New Year 2015
Many people take stock of their lives as a new year begins. I am happy enough myself, but I have one big regret: In more than forty-three years behind the altar I have never been accused of being ‘a holy priest.’ I just don’t seem to give off the right vibe, cultivate the right image. The thing about real holy priests of course is that they don’t have to cultivate anything. They look the part. They are the part already. Whatever odour I emit is definitely not the odour of sanctity. When a parishioner tells me that they have been looking for me all over the place, and I ask: “Did you not try the church?” the answer inevitibly is: “I never thought of looking there.”
Reputation is a tough taskmaster. A person is stuck with whatever reputation they wittingly or otherwise gain at virtually the first glance. If a clergyman gains a reputation for ‘liking a pint’ the cans of draught come out after the Station Mass. He might prefer a whiskey or brandy so that the gas will not keep him awake half the night, but feels it inappropriate to appear ungrateful for the beer. It is much the same with the holiness tag – you have it or you don’t, and no amount of prayer, fasting or abstinence is going to gain it for you.
I am thinking of turning to an image consultant in this The New Year. Surely some of those image quacks who advise politicians to lower their voices and get the bad news out first can help put a halo around my head and give me a pair of knees that look as if they have been really knelt on. Any sportsman or woman who is worth their salt has had to recover from at least one cruciate knee ligament injury. If someone in my business could manage to manufacture a couple of those injuries from dropping on his knees to pray, he would have to gain a reputation for holiness.
I have always been of the opinion that people need a sinner of a priest who can identify with them and they with him, more than someone ‘holier than thou’ whose head is up among the angels most of the time. The rogue is needed more than the saint, in the tradition of the one who said that he came not to call saints but sinners to repent. It is what can be called the incarnational approach, the Son of God/Son of humanity getting down and dirty among tax collectors and sinners, the toxic people of his day in the eyes of the wise, or is it the unwise?
Jesus was so exasperated at one stage at the unwarranted criticism levelled at him that he pointed to the fact that his cousin John the Baptist had been faulted for being a rough diamond, the voice in the wilderness who gave off the image of abstinence and austerity. Jesus on the other hand was called a drunk and a glutton because he ate and drank in the company of both rich and poor. You can’t win, even if you are Son of God/Son of Mary and your cousin wears a hairshirt in the desert.
Reputation is a tough taskmaster. A person is stuck with whatever reputation they wittingly or otherwise gain at virtually the first glance. If a clergyman gains a reputation for ‘liking a pint’ the cans of draught come out after the Station Mass. He might prefer a whiskey or brandy so that the gas will not keep him awake half the night, but feels it inappropriate to appear ungrateful for the beer. It is much the same with the holiness tag – you have it or you don’t, and no amount of prayer, fasting or abstinence is going to gain it for you.
I am thinking of turning to an image consultant in this The New Year. Surely some of those image quacks who advise politicians to lower their voices and get the bad news out first can help put a halo around my head and give me a pair of knees that look as if they have been really knelt on. Any sportsman or woman who is worth their salt has had to recover from at least one cruciate knee ligament injury. If someone in my business could manage to manufacture a couple of those injuries from dropping on his knees to pray, he would have to gain a reputation for holiness.
I have always been of the opinion that people need a sinner of a priest who can identify with them and they with him, more than someone ‘holier than thou’ whose head is up among the angels most of the time. The rogue is needed more than the saint, in the tradition of the one who said that he came not to call saints but sinners to repent. It is what can be called the incarnational approach, the Son of God/Son of humanity getting down and dirty among tax collectors and sinners, the toxic people of his day in the eyes of the wise, or is it the unwise?
Jesus was so exasperated at one stage at the unwarranted criticism levelled at him that he pointed to the fact that his cousin John the Baptist had been faulted for being a rough diamond, the voice in the wilderness who gave off the image of abstinence and austerity. Jesus on the other hand was called a drunk and a glutton because he ate and drank in the company of both rich and poor. You can’t win, even if you are Son of God/Son of Mary and your cousin wears a hairshirt in the desert.
