Reality Magazine July/August 2022

LAUDATO SI’ WEEK

PETER McVERRY ON TRAVELLER RIGHTS

SOUNDCHECK: LEONARD COHEN’S ‘HALLELUJAH’

JULY/AUGUST 2022 INFORMING, INSPIRING, CHALLENGING TODAY’S CATHOLIC

ALIVE AND KICKING SIGNS OF LIFE IN THE YOUNG CHURCH

TALKING TO JOE JOE DUFFY ON LOVE, LOSS AND LIVELINE

TIME TO RETHINK THE SACRAMENTS? BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO OUR PARISHES

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IN THIS MONTH’S ISSUE FEATURES �� ALIVE AND KICKING Young people are making their mark in a variety of church ministries

By Ann Marie Foley

18 TALKING TO JOE Radio presenter Joe Duffy talks love, loss and Liveline

By John Scally

20 TIME TO RETHINK THE SACRAMENTS? A new model that could breathe new life into parishes

By Christina Malone

24 TIME AND REDEMPTION IN NETFLIX’S RUSSIAN DOLL

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The time-looping TV show inviting questions about time, the universe and humanity

By Paul Clogher

28 SAINTS OF THE ROMAN CANON Heroes of the faith in the First Eucharistic Prayer

By Maria Hall

30 LETTER FROM THE PHILIPPINES There are pitfalls when communicating across a language barrier!

By Colm Meaney CSsR

20

24

32 THE SOUNDCHECK SERIES Leonard Cohen on experiencing the transcendent

By Michael Sherman

36 A QUESTION OF CONSCIENCE The moral dilemma at the heart of Claire Keegan’s latest novel

By Eamon Maher

OPINION

REGULARS

11 EDITORIAL

04 REALITY BITES 07 POPE MONITOR 08 SAINTS IN THE CELTIC TRADITION 09 REFLECTIONS 38 TRÓCAIRE 43 GOD’S WORD

17 JIM DEEDS 27 CARMEL WYNNE 40 PETER McVERRY SJ

REALITY BITES TEXAS

US BISHOPS LAMENT “EPIDEMIC OF EVIL AND VIOLENCE” The US Catholic bishops have said that the country is facing an “epidemic of evil and violence” after a gunman killed 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvdale, Texas on May 24.

In a statement issued that day, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) said: “There have been too many school shootings, too much killing of the innocent.

Our Catholic faith calls us to pray for those who have died and to bind the wounds of others, and we join our prayers along with the community in Uvalde and Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller.

“As we do so, each of us also needs to search our souls for ways that we can do more to understand this epidemic of evil and violence and implore our elected officials to help us take action.”

The US bishops also condemned recent mass shootings in New York State and California. On May 16, the USSCB said in a statement that it continued to “advocate for an end to violence”, after a gunman killed 10 people and injured three others on May 14 at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and a shooter killed one person and wounded five others on May 15 at a church in Laguna Woods, California.

Memorial outside Robb Elementary School

Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller of San Antonio, who is tending to those grieving in Uvalde, asked for prayer and support for the families who have lost loved ones.

“We embrace the families as a mother her children. We cry like a mother does! Our children have been taken away! The pain of families in Uvalde is our own,” he said in a homily.

He urged all, in the midst of grief and horror, to look to Jesus for comfort and guidance.

“After he rises from the dead, Jesus does not return to take revenge on those who murdered or abandoned him. His first greeting to his disciples is: ‘Peace be with you.’ Thanks to him we are a people of life.

He strengthens us in times of trial.”

WICKLOW

KILTEGAN FATHERS ELECT FIRST AFRICAN LEADER St Patrick’s Missionary Society, widely known as the Kiltegan Fathers, has elected an African leader for the first time in the society’s 90year history.

On May 14, Fr Richard Filima SPS was announced as the new society leader, to succeed Fr Victor Dunne SPS. The 43-year-old is from Bodo, Rivers State in Nigeria. He joined St Patrick’s Missionary

4 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

Society in 1997 for initial formation in Nigeria, and went on to study philosophy in South Africa and theology in Nairobi, Kenya.

Fr Filima was ordained on January 26, 2008 and his first appointment was to Mato Grosso in Brazil. He later went to KwaPatrick, South Africa as director of formation for the Kiltegan Fathers, and in 2020 was appointed director pf promotion in Britain. No

stranger to Ireland, Fr Filima carried out his postgraduate study for formation in Dublin and Cork.

St Patrick’s Missionary Society was founded on St Patrick’s Day 1932 and for 90 years has continued the work of spreading the Gospel.

The society had its origins in Nigeria, and now works in eight African countries as well as South America and the Caribbean.

N E WS

MADRID

REAL MADRID CHAMPIONS OFFER EUROPEAN CUP TO OUR LADY

On their return to Spain after winning the EUFA Champions League final, the Real Madrid CF football team offered their trophy to the Virgin of Almudena, patron of the city.

This is the 14th time that Real Madrid has won the European football competition. The Spanish team defeated Liverpool FC 1-0 in the Champions League final in the Stade de

France in Paris on May 28.

The victorious team, who were welcomed by tens of thousands of fans in the streets of the Spanish capital on May 29, went to Almudena Cathedral in the evening where they were received by Cardinal Carlos Osoro Sierra of Madrid. In addition to the EUFA award, they also presented to Our Lady the

trophy they earned on April 30 when they won the Spanish football league LaLiga.

During the cathedral visit, Cardinal Osoro greeted the players with affection, saying “It is stimulating to share a journey with others, support each other in the search for success and put in effort to create a network of relationships that can make your life together an experience of fraternity... I sincerely thank you for what you’ve achieved.”

