Week ending 24th June
Writing a Sunday sermon can be a chore or a challenge for clergy of all denominations. I personally find this time of the year the most difficult when it comes to writing a weekend sermon. The Easter and Pentecost seasons, the times in which the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit are celebrated, have come to an end. Suddenly there seems to be no peg left to hang ones spiritual hat on. There are the Sunday readings, of course, but they are not always as easy to get your teeth into as feastdays such as we had recently, Ascension, Pentecost, Holy Trinity and Corpus Christi, four weeks in a row. There is the added satisfaction on such occasions of having dealt with those themes before, and it is not easy to add to the distilled wisdom of centuries or even millenia.
It is then that international, national and local feasts come into focus. Today we have the feast of the birth of Saint John the Baptist, neatly arranged after the summer solistice, with only about one hundred and eighty two shopping days left till Christmas. It is the traditional bonfire night, a night we throw burning coals as blessing on crops, even if the coal from the fire is nearly as large as some of our crops nowadays. I often think of the Baptist as one of the hard done by characters of the New Testament, the burly bridesmaid in his camel hair coat stalking the desert as he paved the way for his fairly laidback cousin, Jesus. Prepare the way he did in words many of us quote daily: “This is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” John was the one who put his finger on the button with regard to Jesus.
Next weekend we have the feast of Peter and Paul on the 29th of June. A church holyday in my youth I still celebrate it as such in so far as I can, because of the importance of the men involved in the Christian story of salvation. The fact that it is on a Sunday this year gives it an added significance. In my first public sermon as a deacon in Fulham in 1970 I described Peter and Paul as “those two blackguards” which led to a mild reprimand from a gentle English Parish Priest. What I was trying to get across is that the road to sainthood is often littered with sins. Peter blew hot and cold in his younger days, promising more than he could deliver to Jesus before denying that he ever “knew the man,” on the night before his crucifixion. Paul switched from being an ardent enemy to an enthusiastic advocate of the way of Christ on the road to Damascus. The message is there for all of us.
Here in southwest Conamara local saints are highly honoured on their feastdays, Saint MacDara on the 16th of July on the offshore island on which his church, renovated in the 1970’s stands. He is honoured also in An Cheathru Rua and all around the area, as well as Carna. The name Dara or MacDara still retains its popularity at christening time, despite the arrival on the scene of many less traditional names. In the other side of this parish Saint Kieran or Ciaráin is honoured in Cill Chiaráin on his feastday, the 9th of September. It is the same Ciaráin who studied on Inis Mór in the Aran Islands, spent some time in Conamara, and is associated at a national level with Clonmacnoise. His name too lives on in the many boys named after him. Saint Patrick is honoured among the mountains, in Máméan on the Sunday after Reek Sunday, with ceremonies too on Saint Patrick’s Day and Good Friday. With all of that to chew on, there is little danger of running out of sermon subjects for quite a while..
It is then that international, national and local feasts come into focus. Today we have the feast of the birth of Saint John the Baptist, neatly arranged after the summer solistice, with only about one hundred and eighty two shopping days left till Christmas. It is the traditional bonfire night, a night we throw burning coals as blessing on crops, even if the coal from the fire is nearly as large as some of our crops nowadays. I often think of the Baptist as one of the hard done by characters of the New Testament, the burly bridesmaid in his camel hair coat stalking the desert as he paved the way for his fairly laidback cousin, Jesus. Prepare the way he did in words many of us quote daily: “This is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” John was the one who put his finger on the button with regard to Jesus.
Next weekend we have the feast of Peter and Paul on the 29th of June. A church holyday in my youth I still celebrate it as such in so far as I can, because of the importance of the men involved in the Christian story of salvation. The fact that it is on a Sunday this year gives it an added significance. In my first public sermon as a deacon in Fulham in 1970 I described Peter and Paul as “those two blackguards” which led to a mild reprimand from a gentle English Parish Priest. What I was trying to get across is that the road to sainthood is often littered with sins. Peter blew hot and cold in his younger days, promising more than he could deliver to Jesus before denying that he ever “knew the man,” on the night before his crucifixion. Paul switched from being an ardent enemy to an enthusiastic advocate of the way of Christ on the road to Damascus. The message is there for all of us.
Here in southwest Conamara local saints are highly honoured on their feastdays, Saint MacDara on the 16th of July on the offshore island on which his church, renovated in the 1970’s stands. He is honoured also in An Cheathru Rua and all around the area, as well as Carna. The name Dara or MacDara still retains its popularity at christening time, despite the arrival on the scene of many less traditional names. In the other side of this parish Saint Kieran or Ciaráin is honoured in Cill Chiaráin on his feastday, the 9th of September. It is the same Ciaráin who studied on Inis Mór in the Aran Islands, spent some time in Conamara, and is associated at a national level with Clonmacnoise. His name too lives on in the many boys named after him. Saint Patrick is honoured among the mountains, in Máméan on the Sunday after Reek Sunday, with ceremonies too on Saint Patrick’s Day and Good Friday. With all of that to chew on, there is little danger of running out of sermon subjects for quite a while..
