Week ending 27th December 2011
_They lie
like the coffins of giants at the bottom of my back garden overlooking the
little lake I refer to lovingly as my swimming pool. The only swimmers there at
the moment are two majestic swans. They seem to be too big to be some of the
ugly wild ducklings hatched out on a nearby shore earlier this year. Ugly only
to swans I would say. Their drake father and duck mother thought they were
beautiful, real quackers as they wondered why would any duck want to grow up to
look like a big goose. The swans are steering clear of my wooden boxes at the
moment, just in case they might turn out to be what they seem to be from a
distance, coffins.
I can imagine scientests in NASA or in some Siberian, Chinese or European Community bunker peering at what sattelites feed on to their screens as they try to make out what those twelve foot by four boxes are for. They have probably ruled out the grave theory at this stage, unless they imagine I may have been involved in a giantkilling exercise. Could it be some kind of eurostore in which to compost redundant backnotes if that currency goes belly-up in the near future? Even dead banknotes come to have a value eventually. No. The answer is much simpler. The boxes, rapidly filling up with the year’s grasscuttings and bags of seaweed are my vegetable boxes for next year. They are not coffins, quite the opposite. They are my newborn New Year’s resolutions being put into practice.
I wrote during the year of not having to buy a vegetable during the months of June, July and August and well into September. That was because of what I had grown in a box made from four discarded woodchip built-n wardrobe doors hammered together and filled with composted grass, potato and vegetable peelings and a few buckets of topsoil. The sides of that box are ready to fall apart due to rain and other moisture but it has every sign of holdng together for another year. To this I am adding the two boxes mentioned earlier with a view to expanding the variety and number of vegetables as well as growing a few early potatoes. They could be described as a lazy man’s lazybeds, but the boxed sides to the ridges certainly do away with a lot of weeding as a man gets older.
I have brought about sixty bags of seaweed from various beaches at this stage. Every time I bring the dog for a walk I fill four or five plastic bags from the shoreline. Most of it will just melt into the ridges as it rots away but it will leave its goodness behind. People tell me the whole seawwed industry has had a boost from the downturn in the economy, as men who worked on the buildings in Galway are turning to the skills they practised in their youth, cutting or gathering seaweed for a local factory in Kilkerrin. It’s an ill wind…
I have never been a great one for New Year’s resolutions other than practical and achievable ones. Make a plan and see it through. Don’t take on too much at any one time. Do a little almost every day in a consistent fashion, whether that applies to gardening, praying or writing. It’s amazing what three hundred and sixty six (this year) days of doing a little can all add up to. Happy New Year.
I can imagine scientests in NASA or in some Siberian, Chinese or European Community bunker peering at what sattelites feed on to their screens as they try to make out what those twelve foot by four boxes are for. They have probably ruled out the grave theory at this stage, unless they imagine I may have been involved in a giantkilling exercise. Could it be some kind of eurostore in which to compost redundant backnotes if that currency goes belly-up in the near future? Even dead banknotes come to have a value eventually. No. The answer is much simpler. The boxes, rapidly filling up with the year’s grasscuttings and bags of seaweed are my vegetable boxes for next year. They are not coffins, quite the opposite. They are my newborn New Year’s resolutions being put into practice.
I wrote during the year of not having to buy a vegetable during the months of June, July and August and well into September. That was because of what I had grown in a box made from four discarded woodchip built-n wardrobe doors hammered together and filled with composted grass, potato and vegetable peelings and a few buckets of topsoil. The sides of that box are ready to fall apart due to rain and other moisture but it has every sign of holdng together for another year. To this I am adding the two boxes mentioned earlier with a view to expanding the variety and number of vegetables as well as growing a few early potatoes. They could be described as a lazy man’s lazybeds, but the boxed sides to the ridges certainly do away with a lot of weeding as a man gets older.
