publicly?
The church, when it dares to speak on sex, is dismissed as 'out of touch'. Jewish academic Leon Kass remarks, "Safe sex is the self-delusion of shallow souls". Sex should be a dangerous activity. What could be more dangerous than to lose yourself to another person and to embark upon childbirth and parenting?
When we ignore this, sex is reduced to advice on techniques commonly found in teenage magazines. Then partners cease to hold the promise of lifelong love. They are reduced instead to the means of gratification. What looked like freedom has turned out to be the tightest bondage to a false eroticism and turmoil in marital affairs. I'm not advocating a return to the neurotic, unhealthy 1950s. But who would claim present practices are healthy? We must retrieve that deep Christian insight into the workings of the human soul. Happy Valentine!
-Dick Lyng
Difficult Times
- MARTIN ON RECESSION: I will not repeat the sort of cliché being bandied about in the period after the serious illness of the Celtic Tiger, namely, that a little bit of depression and recession will do us all good and we will repent our superficiality and get back to living more serious, sober and more spiritual lives. It does not work out that way. Those who liked the high life when things were high, will find a way of living an albeit reduced high life even when things are not so good, while those who worked hard to make ends meet when things were going well for others, will find themselves the first victims of an economic turn down. That would not be a situation about which anyone could rejoice.
- Where things are not objectively optimistic, then it is foolish to be optimistic; but that does not mean that it is foolish to have hope. Nor does it mean that hope is just some sort of narcotic which helps us to bear with it when times are not so good.
- It is harder to recognise when optimism is false optimism which can quickly deceive us into false hope. I say false hope and not false hopes, because hope is not simply a series of quantifiable, predictable outcomes of a mechanism. Hope is deeper. It is never just an outcome; it is a way of life.
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was born on February 12th, 1809, 200 years ago this week. This 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin has led not only to celebration of his life but also extensive discussion concerning the religious consequences of his work. Atheism and six day creationism have given the impression that the legacy of Darwin is that God is a delusion, fulfilling George Bernard Shaw's comment that "Darwin had the luck to please everybody who had an axe to grind." Meanwhile, other religious commentators have been queuing up to say that Darwin and the Bible can walk hand in hand in celebrating the grandeur of this world.
As a physicist, a theologian and an evangelical Christian, I'm not in the camp of either atheism or six day creationism. I am immensely grateful for Darwin. I take seriously the weight of evidence for evolution and am filled with wonder at the world it so successfully describes. He doesn't undermine my belief in a Creator God, but I do find he asks difficult questions for faith.
In that I'm not alone. The response to Darwin in the 19th century was complex and varied, contrary to the popular myth that evolution undermined the church which believed that the Universe was 6000 years old. From the earliest Jewish and Christian thinkers through to church leaders in the 1860s, few were biblical literalists and most didn't see Genesis Chapter 1 as a scientific textbook.
Indeed, some of the early supporters of evolution were evangelical Christians, "Darwin's Forgotten Defenders" as they have been called. Darwin did however undermine two popular religious arguments. Natural selection gave a powerful alternative to the attempt of proving God from intelligent design. It also questioned the assertion that human beings were unique by virtue of being created separately from other species. In fact, I find neither argument at the core of my Christian faith.
For Christians, the evidence for the existence and nature of God isn't seen primarily in the natural world, but in the claim that God is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.
Further, human beings, even though we are made out of the same stuff as the rest of creation, are special because of the divine gift of intimate relationship with God.
Yet one serious question remains. Darwin shows me a God creating a world which is dynamic and awe-inspiring in its complexity. But I don't fully understated why this creativity involves such violence and waste.
Perhaps it's because it is the only way that such a world can be created. Would God work like that? If I see God redeeming through the violence and waste of a man dying on a cross, I can accept that he can work through evolution too.
-Revd Dr David Wilkinson.
Parish Meeting
Keep in mind our General Meeting on Monday night week, February 23rd at 7.30. We drew up a tentative agenda for it at our Steering Committee meeting this week. (1) Update on Augustinian Project. (2) Financial Report. (3) Child Protection Report. (4) Recession: how can the Church help? (5) Parish Groups. (6) Young people: can we do something for them? (6) St. Nicholas's - the future. (7) Appeal for more helpers. (8) Ongoing maintenance. (9) A.O.B. Items for the agenda are still welcome. Send them to Dick Lyng or Gerry Ferguson.