Week ending 10th June
Seldom one to back a winner, I hitched my wagon to the Irish Labour Party in the recent Co Council elections. The decision was local rather than ideological. With the retirement of Independent Seosamh Ó Cuaig, the only candidate from Carna/Cill Chiaráin parish was Joe Curran from Cill Chiaráin whose chances were washed away in the swing against his party. Inspired by a talk given by Dr Noel Browne in Maynooth College during a by-election in Kildare in the late sixties of the last century, I had voted for Labour for many years until alienated by our present President, Mr Michael D Higgins. An insulting and abusive phonecall from the then Minister For The Gaeltacht when I was curate on the Aran island of Inis Meáin and chairperson of the local Co-op led me to think I was finished with Labour. Thankfully Mr Higgins seems to have overcome angry and aggressive outbursts and become an excellent President.
Most political parties seem to get a kicking from the electorate from time to time, but many learn the lessons and recover. Even in this century Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have been written off but have made comebacks. Eamonn Ryan of the Green Party came within a whisper of winning a European Parliament seat in Dublin despite his parties’ collapse at the last General Election. While the Progressive Democrats have gone away in name, a number of its former stalwarts are still being elected, particularly in Galway. Sinn Féin is on the rise, spectacularly in the European elections, while not attaining the level of support in the local polls gained by Martin McGuinness in the Presidential election, so although the present media darlings, they should look at how quickly the Higgins success evaporated for his party. Labour will probably reach its traditional level of ten percent before the General Election, with occasional surges, as in the Spring tide of 1992 and the Gilmore surge of 2011.
I write this at a time in which the Labour Party is in the process of electing a leader. I wrote here quite recently that the party unfortunately had gained the reputation of being the ‘anti-Catholic party,’ because of the almost sectarian secularism of some of its leading members. This is particularly true in the educational sphere, and the gung-ho closure of the Vatican Embassy did not help. Most Catholics have little problem with secularism in so far as it is live and let live. You do your thing and I will do mine. When it gets to the level of sidelining people’s religious beliefs, they do have a problem. Media commentators seldom seem to even notice this factor in political discourse, but a glance at ‘pro-life’ literature shows not a little gloating at the problems experienced by Fine Gael and Labour one year after the ‘abortion’ legislation this time last year. People wait in the long political grass, not just for economic reasons, but for social ones as well. It would do a new Labour leader no harm to state that the party cherishes people of all religions and none.
The people of Europe have flexed their muscles during the recent election, and politicians need to take heed. The European project however can be deemed a success in a “two cheers for democracy” kind of way. It is not ideal, but it certainly beats the two World Wars that lay ahead of the people of this continent a hundred years ago.
Most political parties seem to get a kicking from the electorate from time to time, but many learn the lessons and recover. Even in this century Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have been written off but have made comebacks. Eamonn Ryan of the Green Party came within a whisper of winning a European Parliament seat in Dublin despite his parties’ collapse at the last General Election. While the Progressive Democrats have gone away in name, a number of its former stalwarts are still being elected, particularly in Galway. Sinn Féin is on the rise, spectacularly in the European elections, while not attaining the level of support in the local polls gained by Martin McGuinness in the Presidential election, so although the present media darlings, they should look at how quickly the Higgins success evaporated for his party. Labour will probably reach its traditional level of ten percent before the General Election, with occasional surges, as in the Spring tide of 1992 and the Gilmore surge of 2011.
I write this at a time in which the Labour Party is in the process of electing a leader. I wrote here quite recently that the party unfortunately had gained the reputation of being the ‘anti-Catholic party,’ because of the almost sectarian secularism of some of its leading members. This is particularly true in the educational sphere, and the gung-ho closure of the Vatican Embassy did not help. Most Catholics have little problem with secularism in so far as it is live and let live. You do your thing and I will do mine. When it gets to the level of sidelining people’s religious beliefs, they do have a problem. Media commentators seldom seem to even notice this factor in political discourse, but a glance at ‘pro-life’ literature shows not a little gloating at the problems experienced by Fine Gael and Labour one year after the ‘abortion’ legislation this time last year. People wait in the long political grass, not just for economic reasons, but for social ones as well. It would do a new Labour leader no harm to state that the party cherishes people of all religions and none.