I have brought about sixty bags of seaweed from various beaches at this stage. Every time I bring the dog for a walk I fill four or five plastic bags from the shoreline. Most of it will just melt into the ridges as it rots away but it will leave its goodness behind. People tell me the whole seawwed industry has had a boost from the downturn in the economy, as men who worked on the buildings in Galway are turning to the skills they practised in their youth, cutting or gathering seaweed for a local factory in Kilkerrin. It’s an ill wind…
I have never been a great one for New Year’s resolutions other than practical and achievable ones. Make a plan and see it through. Don’t take on too much at any one time. Do a little almost every day in a consistent fashion, whether that applies to gardening, praying or writing. It’s amazing what three hundred and sixty six (this year) days of doing a little can all add up to. Happy New Year.
Week ending 20th December 2011
_
I’m
delighted that we are having a Saturday night and Sunday Christmas this year.
Anything that lightens the workload is to be welcomed at my age. Last year was
bad enough with the frost and snow, but to have to get up for Sunday morning
Masses the following day meant that the Christmas dinner could not be washed
down adequately. The goose-fat was still stuck in my craw as I headed off to
Mass in the other side of the parish, hoping that my Fiesta would climb one of
the few hills in the area. I vowed that I would have a fourXfour this Christmas
for just such eventualities, but like other vows it too was on the slippery
slope along with me and it melted with the snow and ice the following week. The
trusty Fiesta is still on duty, and its New Year’s resolution is to pass the
NCT.
Mary and Joseph’s donkey does not need an NCT disc as they head along the rocky road to Bethlehem. The young couple are probably happy tp be away from the prying eyes of Nazareth. The gossip mongers had a field day when innocent little holy Mary began to show signs of her pregnancy. “When was Joseph going to do the right thing and marry her?” they asked “Wasn’t he the dark horse all the same, and you would think that butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. That’s if he was the father. Rumour had it that Joseph and herself had never been together. If not, who was the father? Where was DNA when you needed it? Fair play to Joseph all the same. He was sticking with her no matter what anyone said, which was more than a lot of fellows would do if they were in his sandals.”
Here they were on their adventure far from home, enjoying the fresh air and the company of the people they met around the watering holes, or at the open fires when they stopped for something to eat. They were returning to Joseph’s roots, going back for the census, a once in a lifetime event, a kind of pilgrimage to the past, back to the King David connection from centuries before. It was something that his people had always talked about. What was it about royalty that so many people wanted to be connected to? Anyway that was then and this is now. This baby was likely to come into the world far from home. They were ready for it. They wouldn’t be sleeping under the stars that night. They had the money for an Inn, tightly wrapped in a little handkerchief in the very middle of the swaddling clothes Mary had brought with her to put around the baby as soon as it was born and washed.
Was it all a dream? Mary wondered sometimes. This baby from out of the blue. This baby from God as that vision had told her all of nine months ago. Could it have been some kind of a hallucination? The baby that had grown within her was real enough. Why me? What was God up to? If he was as great as people said couldn’t he have found a less complicated way to send his son into the world. Couldn’t he have just dropped him into some palace where he would have a bit of comfort. Why had he to go the natural way, the nine months, the birth?‘ But who am I to tell God his business?
Joseph tells himself that people must think that he is a right eejit, but he wouldn’t want it any other way. He trusts Mary. If she says this is a child of God, that is enough for him. If it is of God, sure it has to be good. He finds it hard to understand why Mary is so sure that her baby is going to be a boy. That’s what God’s messenger told her, apparently. Does that mean she will be disappointed if it turns out to be a girl? Whatever…Whichever it is they are going to love it. That’s what it’s all about – Love. Happy Christmas.
Mary and Joseph’s donkey does not need an NCT disc as they head along the rocky road to Bethlehem. The young couple are probably happy tp be away from the prying eyes of Nazareth. The gossip mongers had a field day when innocent little holy Mary began to show signs of her pregnancy. “When was Joseph going to do the right thing and marry her?” they asked “Wasn’t he the dark horse all the same, and you would think that butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. That’s if he was the father. Rumour had it that Joseph and herself had never been together. If not, who was the father? Where was DNA when you needed it? Fair play to Joseph all the same. He was sticking with her no matter what anyone said, which was more than a lot of fellows would do if they were in his sandals.”