As reported by the Archdiocese of Madrid, the cardinal thanked them for taking the name of the Spanish capital to all the corners of the world, just like St Isidore the Farmer, to whom a Holy Year is being dedicated in the Archdiocese.

During the brief ceremony, Real Madrid’s public relations director, former footballer Emilio Butragueño, read out petitions, one of which asked that those present experience “the maternal protection of the Virgin Mary”.

GALWAY

CLONFERT FORMALLY RECOGNISED AS DIOCESAN MARIAN SHRINE The Bishop of Clonfert and of Galway, Kilmacduagh and Kilfenora, Michael Duignan, travelled to the Shrine of Our Lady of Clonfert on May 31 to bless the newly renovated church and to consecrate its new altar.

In recognition of the importance of the shrine as a pilgrimage centre, he also approved canonical statutes for the shrine and signed a decree to raise it to the status of a recognised Diocesan Marian Shrine. Fr Declan McInerney, parish priest of Eyrecourt, Clonfert and Meelick, was appointed the Shrine’s first rector.

Speaking at the shrine, Bishop Duignan said, “Although in many places traditional religious practices may seem to be in a phase

of decline, the practice of pilgrimage remains a meaningful source of spiritual nourishment for so many people. Today, we formally recognise the long history of devotion to Our Lady in this place. We also look forward to the development of the shrine as a fount of rich spiritual sustenance for future generations and in particular as a spiritual refuge and healing for those who, like the statue itself, have been wounded as they travel the journey of life. Let us turn our hearts and minds to Our Lady of Clonfert, invoking her intercession with God… so that these new initiatives might bear much spiritual fruit.”

The statue of Our Lady of Clonfert dates from the late 13th/early 14th century. Local

folklore describes that in the 19th century a woodcutter was felling an old oak tree which began to bleed. Upon examination, he found the statue hidden in a hollow in the tree. It is believed that it had been placed there for safekeeping during the persecution of Catholics during the Cromwellian period.

The statue is now housed in the Church of St Brendan, Clonfert. Carved from wood and brightly painted, the statue portrays a smiling Mary carrying the infant Jesus in her right arm.

Sadly, the left arm, severed when the statue was discovered, is missing. In recent years, the statue has become the focus of renewed Marian devotion, with the month of May a particular period of pilgrimage.

5

REALITY BITES SPAIN

CONCHITA BARRECHEGUREN TO BE BEATIFIED Pope Francis has paved the way for the beatification of Conchita Barrecheguren García (1905-1927), a young Spanish woman and daughter of the Redemptorist priest, the Venerable Francisco Barrecheguren.

On May 21 last, a miracle attributed to the intercession of María de la Concepción Barrecheguren García (known as Conchita) was approved by Pope Francis.

Conchita’s fame for holiness exploded soon after her death in 1927 and endures to this day in Spain and in many countries across the world.

Born on November 27, 1905 in Granada, Spain to Francisco Barrecheguren Montagut and Concha García Calvo, Conchita showed signs of poor health from childhood. Her father took charge of her education, preparing her for the sacraments of First Communion and Confirmation. In addition to her studies, Conchita spent hours praying in the oratory at

home and teaching catechism to the domestic helpers.

From an early age, she joined the Archconfraternity of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and felt a call to religious life, desiring to become a Carmelite. Unfortunately, illness prevented the realisation of her desire. Despite her poor health, Conchita made several journeys and pilgrimages. In 1926, after a pilgrimage to Lisieux, at the tomb of St Therese of the Child Jesus, she fell ill with tuberculosis and died on May 13, 1927, at the age of 22.

Her remains are in the Redemptorist Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Granada, next to those of her father, who became a Redemptorist priest after the death of his wife.

Conchita was declared Venerable, along with her father, in May 2020 by Pope Francis. The miracle attributed to her intercession involved the healing of a 16-month-old Spanish girl in 2014.

ROME

2022 WORLD MEETING OF FAMILIES TAKES PLACE IN ROME The 10th World Meeting of Families takes place in Rome from June 22-26. The international gathering of Catholic families is usually held every three years; the previous gathering took place in Ireland in 2018, but the 2021 event was postponed to this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The theme for this year’s event is ‘Family Love: A Vocation and a Path to Holiness’.

While previous events have drawn large crowds, the organisers of the 2022 event limited in-person attendance to 2,000 families. However, families from around the world were invited to take part virtually by tuning into media broadcasts and live streams of the speeches and catechesis.

Families from Ukraine were among those

6 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

invited to participate in person at this year’s meeting, thanks to a solidarity fund created by the Vatican Dicastery for the Laity, Family, and Life to cover the travel expenses for delegate families from countries facing difficulties. The fund also supported the participation of delegates from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Central Europe, in addition to representatives from both the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Latin Rite Catholic community in Ukraine.

In total, families and delegates from 120 countries were expected to travel to Rome to participate in the June event. Speakers from Burundi, Lebanon, South Africa, the United States, Taiwan, Spain, Indonesia, France and Australia shared testimonies as part of the

conference schedule.

The line-up included a performance by Italian musical trio Il Volo during the opening Festival of Families, as well as speakers and panels on themes such as ‘Synodality and the Domestic Church’ and ‘Family life and technology’. The main Mass with Pope Francis was scheduled to take place on Saturday June 25 in St Peter’s Square.

A beatified married couple, Blessed Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi, are the patrons of this year’s World Meeting of Families. They were the first married couple to be beatified together by the Catholic Church in the presence of their children, in 2001.

