Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: (Vigil): Mary McGrath & family, (RIP).
11.00: Joseph & Catherine Kelly, (Anniv).
6.30: Jimmy & John Lally, (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

The coming week is the most important sporting and social week in the Galway calendar. If you are a visitor to the city, and happen to wander into the Augustinian, you are in all probability in search of St. Jude, the 'Patron of Hopeless Cases.' Bring the race card with you! Jude may be good, but don't push him too far!

Up to 200,000 people will descend on the city to see 1,200 horses gallop for glory. A considerable number of these will be returned emigrants, using the occasion to reacquaint themselves with family and friends. Traditionally, this has always been the case. The Galway race festival has a family dimension that is not to be found at any other race meeting in the country.

But don't let that fool you. The Galway Races is not primarily about strengthening family bonds, or promoting Catholic family values! Even in these recessionary times, punters will lay (and probably lose!) over €100 million in bets this week. The British poet Rudyard Kipling got it just about right in his poem on human folly (I have yet to hear a bookie recite this one):

As it will be in the future,
it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain
since Social Progress began:
That the Dog returns to his Vomit
and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger
goes wobbling back to the Fire!

Nevertheless, individual folly often amounts to collective wisdom! After all, this week's festival will generate an estimated €70 million for the local Galway economy. Racing here is a serious business, and always was.

The first racing festival held in Ballybrit was a two-day event, in August, 1869. According to local newspapers, 40,000 attended. The public park in Eyre Square was set up as a campsite. The Great Western Railway agreed to carry all horses to and from the course free of charge. Specifically commissioned trains came to Galway from all over the country. The Lough Corrib Steam Navigation Company ran a special service from Cong. All roads, rails and rivers seemed to converge on Galway.

In 1929, the Galway Plate were broadcast on radio for the first time, and in 1963 television broadcasting begun. Corporate sponsorship followed in 1959 when the Galway Races was extended to a three-day meeting. Today, of course, the festival is a full seven-day event.

However, man's relationship with the horse predates Galway, and is far more comprehensive than mere racing! "History was written on the back of a horse" according to the proverb. But history was often unwritten, and punters undone, from that precarious position too! Despite this, the horse has done more for man than man for the horse. Most human activities can be categorised as either war, travel, work, or leisure. Down through history, the horse has been indispensable to all four. The domestication of horses had a profound impact on our way of life.

So, as you cheerfully pump your money into the bookie's bag in Ballybrit this week, console yourself with the sure knowledge that the horse owes you nothing!

-Dick Lyng

A Mixed Bag

A National Pastoral Plan for Ireland is needed now more urgently than ever. However, before we embark on any long-term plan, we would do well to remind ourselves that we belong to a divided Church. Unless we learn to deal seriously with our differences, the future will hold no more promise than the past.

Perhaps 'divided' is too strong a word. But we are certainly no longer dealing with the old Roman Catholic monolith of the past. In fact there are several - perhaps as many as seven? - constituencies or churches that would identify themselves as 'Catholic' . They have emerged from the turmoil of the past forty years.

Here is a possible categorisation:

Our greatest urgency now is to find people who can build bridges, who can bind these groups into a unity.

-Fr. Ray Brady (a priest of Kilmore diocese)

In Praise of the Horse

Are you the one who makes the horse so brave?
And covers his neck with flowing mane?
Do you make him leap like a grasshopper?
His haughty neighing spreads terror.
Exultantly he paws the soil of the valley,
and rushes the fences with all his strength.
He laughs at fear; he is afraid of nothing,
He recoils before no sword.
On his back the quiver rattles,
The flashing spear and javelin.
Trembling with impatience, he eats up the miles;
When the trumpet sounds, there is no holding him.
At each trumpet blast he neighs exultantly.
He scents the battle from afar,
the thundering of the commanders and the war cry.

-(Book of Job, 39:19-25)

Reflecting on the Moon-landing

Ever since we first set foot on this planet, people have gazed upwards and outwards at the heavens and wondered. We have wondered who is up there, what is out there, how we came to be here.

"Fly Me To the Moon", sang Sinatra, five years before Apollo 11 set off, "and let me play among the stars." The wonder can always fade, of course. "If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years," said Rudolph Waldo Emerson, "how man would believe and adore! But every night come out those envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."

And almost every night, we just stay in and watch TV.

We can grow too familiar, even with the most miraculous of everyday sights, whether it's the sky at night or even each other.

So surely one thing this week's anniversary of the moon landing will do is simply to remind us of the joy we can feel in seeing anything familiar afresh. We'll remember that none of us can look up at the Moon in quite the same way, since that astonishing, close encounter 40 years ago.

But perhaps the most abiding memory is not of the lunar landscape, at all, nor of Neil Armstrong bouncing down the steps of the landing craft for that first time - but of the completely new sight of Planet Earth, as seen rising from the Moon.

In 1963, Buckminster Fuller wrote that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue we are on one, flying through the universe at breakneck speed, with no need for seatbelts, plenty of room, and great food.

Since July 1969, perhaps we have a better idea of just how precious that mother ship is, and just how privileged we are to receive a flight aboard her.

But we should always continue to wonder. "When I consider your heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and stars that you have set in place," said Buzz Aldrin, quoting from the Psalms the night before he came back down to Earth, "What is man that you care for him?"

-Brian Draper, BBC 4.

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