Here they were on their adventure far from home, enjoying the fresh air and the company of the people they met around the watering holes, or at the open fires when they stopped for something to eat. They were returning to Joseph’s roots, going back for the census, a once in a lifetime event, a kind of pilgrimage to the past, back to the King David connection from centuries before. It was something that his people had always talked about. What was it about royalty that so many people wanted to be connected to? Anyway that was then and this is now. This baby was likely to come into the world far from home. They were ready for it. They wouldn’t be sleeping under the stars that night. They had the money for an Inn, tightly wrapped in a little handkerchief in the very middle of the swaddling clothes Mary had brought with her to put around the baby as soon as it was born and washed.
Was it all a dream? Mary wondered sometimes. This baby from out of the blue. This baby from God as that vision had told her all of nine months ago. Could it have been some kind of a hallucination? The baby that had grown within her was real enough. Why me? What was God up to? If he was as great as people said couldn’t he have found a less complicated way to send his son into the world. Couldn’t he have just dropped him into some palace where he would have a bit of comfort. Why had he to go the natural way, the nine months, the birth?‘ But who am I to tell God his business?
Joseph tells himself that people must think that he is a right eejit, but he wouldn’t want it any other way. He trusts Mary. If she says this is a child of God, that is enough for him. If it is of God, sure it has to be good. He finds it hard to understand why Mary is so sure that her baby is going to be a boy. That’s what God’s messenger told her, apparently. Does that mean she will be disappointed if it turns out to be a girl? Whatever…Whichever it is they are going to love it. That’s what it’s all about – Love. Happy Christmas.
Week ending 13th December 2011
I was unable to attend the funeral of Monsignor Joe Quinn, Parish Priest of Knock Shrine, who died at a relatively young age recently. There was not enough time between my Sunday Masses and a Mass in a refurbished school at 5pm to get from Carna to Knock and back. I would like to have been there to sympathise with his family and say my own goodbyes to a man I have known for more than fortyseven years and with whom I served as a priest in the Aran Islands in the early seventies of the last century. Instead I will try to put a few words together in his memory during the hours I might have been on the winding road from Carna to Knock and back.
I first met Joe Quinn in Castlebar fairgreen during a Saturday fair in the summer of 1964. Although Joe was from NewAntrim Street in the town, he regularly helped out on his uncles farm in the Errew area. I had been reared on grass but as it turned out the townie was a better judge of a beast than I was. Our groups had both pitched our stands as high as we could go on the slope of the low hill on the green in the hope that an extra inch or two in height might mean a few pounds more for our cattle. We mightn’t have heard of psychology at that stage, but we knew how it worked. Being over near the corner meant that our charges were half penned in already and needed less herding. Joe’s uncles knew my father and the Maynooth connection was soon made.
The future Monsignor had already spent a year there and I was preparing to head for the seminary in September. As we stood with two mugs of tea in front of the mobile canteen he filled me in on what life was like behind the high walls on the plains of Kildare. Even then he had an infectious enthusiasm for the priesthood, but got the point across as well that Maynooth could be an enjoyable place despite the strict regime. There was a comraderie among the students he told me, and it was obvious that he loved it. A couple of months later he was next door to me and the present Archbishop Michael Neary in Junior House in the College, with the ghostroom on the other side. That never bothered Joe, as he regularly dropped in and out to help guide our first tentative steps in student life. He was younger than we were as he had done the Leaving Cert early, but he was the senior man because of his extra year in college.
Even in those days Joe had a great interest in liturgy and rubrics, which was basically how to conduct yourself with dignity on an altar while trying to put across the symbolic meaning of what was being enacted. While some of us might baulk at the finer points of such presentation it all seemed to come naturally to him, and it was no surprise that he studied the subject further. This stood him in good stead around the Cathedral altar in Tuam or the shrine or Basilica altar in Knock, two places central to his priestly life. But Joe Quinn was not just a sacristy or sanctuary priest. He was at his best in a pastoral role, out among the people, discussing everything from the affairs of the church or the world to the price of calves. He used to amaze men on Aran in the way he could judge the weight or the price of an animal.