N E WS

POPE MONITOR

KEEPING UP WITH POPE FRANCIS

POPE FRANCIS ISSUES CHALLENGE FOR LAUDATO SI’ WEEK: “HOW WILL YOU RESPOND?” Laudato Si’ Week, the weeklong event marking the seventh anniversary of Pope Francis’ encyclical on creation care, featured a series of global celebrations and the first-ever public sneak peek of The Invitation, a new film featuring Pope Francis.

Hundreds of thousands of Catholics united from May 22-29 to celebrate the progress made in bringing Laudato Si’ to life and to intensify their efforts through the Vatican’s Laudato Si’ Action Platform.

Tomás Insua, executive director of Laudato Si’ Movement, said: “Laudato Si’ Week has blossomed into a global celebration that leaves the faithful feeling inspired to do even more for our common home. Amidst chaos and destruction globally, every day Catholics take urgent action against the climate emergency and ecological crisis. Laudato Si’ Week [serves] as a fountain of inspiration and lessons learned for all people interested in saving God’s creation.”

The theme for the week was ‘Listening and Journeying Together’. The eight-day global event was guided by the following quote from Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’: “Bringing the human family together to protect our common home” (LS 13).

Pope Francis marked the beginning of the week by asking the crowd gathered in St

Peter’s Square, “How will you respond?”

Inviting everyone to participate, he emphasised the importance of “listening ever more attentively to the cry of the earth, which spurs us to act together in caring for our common home.”

Each day of Laudato Si’ Week featured global, regional and local events tied to one of the seven Laudato Si’ goals. On the day celebrating ecological education, footage from The Invitation, a new feature-length documentary film on Laudato Si’, was shown to the general public for the first time ever during a livestreaming event.

The event featured a trailer of the film, which will have its global release later this year. The film follows diverse ecological champions from around the world as they find common

ground with each other and with Pope Francis, who is featured in the film.

The closing celebration of Laudato Si’ Week was held in Brumadinho, in the region of Minas Gerais, Brazil. During the ceremony, a special moment was held to remember the 273 victims who have suffered the consequences of the climatic tragedies in the region, particularly the Brumadinho dam disaster on January 25, 2019.

The Laudato Si’ Action Platform, aimed at empowering Catholic institutions, communities and families to fully implement Laudato Si’, can be accessed at laudatosiactionplatform.org.

SOUTH SUDAN ECUMENICAL VISIT OFFERS HOPE FOR PEACE Pope Francis, Anglican Archbishop Justin Welby of Canterbury and the Rev. Dr Iain M Greenshields, who took office as moderator of the Presbyterian Church in May, will visit South Sudan together from July 5-7.

As violence in South Sudan continues to cause concern, it is hoped the visit will offer a much-needed boost for the peace process after decades of war, the country’s newest bishop has said.

Bishop Christian Carlassare of Rumbek, who

made headlines last year after he survived an assassination attempt, said the long-awaited papal visit will reassure the country’s people that the Christian churches will not abandon them. Political instability and the pandemic had forced repeated delays of the trip.

“The pope is coming here not just to see that peace is achieved but to ensure that the path to peace continues… But above all, to bring that peace that is sought after by the politicians and give it to the people,” said Bishop Carlassare.

South Sudan became independent from Sudan in 2011 after decades of war, but just two years after independence, violence erupted once again.

“It is important that in this peace process, the people know that the pope, the church, the (Christian) churches are close to the people,” he added, and that “despite situations of injustice, the people can choose peace, they can choose reconciliation, they can choose to put down their weapons.”

7

SAINTS IN THE

REALITY

CELTIC TRADITION ST COLMAN OF INISBOFIN AUGUST 8 A visit to Inisbofin off the Mayo coast was on my bucket list for more than six decades. While noted for hosting several early Irish saints for temporary sojourns, the island’s chief attraction for me was the presence of St Colman there in the late 7th century. Colman was an abbot and missionary bishop in North Britain until he found himself to be out of sync with an evolving British church. Having given the matter serious consideration he returned to Ireland, to mind his own business and say his prayers. Not that he had ever neglected prayer, for he had recruited and trained young men in the Christian way of living the Gospel message as he himself had learned in the days of his youth.

When Colman became bishop of Lindisfarne in 660, the controversy over the dating of Easter was at fever pitch. It had already gone on for well over a century and had torn the heart and soul out of the Irish and British churches. In the hope of securing a resolution to this intractable problem, St Hilda, abbess of Whitby, made her convent available for a synod in 664. The interested parties assembled there in the fall of the year and Oswy, king of Northumbria, presided. Bishop Colman argued for the old Roman tradition inherited from Patrick and Colmcille, while Wilfrid, bishop of Rippon, spoke for Rome’s revised and updated system for calculating Easter day.

In a mild, gentle tone, Colman explained that the tradition for which he spoke had been handed down by his fathers in the faith. He went on to explain that the tradition was based on St John’s Gospel and holy people such as St Patrick and St Colmcille.

With that Wilfrid, who had been educated by the Irish monks at Lindisfarne and ordained there only the previous year, rose to his feet. He boasted a colourful CV relating to his studies in Rome and his experience of church life in France, Italy and elsewhere on the Continent. He then rounded on Bishop Colman, insulting him, disparaging him and his tradition, referring to Colmcille and other saints and learned people of Ireland as “a few men in a corner of a remote island”. He spoke of them as “stupid” and “stubborn” before grudgingly acknowledging that while they may have been holy and well-meaning, they were an ignorant lot. St Colman was told that if he rejected what was on offer, he should resign his episcopal see of Lindisfarne in favour of another and better candidate.