Christmas 2014
It is nineteen years since I wrote my first article for “The Connaught Telegraph.” It was my first Christmas in Tourmakeady, my first Christmas as a priest in my home County of Mayo after terntyfour years in the islands and coastlands of Galway. It was not that I did not treasure those Christmasses. I remember the joy of driving the twelve miles from An Cheathrú Rua (Carraroe) to Leitir Mealláin on the other side of the parish for Midnight Mass. I soaked in the atmosphere of the candles lighting in nearly every window along the way to welcome the child Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I would stand on the hill on which that church is built and look across at the Aran Islands in which I had spent enjoyable Christmasses too, and think of the people there as they gathered to celebrate their Saviour’s birth. If there is such a think as spiritual magic, that was it for me. I referred last week to he ritual of Christmas Eve at home in Ballydavock, about halfway between Belcarra and Clogher lives on in my memory and mind’s eye.. We would gather around the kitchen table on which the tall red candle was lit. There was a pause for a moment to pray for the living and the dead. My father would leave the table, take the tongs from the hearth and break a lighted sod of turf in the open fire. This was to signify the breaking of the devil’s back, the power of evil being overcome by the Christchild. It was a ceremony that lost some of its significance when we got a secondhand black Stanley range in the mid fifties, a year or two after the electricity and the radio. It made it easier to cook a turkey, but the poor old devil seemed to have got lost somewhere behind the bars of the range, as if caged and powerless.
It would be at about that stage too that the giblets on our plates on Christmas Eve would have been those of a turkey, rather than a goose, a duck or a hen. There was obviously a concerted effort made countrywide to turkey-ise Christmas in those years, and help the poultry industry at the same time. There was probably the American influence too, from newly aquired radios as well as from the comics and magazines that arrived at the bottom of the tradiditional parcels from cousins across the Atlantic. Disaster struck when the turkeys roosted with the hens, causing their breastbones to bend and leaving them virtually unsaleable. My worst Christmas period was probably the year in which we ended up with about five such turkeys and had to eat them ourselves. The eating part was fine. The plucking was probably the devil’s revenge for roasting him in the furnace of the black range.
Difficulties in the “Connaught” during the year led me to believe that I would not fulfil my ambition to write articles for twenty years for this noble paper which in its earlier years supported Michael Davitt and The Land League, a paper with which Belcarra man, James Daly was closely associated. Thankfully that storm seems to have been weathered and I may weather another year. In the meantime old age creeps inexorably on, and as I approach my seventieth year I can see myself rounding the last bend in the race of life. It is not a race I expect to win, as I have never won any athletic competition in this life. Always a plodder, but plodders are usually the ones that get there as some of the old fables tell us. In the meantime Mary and Joseph, their unborn child and their donkey plod along the road towards Bethlehem, wondering will there be any room in the Inn, wondering what kind of a surprise this Christmas will bring. I wish you all a peaceful and happy one.
It would be at about that stage too that the giblets on our plates on Christmas Eve would have been those of a turkey, rather than a goose, a duck or a hen. There was obviously a concerted effort made countrywide to turkey-ise Christmas in those years, and help the poultry industry at the same time. There was probably the American influence too, from newly aquired radios as well as from the comics and magazines that arrived at the bottom of the tradiditional parcels from cousins across the Atlantic. Disaster struck when the turkeys roosted with the hens, causing their breastbones to bend and leaving them virtually unsaleable. My worst Christmas period was probably the year in which we ended up with about five such turkeys and had to eat them ourselves. The eating part was fine. The plucking was probably the devil’s revenge for roasting him in the furnace of the black range.
Difficulties in the “Connaught” during the year led me to believe that I would not fulfil my ambition to write articles for twenty years for this noble paper which in its earlier years supported Michael Davitt and The Land League, a paper with which Belcarra man, James Daly was closely associated. Thankfully that storm seems to have been weathered and I may weather another year. In the meantime old age creeps inexorably on, and as I approach my seventieth year I can see myself rounding the last bend in the race of life. It is not a race I expect to win, as I have never won any athletic competition in this life. Always a plodder, but plodders are usually the ones that get there as some of the old fables tell us. In the meantime Mary and Joseph, their unborn child and their donkey plod along the road towards Bethlehem, wondering will there be any room in the Inn, wondering what kind of a surprise this Christmas will bring. I wish you all a peaceful and happy one.
Week ending 16th December 2014
It/s good to know that he is still on the go, the man with the big white beard and the red hat and coat. Santa Claus and I go back a long way. Back at least until the middle of the last century. The centre of the world then, or my world at least, was a house on a rounded drumlin hill in the middle of a village called Ballydavock, about halfway between Clogher and Belcarra. Electricity or radio had not yet reached us, but fair play to Santa, he knew where we were, and he made his deliveries in good times and bad. The first time I remember nearly getting a glimpse of him was on a frosty night in which stars shone as bright as Bethlehem. Our father, lanthern in hand, led us three children to the barn in which he gave an extra helping of hay to the two cows and a number of calves tied there in their stalls. The barn was always a lovely warm place, where you could almost live yourself, apart from the smell of manure. A graip was then used to pull away the droppings that had accumulated behind the animals. Clean straw was spread beneath them and the work was done for that day.