Above all else Joe Quinn retained a kind of innocence all his life, an innocence that meant he could enjoy the trappings of Monsignor-iety while still having the aura of being one of the little children of whom Jesus said – “such is the kingdom of heaven.” As chaplain in Kylemore Abbey, as curate in the Aran Islands, Crimlin and Tuam, as Administrator in Tuam and Parish Priest in Knock he displayed efficiency, organisation and a quiet strength, but he still retained the innocence and enthusiasm of that young man I met on Castlebar fairgreen all those years ago. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.
I first met Joe Quinn in Castlebar fairgreen during a Saturday fair in the summer of 1964. Although Joe was from NewAntrim Street in the town, he regularly helped out on his uncles farm in the Errew area. I had been reared on grass but as it turned out the townie was a better judge of a beast than I was. Our groups had both pitched our stands as high as we could go on the slope of the low hill on the green in the hope that an extra inch or two in height might mean a few pounds more for our cattle. We mightn’t have heard of psychology at that stage, but we knew how it worked. Being over near the corner meant that our charges were half penned in already and needed less herding. Joe’s uncles knew my father and the Maynooth connection was soon made.
The future Monsignor had already spent a year there and I was preparing to head for the seminary in September. As we stood with two mugs of tea in front of the mobile canteen he filled me in on what life was like behind the high walls on the plains of Kildare. Even then he had an infectious enthusiasm for the priesthood, but got the point across as well that Maynooth could be an enjoyable place despite the strict regime. There was a comraderie among the students he told me, and it was obvious that he loved it. A couple of months later he was next door to me and the present Archbishop Michael Neary in Junior House in the College, with the ghostroom on the other side. That never bothered Joe, as he regularly dropped in and out to help guide our first tentative steps in student life. He was younger than we were as he had done the Leaving Cert early, but he was the senior man because of his extra year in college.
Even in those days Joe had a great interest in liturgy and rubrics, which was basically how to conduct yourself with dignity on an altar while trying to put across the symbolic meaning of what was being enacted. While some of us might baulk at the finer points of such presentation it all seemed to come naturally to him, and it was no surprise that he studied the subject further. This stood him in good stead around the Cathedral altar in Tuam or the shrine or Basilica altar in Knock, two places central to his priestly life. But Joe Quinn was not just a sacristy or sanctuary priest. He was at his best in a pastoral role, out among the people, discussing everything from the affairs of the church or the world to the price of calves. He used to amaze men on Aran in the way he could judge the weight or the price of an animal.
Above all else Joe Quinn retained a kind of innocence all his life, an innocence that meant he could enjoy the trappings of Monsignor-iety while still having the aura of being one of the little children of whom Jesus said – “such is the kingdom of heaven.” As chaplain in Kylemore Abbey, as curate in the Aran Islands, Crimlin and Tuam, as Administrator in Tuam and Parish Priest in Knock he displayed efficiency, organisation and a quiet strength, but he still retained the innocence and enthusiasm of that young man I met on Castlebar fairgreen all those years ago. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.
Week ending 6th December 2011
Some of my favorite Scripture lines in the lead-up to Christmas we call Advent are those that echoed through last Sunday’s readings: “Prepare a way for the Lord., make straight his path, and all shall see the salvation of God.” (Lk:3,4,6) Although this particular quotation from the “Alleluia” of Sunday’s Mass comes from Saint Luke, the words themselves are much older. They are from the prophet Isaiah who lived approximately seven hundred years before the time of Christ. Some of the writings attributed to Isaiah may not have been his own. I am not suggesting that he stole them from others, but that he used quotations from other wise prophets of his own time or earlier. Either way the words we read or hear now are the best part of three thousand years old, and are none the worse for that.