Well, the decision at Whitby went in favour of the new dating system put forward

by Wilfrid. Colman resigned. He and those who agreed with him returned to Lindisfarne, picked up their few belongings and left, but not before collecting the bones of St Aidan in fulfilment of an ancient promise. They relocated to Inisbofin off the Mayo coast where, until his death in or about 674, Bishop Colman quietly resumed his humble monastic routine of work and prayer.

Volume 88. No. 6 July/August 2022 A Redemptorist Publication ISSN 0034-0960 Published by The Irish Redemptorists, St Joseph's Monastery, St Alphonsus Road, Dundalk County Louth A91 F3FC Tel: 00353 (0)1 4922488 Web: www.redcoms.org Email: sales@redcoms.org (With permission of C.Ss.R.)

Editor Tríona Doherty editor@redcoms.org Design & Layout Tanika Design Sales & Marketing Claire Carmichael ccarmichael@redcoms.org Accounts Dearbhla Cooney accounts@redcoms.org Printed by W&G Baird Printers, Belfast Photo Credits Shutterstock, Trócaire, Wikimedia Commons, CNA REALITY SUBSCRIPTIONS Through a promoter (Ireland only) €20 or £18 Annual Subscription by post: Ireland €25 or £20 UK £30 Europe €40 Rest of the world €50 Please send all payments to: Redemptorist Communications, St Joseph's Monastery, St Alphonsus Road, Dundalk County Louth A91 F3FC ADVERTISING Whilst we take every care to ensure the accuracy and validity of adverts placed in Reality, the information contained in adverts does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Redemptorist Communications. You are therefore advised to verify the accuracy and validity of any information contained in adverts before entering into any commitment based upon them.

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John J. Ó Ríordáin CSsR

8 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

Promoters: We keep all of our promoters in our prayers and thank them for their loyal service in selling Reality. We remember in our prayers sick and deceased promoters and their families.

REFLECTIONS Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

HENRY JAMES

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.

JOHN LUBBOCK

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.

VICTOR HUGO

I’d say to someone who’s standing there in a room and they feel like there’s no windows, no doors, it’s all black… to take time and a door will open. Someone will be at that door.

DONAL WALSH

There is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it; if only we’re brave enough to be it.

AMANDA GORMAN

Live in the sunshine. Swim in the sea. Drink in the wild air.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

We might think we are nurturing our garden, but of course it’s our garden that is really nurturing us.

JENNY UGLOW

Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive But to be young was very heaven.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

I don’t want to be remembered as the girl who was shot. I want to be remembered as the girl who stood up.

MALALA YOUSAFZAI

When we show up, act boldly, and practice the best ways to be wrong, we fail forward. No matter where we end up, we’ve grown from where we began.

STACEY ABRAMS

The power of youth is the common wealth for the entire world. The faces of young people are the faces of our past, our present and our future.

No segment in the society can match with the power, idealism, enthusiasm and courage of young people.

KAILASH SATYARTHI

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

MARGARET MEAD

There’s nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitive child.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

MARIE CURIE

Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.

HELEN KELLER

Separating ourselves from the young ought to be done gracefully.

They will love you more if they feel you are fading out with a smile. You have to be prepared to disappear benignly once your job is done.

MAURICE CHEVALIER

This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can… reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah’.

LEONARD COHEN

If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.

LEONARD COHEN

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

FRANK CLARKE

9

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EDI TO R I A L UP FRONT TRÍONA DOHERTY

BREAKING THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE If I can dream of a better land Where all my brothers walk hand in hand Tell me why, oh why, oh why can’t my dream come true…

The documentary Young Plato, an abridged version of which aired on RTÉ recently, opens with headmaster Kevin McArevey driving to school through the streets of Ardoyne in north Belfast. As he passes rows upon rows of terraced redbrick houses, ‘IRA’ signs tacked to lampposts and murals depicting paramilitaries with guns, he sings along to ‘If I Can Dream’ by Elvis Presley. It’s an appropriately dreamy and hope-filled song for the subject matter of the film.

Mr McArevey, we discover, is determined to change the fortunes of this inner-city Belfast community plagued by urban decay, drugs, and the vestiges of sectarian aggression. The charismatic headmaster of Holy Cross Boys Primary School is a philosophy enthusiast and engages its methods to encourage his students to think for themselves, solve problems, listen to other perspectives, and look at things in a different light.

“I want a school full of children who are thinking about thinking,” he says. “What I’m trying to do is bring philosophy from this hall, kicking through those doors, through those big blue gates and booting your front door down, going into your living room.”

Addressing the boys in one scene, he explains, “Philosophy is all about different thinking, and listening to others’ different thinking, and that could change your thinking. So don’t think ‘I’m always right.’ …

Remember, it’s a caring philosophy.

Everyone’s opinion matters.”

Crucially, the theory is put into practice to help the students to solve problems. Boys who are caught fighting, for example, are encouraged to discuss what has happened

and to reflect in writing on a whiteboard featuring prompts such as “What is a friend?”; “What is respect?”; “How can we control anger?”; “Should you ever take your anger out on someone else?”

The lessons are particularly meaningful in a neighbourhood that has seen its fair share of unrest and violence over the years. The opening shots of small boys running and skipping through the rainbow-painted gates of Holy Cross School are interspersed with footage from the Troubles – armoured vehicles, police in riot gear, gangs throwing rocks. In one heart-wrenching scene, a group of pupils watch footage from 2001 when crowds attempted to block the route to Holy Cross Girls Primary School in Ardoyne.