As we made our way back slowly to the house my father announced excitedly: “There goes Santa’s sleigh.” We had barely time to catch a glimpse of it as it flashed across the sky like a shooting star. Sure enough it was Santa alright. The presents were there to meet us when we got back to the house. He must have slipped down the chimney while our mother was in the scullery collecting the Christmas cake for the supper. The evening meal on Christmas Eve was the main meal for the feast at that stage. There would be a goose or a big chicken on Christmas Day, but the most important part of the festival was the evening before. The table would be carefully set, with a big red candle in the centre, and the beautifully iced cake which we all craved, nearby. A prayer would be said for the living and the dead. Our father then took the tongs from beside the open fire and broke a lighted sod of turf on the hearth. This was a symbolic breaking of the devil’s back in another faraway fire, as the baby Jesus came among us to break the power of evil.
“Things rested so,” as Éamonn Kelly used to say when we did get a radio. The years rolled slowly on. Christmasses came and went, and then one year didn’t Santa actually come to our front door while we were there finishing the supper. There was a loud knocking which was almost scary. The man himself seemed even scarier when he came in as he talked very loudly and laughed a lot. Our mother and father laughed along with him, and chatted away as if they had known him all their lives, so that put us at our ease. I can still see the little cap guns which emerged from Santa’s suitcase and were the heart’s desire of almost every boy at the time, guns which fired with noise like that made by the sixguns that cowboys used in the pictures we got to see now and again in what is now a funeral home in Balla. I still wonder how we did not set fire to all the hay in the hayshed the following day as the caps sparked and spluttered in a gunfight as intense as that in the OK corral.
Our sister Mary, the youngest, turned out to be the most observant. “Wasn’t Santa’s suitcase just like the one under mammy and daddy’s bed,” she observed. We hadn’t time to wonder. Gunfights were waiting to be fought.
A very happy and peaceful Christmas to all “Connaught” readers.
As we made our way back slowly to the house my father announced excitedly: “There goes Santa’s sleigh.” We had barely time to catch a glimpse of it as it flashed across the sky like a shooting star. Sure enough it was Santa alright. The presents were there to meet us when we got back to the house. He must have slipped down the chimney while our mother was in the scullery collecting the Christmas cake for the supper. The evening meal on Christmas Eve was the main meal for the feast at that stage. There would be a goose or a big chicken on Christmas Day, but the most important part of the festival was the evening before. The table would be carefully set, with a big red candle in the centre, and the beautifully iced cake which we all craved, nearby. A prayer would be said for the living and the dead. Our father then took the tongs from beside the open fire and broke a lighted sod of turf on the hearth. This was a symbolic breaking of the devil’s back in another faraway fire, as the baby Jesus came among us to break the power of evil.
“Things rested so,” as Éamonn Kelly used to say when we did get a radio. The years rolled slowly on. Christmasses came and went, and then one year didn’t Santa actually come to our front door while we were there finishing the supper. There was a loud knocking which was almost scary. The man himself seemed even scarier when he came in as he talked very loudly and laughed a lot. Our mother and father laughed along with him, and chatted away as if they had known him all their lives, so that put us at our ease. I can still see the little cap guns which emerged from Santa’s suitcase and were the heart’s desire of almost every boy at the time, guns which fired with noise like that made by the sixguns that cowboys used in the pictures we got to see now and again in what is now a funeral home in Balla. I still wonder how we did not set fire to all the hay in the hayshed the following day as the caps sparked and spluttered in a gunfight as intense as that in the OK corral.
Our sister Mary, the youngest, turned out to be the most observant. “Wasn’t Santa’s suitcase just like the one under mammy and daddy’s bed,” she observed. We hadn’t time to wonder. Gunfights were waiting to be fought.
A very happy and peaceful Christmas to all “Connaught” readers.
Week ending 9th December 2014
For Christians throughout the world thoughts begin to turn to the real meaning of Christmas. There is nothing wrong with the food and the drink, the tinsel and the lights, but none of it makes much sense without the baby Jesus. 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.
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.
Week ending 2nd December 2014
Some of my favourite Scripture lines in the lead-up to Christmas that we call Advent are those that will echo through next Sunday’s readings: “Prepare a way for the Lord., make straight his path, and all shall see the salvation of God.” Although this week’s gospel readings for Saturday night and Sunday Masses come from Saint Matthew, 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 just after this coming weekend, 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 nad 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 than 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 thr solving of intractable problems in the Middle East so difficult. The names of towns and cities we hear ftom the conflict in Syria and Israel are familiar from the New Testament and the Bible generally. We find it difficult to 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 thr 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 just after this coming weekend, 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 nad 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 than 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 thr solving of intractable problems in the Middle East so difficult. The names of towns and cities we hear ftom the conflict in Syria and Israel are familiar from the New Testament and the Bible generally. We find it difficult to 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 thr 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…”