I sometimes try to imagine Isaiah or other prophets. I’m inclined to see them in my mind’s eye at the marketplace, old, greybearded and rugged, their voices raised in the hustle and bustle going on around them, their ‘God-words’ getting lost in the din of those selling copper saucepans or rolls of silk. I may have it completely wrong. Isaiah was young once, and life expectancy was short at the time. He may have spoken quietly in the Synagogue, but either way his words have echoed across the centuries, urging is to prepare a way for the Lord, make his path straight. The phrase in Sunday’s reading: “Make a straight highway for our God” gives me a vision of God hurtling towards us down the motorway, but that is a far cry from the thought of the God-son being born in a quiet stable to a teenage girl, because there was no room for herself or her family “in the Inn.”
There is a further reminder of Mary, the mother of Jesus this week, because the Feast of her Immaculate Conception is celebrated on the eight of December. This feast is often confused with the notion of the virgin birth, but it has nothing to do with that. What it means is that Mary and no personal connection with sin at any stage of her life, a particular honour bestowed on the woman who was to bring together human and divine in the baby she bore. It is difficult for us in this day and age to grasp some of the concepts that have come down to us through writings and tradition that in many cases have a different mindset and understanding of the world to ours. We tend to belong to a Greek/Roman tradition that has a very different understanding than the more storied and subtle traditions we find in the Bible.
In a simplistic way this is basically the East/West divide that exists to this day which makes the solving of intractable problems in the Middle East so difficult. We just do not understand each other’s mindsets or ways at looking at things. We have a similar problem on a smaller scale in our own peace process. Protestant and Catholic traditionally look differently at the meaning of words – in the Bible or outside it. Each view is as legitimate as the other, but it is more difficult to forge an agreement in such circumstances. In a similar way people with a logical Graeco/Roman/Enlightenment view of the world are inclined to dismiss the notion of a virgin birth or angels over Bethlehem, while those with a different imaginative approach see a delightful story that carries a beautiful message. For the next couple of weeks the message is: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight…”
I sometimes try to imagine Isaiah or other prophets. I’m inclined to see them in my mind’s eye at the marketplace, old, greybearded and rugged, their voices raised in the hustle and bustle going on around them, their ‘God-words’ getting lost in the din of those selling copper saucepans or rolls of silk. I may have it completely wrong. Isaiah was young once, and life expectancy was short at the time. He may have spoken quietly in the Synagogue, but either way his words have echoed across the centuries, urging is to prepare a way for the Lord, make his path straight. The phrase in Sunday’s reading: “Make a straight highway for our God” gives me a vision of God hurtling towards us down the motorway, but that is a far cry from the thought of the God-son being born in a quiet stable to a teenage girl, because there was no room for herself or her family “in the Inn.”
There is a further reminder of Mary, the mother of Jesus this week, because the Feast of her Immaculate Conception is celebrated on the eight of December. This feast is often confused with the notion of the virgin birth, but it has nothing to do with that. What it means is that Mary and no personal connection with sin at any stage of her life, a particular honour bestowed on the woman who was to bring together human and divine in the baby she bore. It is difficult for us in this day and age to grasp some of the concepts that have come down to us through writings and tradition that in many cases have a different mindset and understanding of the world to ours. We tend to belong to a Greek/Roman tradition that has a very different understanding than the more storied and subtle traditions we find in the Bible.
In a simplistic way this is basically the East/West divide that exists to this day which makes the solving of intractable problems in the Middle East so difficult. We just do not understand each other’s mindsets or ways at looking at things. We have a similar problem on a smaller scale in our own peace process. Protestant and Catholic traditionally look differently at the meaning of words – in the Bible or outside it. Each view is as legitimate as the other, but it is more difficult to forge an agreement in such circumstances. In a similar way people with a logical Graeco/Roman/Enlightenment view of the world are inclined to dismiss the notion of a virgin birth or angels over Bethlehem, while those with a different imaginative approach see a delightful story that carries a beautiful message. For the next couple of weeks the message is: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight…”