Petrified parents and children are seen battling their way to school through the throngs as missiles are thrown at them. The boys are visibly shocked but aware of the trauma. One says, “My Mummy has really bad anxiety. She says she was scared to go to school, but she had to.” It’s hard to believe these scenes took place just 21 years ago, barely a generation away.

In particular, Mr McArevey encourages the children to discuss and reflect on the history of their part of Belfast, and on its present and future. Their responses are articulate and thoughtful. “It’s ridiculous that people are still fighting over Protestants and Catholics.

Why don’t they just make peace, they’re all part of one family,” says one boy. “I don’t agree,” interjects another. “[The fighting] still does go on, but it’s not as bad as years ago.”

There are wise words from another child: “We all bleed red after all.”

The introduction of philosophical concepts is part of a monumental effort in the school to break cycles of conflict and violence, and to equip the children with the skills to navigate life in Ardoyne, Belfast and Northern Ireland. The mutual respect between

teachers and pupils is evident. Mr McArevey even offers them tools to explore these new ideas with their parents: “It’s time to think for yourself,” he tells his rapt young audience.

“Challenge statements that you hear.

Everything all of your families went through, they don’t want to go through it again.

Violence breeds violence. It never stops. You boys have the power to stop it.”

The film ends with a shot of a newly painted mural beside the school, depicting a pupil in the pose of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ under the words “To find yourself, think for yourself.”

This uplifting documentary provided welcome relief after a sickening incident came to light just days before the TV screening. A video emerged of a group of young men in an Orange hall singing a song mocking Tyrone woman Michaela McAreavey, who was murdered in her hotel room in Mauritius in 2001 while on honeymoon. The scene was a sad reminder of the bigotry that still exists in some quarters.

But with people like Kevin McArevey working hard to break the cycle of violence, a new generation empowered to solve problems peacefully, and young people like those involved in cross-community work in Clonard, Belfast (see page 16 of our cover story), the future is bright.

Tríona Doherty Editor

11

C OVE R STO RY

ALIVE AND KICKING SIGNS OF LIFE IN THE YOUNG CHURCH

YOUNG PEOPLE WHO ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT COMMUNITY, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND FAITH ARE INVOLVED IN A VARIETY OF CHURCH MINISTRIES ACROSS IRELAND

BY ANN MARIE FOLEY

12 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

COVER STO RY

A

t times it seems we can’t escape the image of a church in crisis. We hear reports of the drop in vocations to religious life, the diminishing numbers involved in parishes, and of course the sad revelations of abuse and corruption that have rocked the Catholic Church, in Ireland and elsewhere. According to the European Social Survey 2018, just 54 per cent of people aged between 16 and 29 in Ireland claimed Catholic affiliation.

Our country and our world have changed tremendously in the last 30 years. The culture we now live in encourages a sense of confidence, freedom and awareness of justice

issues, particularly amongst younger generations, but the church has at times struggled to respond to these challenges. Yet, recent years have also seen an upsurge in the quest for spirituality and meaning.

The perception of what it means to be a Christian is changing, and the church, particularly under the direction of Pope Francis, is placing a clear emphasis on issues of social and climate justice. For young people who have a strong sense of justice and social concern, there are many avenues of ministry and spirituality to explore.

To explore what attracts young people to the church, and their

hopes for its future, Reality spoke to five people from all over the island of Ireland who are involved in various church ministries. When asked what had most influenced their faith, all pointed to the witness and friendship of others, be they family, priests or peers. Motivation for embracing their particular ministry ranged from a desire to spread the faith to a recognition of the importance of building community and giving back to society. As for what changes they would like to see in the church, interviewees expressed a wish for a church that is more inclusive and more inclined to reach out to our communities.

NIAMH PUTTING FAITH INTO ACTION

Niamh Grego

Niamh Grego is a member of Young St Vincent de Paul (YSVP) in St Louis Community School, Kiltimagh, Co. Sligo. The organisation appealed to her because in addition to having the opportunity to do community and charity work, the members learn about social justice and social action.

She had seen YSVP in action in school and wanted to join since she was in first year.

Upon joining the group in transition year, one of Niamh’s first projects was to help organise a poster day to befriend first years and a ‘wear

blue’ day. “Everyone wore blue in school, because that is the colour of St Vincent de Paul. We asked if they could bring €2 and we raised €805,” she says. Niamh felt it was very important that the money went to those in the school who needed uniforms, books and other items.

The YSVP group meets most weeks to review actions and discuss future projects. In the lead-up to a pop-up shop, they spent mornings giving PowerPoint presentations to classes about fast fashion, educating their fellow students about the environmental impact of cheap clothing which ends up in landfill.

Afternoons were spent requesting and collecting clothes to sell. “It wasn’t really about raising money but about becoming aware of fast fashion,” explains Niamh.

There is no training necessary for YSVP although Niamh was delighted to attend a YSVP day with around 100 people from Mayo. “It was really lovely to see how so many people of our age love helping out in the community

and getting involved,” she says.

The biggest challenge in her YSVP work is dealing with the stigma associated with being helped by SVP. “A lot of people don’t like asking for help. We did Christmas hampers, and when the students collected them it was all in secret – they would take one item from the hamper home each day.

Because we are in a rural area, so tightknit, nobody wants people to know that they are struggling. I feel it is okay to ask for help and you should not be judged or feel uncomfortable because we all need help at some stage in our lives,” she says.