The people of Europe have flexed their muscles during the recent election, and politicians need to take heed. The European project however can be deemed a success in a “two cheers for democracy” kind of way. It is not ideal, but it certainly beats the two World Wars that lay ahead of the people of this continent a hundred years ago.
Week ending 3rd June
My favourite line in all of the Bible is the Ascension promise of Jesus: “I will be with you always, yes until the end of time.” How does Jesus remain with us? Through his Spirit, the Holy Spirit whose feast we celebrate next weekend at Whit or Pentecost.. There is usually a little confusion at this time of year as the June Bank holiday is often referred to as ‘Whit weekend,’ while the church’s ‘Whit’ is, like Easter, a moveable feast that moves one way or another fifty days after the feast of the resurrection of Jesus, This is where the ‘Pente’ (five) part of Pentecost comes from. The Pentagon in the USA for instance is a five-sided building.
Many of us of an older vintage associate the word Thursday with Ascension, as Ascension Day was on a Thursday for centuries, exactly forty days after Easter. In more recent times the importance of such literal associations has been relaxed, with the feast moving to the following Sunday. You can only go so far with such changes, so there is little likelihood of Ash Wednesday being moved to a Thursday, or Easter Sunday moving to a Monday anytime soon. Still anything is possible with the continuing scarcity of priests. We already have ‘Sunday’ Mass on various weekdays as there are not enough priests available to go around.
Pre-Ascension promises are that Jesus will not abandon us; “I will not leave you orphans, I will come back to you.” Jesus comes back as Spirit to be with us always. I have heard someone recently use the metaphor of radio waves to give a sense of how the Spirit lives with and in us. It has often fascinated me that radio waves were always there but in a sense were only drawn down when instruments to do so were invented in the past century or so. The old folktales of people hearing fairy music may have a fairly simple scientific explanation. A combination of metreological factors may have led to radio waves being accessed, with music from a far-off session being picked up inadvertantly on air.
A TG4 programme about Hy-Brasil in recent years gave a somewhat similar explanation of how an illusion of a faraway city on the horizon may in fact be a picture of a real place transported by athmospheric conditions in something the same way as television pictures of Spanish bullfights wandered on to our TV screens in times of high pressure in the seventies of the last century. The air waves or whatever it is that gives us the worlkwide web many of us use every day of the week must have always been there but we did not know how to, or did not have the equipment to plug into it. Many would see the Soirit of God as being with us in a similar sort of way. All we have to do is to decide to access it by our prayer.
It is never a great idea to try and explain any mystery, but some human pictures and experiences give us hints about such matters. That is all. When I was a child I could never understand, for instance, how people considered the Holy Trinity to be a mystery. Nothing was simpler in my little mind. My approach was that if God was all he was cracked up to be he could be anything he liked. No need for further explanation. “Unless we become as little children…” Jesus said.
Many of us of an older vintage associate the word Thursday with Ascension, as Ascension Day was on a Thursday for centuries, exactly forty days after Easter. In more recent times the importance of such literal associations has been relaxed, with the feast moving to the following Sunday. You can only go so far with such changes, so there is little likelihood of Ash Wednesday being moved to a Thursday, or Easter Sunday moving to a Monday anytime soon. Still anything is possible with the continuing scarcity of priests. We already have ‘Sunday’ Mass on various weekdays as there are not enough priests available to go around.
Pre-Ascension promises are that Jesus will not abandon us; “I will not leave you orphans, I will come back to you.” Jesus comes back as Spirit to be with us always. I have heard someone recently use the metaphor of radio waves to give a sense of how the Spirit lives with and in us. It has often fascinated me that radio waves were always there but in a sense were only drawn down when instruments to do so were invented in the past century or so. The old folktales of people hearing fairy music may have a fairly simple scientific explanation. A combination of metreological factors may have led to radio waves being accessed, with music from a far-off session being picked up inadvertantly on air.
A TG4 programme about Hy-Brasil in recent years gave a somewhat similar explanation of how an illusion of a faraway city on the horizon may in fact be a picture of a real place transported by athmospheric conditions in something the same way as television pictures of Spanish bullfights wandered on to our TV screens in times of high pressure in the seventies of the last century. The air waves or whatever it is that gives us the worlkwide web many of us use every day of the week must have always been there but we did not know how to, or did not have the equipment to plug into it. Many would see the Soirit of God as being with us in a similar sort of way. All we have to do is to decide to access it by our prayer.
It is never a great idea to try and explain any mystery, but some human pictures and experiences give us hints about such matters. That is all. When I was a child I could never understand, for instance, how people considered the Holy Trinity to be a mystery. Nothing was simpler in my little mind. My approach was that if God was all he was cracked up to be he could be anything he liked. No need for further explanation. “Unless we become as little children…” Jesus said.