Niamh feels that the church could make a bigger effort to engage young people, and be more overt in inviting people to join its work of helping those in need. She would like to see a more inclusive church too; as she puts it, “more inclusion for everyone, be it the LGBTI+ community or whoever. It would be nice if everyone had the opportunity to practise their faith if they wanted to.”

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MEGAN JOURNEYING WITH YOUNG PEOPLE

Megan Sarl Megan and her colleagues in Scala, Cork

Megan Sarl is outreach coordinator with the Redemptorist youth ministry Scala in her native Cork city. She facilitates retreats, outreach and a leadership programme called Meitheal. “Our mission is journeying with young people, planting that seed, trying to build between life issues and faith. Some are questioning, searching, some have no faith but they still want to take part in discussions,” she says.

Megan works with individual children with a diagnosis of ASD, Dyslexia or ADHD, or children who are from families that are vulnerable, or have a history of drug or alcohol abuse or trouble with the law. One of her goals is to help them stay in school and to transition from primary into secondary.

A typical day starts with morning community prayer with the Redemptorist community and the Scala team. Then she has a retreat or meetings with teachers or the children she works with. “Pupils taking part in a retreat are coming from their own busy lives, so it is a day to step back, pause, enjoy being with their friends in a different setting. We explore different faith and life issues,” she explains. Post-Covid this has been more important than ever, as young people transition from onscreen classes and gatherings back to in-person encounters.

More than 6,000 people attend retreats at

14 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

Scala every year. Some of the groups have created a Sustainable Development Goals and Laudato Si’ trail and a mural about climate change, and Scala also carry out eco workshops in schools.

Megan is often asked by her peers what it is like working with priests. However, when they see her enthusiasm and passion for her work, they understand. “I haven’t had too much backlash but there definitely are some people who question it more,” she says. She herself has been influenced greatly by her own involvement with the Redemptorists and Scala all through her school days. “That had a huge impact on my own faith and who I am as a person, seeing how much of a difference they make to young people and the people they work with.”

She hopes that in the future the church will go out onto the streets more. “It is about volunteering and living out Christian values, being compassionate and just and fair and humble. I think it is about giving young people the opportunity to be the church, in settings where faith can be nurtured in so many other ways.”

She adds that those who volunteer through youth ministry do this. “That is them living their faith and beliefs, but they might not be going to Mass on a Sunday or in a church building,” she says.

“It is about volunteering and living out Christian values, being compassionate and just and fair and humble. I think it is about giving young people the opportunity to be the church, in settings where faith can be nurtured in so many other ways.”

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MARIA EMOTIONAL AND SPIRITUAL SUPPORT

Maria O’Keeffe

Maria O’Keeffe is a healthcare chaplain at Our Lady’s Hospice & Care Services, Harold’s Cross in her hometown of Dublin. She describes her ministry as providing spiritual, relational and emotional support to hospice patients and their loved ones as well as staff. “You are meeting people on their most frightening, anxious day and just to be a source of comfort or support is such a privilege,” she says.

A typical day is full-on from the start. “As we begin our day, we check if any patient has died or if new patients have come in,” says Maria. Then there is a multidisciplinary team meeting with a doctor, nurse, physio, occupational therapist, social worker, dietician and healthcare chaplain. “That highlights the

holistic nature of palliative care, because we are dealing with every part of the person and it gives an opportunity to relay to the rest of the team if a patient or their loved one is dealing with spiritual pain or is distressed,” she explains.

Maria talks with patients about topics like what death will be like, or about physical or spiritual suffering. Some express regret, and some wonder if they are being punished for something in their past. Some can be angry with God, as can their families, but others are at peace. “They reflect on their life. They have things they are grateful for and they express what gives them meaning and purpose. Often they are open with their family about their readiness for death.”

Maria says her motivation for this ministry came from her early years as part of the church community, and from a priest she knew in Knockmitten, Clondalkin. She studied religion as an exam subject in her Leaving Certificate and went on to study theology and philosophy at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. She later did a Masters in Scripture and a Higher Diploma in Healthcare Chaplaincy.

Friends and family were supportive, but some had reservations when she became a healthcare chaplain at the age of 26. She acknowledges

that she is “a very young person to deal with so much dying and death and illness,” but hopes that more lay young people choose pastoral care as a career, and as an opportunity to live their faith every day.

When the Irish Synodal Pathway opened up for consultation, Maria made a personal submission as well as being involved with the contribution of healthcare chaplains. She would like to see more openness in the church.

“People are very reassured when they realise that you are open to them and supporting them where they’re at, and there is nothing being forced on them; allowing them to tell their story to give you an understanding of their experiences, because sometimes the listening is important for them to feel heard and seen. This is ultimately what I would want the church to facilitate for people,” she says.

Pastoral care is open to all, and Maria contacts spiritual leaders of patients of other faiths when needed. “There is huge emphasis on openness and respect for diversity and inclusivity. Obviously people express that they have no faith, and yet there are some very important conversations to be had. That openness is really present in pastoral care in healthcare.”

community and making Jesus present where we are,” Lucia says.

People from all walks of life volunteer with NET and they are given the training they need, but Lucia had previously studied Spanish and theology in Maynooth. She enjoyed learning about the foundations of the faith and church teaching, and studying the church documents which she says are “so rich”. She now works with a Mayo man and others from Germany, Canada and Glasgow. Each volunteer has fundraised for a stipend for their year in the parish.

A typical day for Lucia is often from 9am10pm, and the team start and end the day with prayer and participate in a daily parish Eucharist.

“The most important part of our day is that time we get to spend with the Lord and let everything

flow from that,” she says. NET volunteers also help with religion classes in secondary schools and confirmation classes in primary schools and in the parish. The work is challenging but Lucia always tries to remind herself why she is doing it. “If you are not asking for the grace of God to let you really flow, you can be really drained,” she says.

Working with secondary school students is a particular challenge: “It’s not about me, it’s about Jesus, and it’s okay if I look a bit foolish.” But once they establish a relationship, and that there is no preaching involved, they generally get along.

Often young people have set ideas about the church and Lucia sees this as an opportunity to listen. The many questions that young people have can lead to great discussions.

LUCIA SHARING THE GOSPEL

Lucia Diamond

Lucia Diamond is originally from Letterkenny and volunteers there with NET (National Evangelisation Teams) Ministries Ireland. “A lot of what we are trying to do is to bring Jesus to young people, or to create an environment of

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Lucia and fellow volunteers with NET Ministries

In her own mid-teens, Lucia was not committed to her faith. Then she spent a summer with her cousins and family in Glasgow and their witness of going to daily Mass and entrusting their intentions to Our Lady and God in the Rosary had a huge impact on her.

“They were really joyful and talking about Jesus or God like he was their best friend and like he was there all the time. I never saw that before and realised that yes, you can have a relationship with God constantly and not just at morning or bedtime prayers,” she says.

These days, Lucia hopes for more community building for the church in Ireland as we come out of Covid and the isolation and fear that went with it. “We come together in the church for Mass [and we need] to have that communion outside the church as well, to invite others into that and really be a church that welcomes all.

I think my hope for the church is that we are able to bring the Gospel through ourselves, through communities and prayer groups, but also through meals and the normality of faith in everything,” she says.

on to take up youth work (following university courses), teaching and caring professions like nursing. A few participants have even met their marriage partners during that summer week!

Brendan and the community at Clonard are involved in cross-community work with a number of projects with people from nationalist West Belfast and unionist North Belfast. Together they have developed formal training for a Certificate in Good Relations and Youth Work Practice.

The young people are very respectful of each other’s culture and faith, and want to learn more. One group has members attending a 12th of July parade and others going to St Patrick’s Day celebrations. “Belfast has been transformed,” says Brendan. “That cancer that is sectarianism is almost disappearing among young people, and it’s people from another generation that may be holding back a little, and holding on to the old narrative of orange and green. But I think we are going to see huge changes in this [generation].”

Brendan’s motivation for his ministry comes from his involvement with the Redemptorists from a young age: “As soon as I came through the door at Clonard, I never really left!” The annual novena also inspires him. “It’s more than an event, it is a gathering of people to celebrate life and to be comforted in the depths of their sorrow. Looking back at the early 1980s during the Troubles, it comforted the people. Now, many who don’t go to church come to the novena.”

He speaks passionately of the need to reach

out to people in society who have been abandoned or are not connected with the church or community, including those who need to talk or who are living with loss in life. “I think that is why youth ministry is so important.

People often say to me ‘what can you do on a school retreat, it’s only one day?’ and we talk about planting a seed in youth ministry. If you can plant a seed and nourish it, it will grow.”

Brendan feels that the church in Ireland is going through huge change in this time of synodality and the listening process that Pope Francis has initiated. “The way that we do church and what has been the traditional parish community has been eroded away for many people for a long time. I think we should see this as an opportunity for renewal and growth and change. Models of church can and should change. We all become co-responsible for our faith community – all baptised people.”

BRENDAN A SENSE OF BELONGING

Brendan Dineen

Brendan Dineen has 30 years’ experience working with young people and is currently youth ministry coordinator at Clonard Monastery in Belfast. He explains that Redemptorists are famous for retreats, but in the last 20 years lay co-workers have been leading retreats. He works on one of those teams, facilitating retreats at Clonard for 11- to 18-year-olds.

He is also involved in a young adult group which is all action. During the annual novena, with up to 10,000 people daily, they are stewards and readers and look after car parking.

Up to 40 young people get involved in an annual summer outreach programme over the course of a week. They pray with the Redemptorist community and go out to the neighbouring communities, cleaning streets and inviting families and local children out to play in a safe environment. “It really gives them a sense of belonging. At the beginning of the week, we celebrate the Eucharist and they are commissioned to go out and be witnesses of the Gospel. The young people love it and we have seen very strong friendships form; they develop a passion for their faith and for working with others,” says Brian. Some participants have gone 16 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

Brendan with members of the youth ministry team, Clonard Ann Marie Foley is a freelance writer living in Co Laois, covering a variety of topics including religion, food, farming and country life, transport and business. She has written for CatholicIreland. net and several other religious publications.

COM M E N T WITH EYES WIDE OPEN JIM DEEDS

THE MARGINS ARE OUR OWN

INSTEAD OF REACHING OUT TO ‘THE MARGINS’, WE SHOULD AIM TO REACH BEYOND OUR OWN MARGINS AND BOUNDARIES

P

ope Francis intends to hold a great gathering in Rome in October 2023. It will gather under the banner of a Universal Synod, entitled ‘Synod 2021-2032: For a Synodal Church’. Unlike previous synods, which heard almost exclusively from bishops, Pope Francis wants this to be a synod that hears the opinions of all of us.

In preparation for this gathering, and to ensure that as many voices as possible are heard, over the past few months most dioceses in the world will have invited people to get involved in listening to each other. This will have taken the form of online submissions, online meetings, and face-to-face listening sessions. The goal in all of this is to get better at listening to where the Holy Spirit is leading us all. And in doing so, Pope Francis wants us to get better at meeting, talking and listening to each other, supporting each other’s journey of life. He asked us, as part of the Synodal experience, to make an effort to listen to voices that we don’t often hear, or if we are honest, often don’t want to hear.

And so, we heard a lot of talk of, and genuine effort being put into, reaching out to ‘the margins’.

This impulse comes from a good place, but I think we’re wrong in some fundamental ways. When we say that we want to go to the margins, what we are implying (consciously or not) is that those we are going to are other than ‘us’.

But let’s remember that these are our brothers and sisters we are talking about. They are not ‘them’, they are ‘us’.

Going to ‘the margins’ doesn’t only imply otherness, it implies that those we meet are in need of us. Pushing that one, we could be saying “we’re all sorted here and now here we come to tell you all about it.” Now I know that isn’t universally true, but this notion of ‘reaching out to the margins’ runs the risk of bringing this kind of ‘holier than thou’ thinking with it.

Another thing to point out is that most people we speak of as being on the margins... actually aren’t. The church is on the margins! The church is a minority grouping in society. I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. But I am saying that it is a real thing.

And so, it is not accurate to say that the church can reach out to the margins, when we are already there.

There definitely is much work to be done, though. I think a better way to express that work is to say that the church needs to reach out beyond our margins.

We need to go beyond our own, often self-imposed, boundaries

and into what might feel like a wilderness. And yet, it is precisely there – the wilderness – that Jesus brought his followers to reflect, pray and learn. The wilderness is, by nature, a wild place, a place of messiness and uncertainty. Just for emphasis, let’s remember again how many times Jesus went into the wilderness (clue: lots of times!) And in the wilderness, Jesus told his followers to minister.

“Feed them yourselves” Jesus tells them, when faced with a crowd of people in need in the wilderness (Lk 9:13).

Going beyond our own church boundaries might also mean letting go of what we currently hold as the rationale for ‘reaching out to the margins’. Do we hold that its purpose is to convert people? Do we hold that it is to teach people? Do we hold that it is to correct people? There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that, in and of itself. But, unless we go to our margins, willing to encounter whoever we meet there, seeing and hearing and

learning from them, nothing else will come of it anyhow. It is only in the encounter that we will, all of us, encounter Jesus among us.

Seeing as Jesus saw, hearing as Jesus heard, means wanting to bring love and wholeness, peace and healing, wherever we go. The margins are our own. In ways the phrase is just a defence against the realisation that were as messed up as everyone else. Yet, it’s that realisation that creates real freedom and unity among all people in the realisation that we are all in need of God’s love, and God’s mercy, and God’s forgiveness. All of us. The good news, of course, is that love is freely available to us all. Good News indeed.

In calling this synod, and in calling on us to push ourselves beyond our usual listening, Pope Francis is calling on us to go beyond our own boundaries and encounter people on our margins.

I say, let’s go! “Let’s listen to all the faithful, for in every one of them the Spirit of God breathes” (St Paulinus of Nola). Let’s go with Jesus’ ears and eyes, willing to listen and see, bringing God’s love and mercy with us where we can. And in doing this, let’s watch and listen to how we are affected ourselves. I think that these encounters will indeed convert, teach and correct. And I think all of us will be the recipients of those gifts.

Belfast man Jim Deeds is a poet, author, pastoral worker and retreat-giver working across Ireland.

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TALKING TO JOE AS PRESENTER OF RTÉ RADIO’S LIVELINE, JOE DUFFY IS THE VOICE OF UNDERSTANDING AND EMPATHY. HIS OWN LIFE HAS ALSO BEEN TOUCHED BY TRAGEDY AND LOSS Joe Duffy

BY JOHN SCALLY

I

t’s been a tough year for Joe Duffy. In February he lost his beloved mother Mabel, aged 93.

“She enjoyed great health, even when she warned off night-time intruders when a curtain rail while living alone a few years ago,” Joe tells me. “The Gardaí in Ballyfermot wanted her to go to hospital but when the paramedics arrived, they discovered she had a healthier blood pressure than the assembled younger uniformed men and women around her!”

However, her vision began to fail dramatically. “Again, after going through a long regime of very painful eye injections, she refused any painkillers but gradually her health began to fail and she became frail, which she found hard to accept. “[When she was] almost clinically blind, I rang her favourite priest Fr Joe asking if he could give her Holy Communion in the body of the church as he did with others during Mass. The following Sunday he went down to where Mabel sat and offered her Communion; she refused it, denying she had an eyesight problem and she beat him back up to the altar!”

Unfortunately, Mabel contracted COVID-19 before the vaccination rollout had begun.

“Falls at home and a stroke brought the inevitable and in the middle of the Covid pandemic in 2020, when St James’s Hospital insisted she needed intensive 24-hour help,

she contracted Covid before vaccines arrived, and she reluctantly went into Kiltipper Woods Care Centre where she lived and was cared for brilliantly until her death,” says Joe. He recalls that Mabel was a hard worker all her life, despite having no education.

“We have come a long way in her lifetime.

On the day that Mabel was born, May 11, 1929, the new Dáil was debating the closure of workhouses, which had existed in Ireland

bought the house off the corporation with her own money, she carried the deeds around in her handbag.

“I seldom saw my mother sitting down. It’s only after she got a part-time job as a cleaner in the toy factory. It was to be a six-month fundraising project to buy a twin-tub washing machine. It lasted for 20 years. She insisted on cutting her grass with a shears and a push lawn mower up to the time she was 90.”

SOCIAL CONSCIENCE As a confessor to the nation on his Liveline programme, Joe has carved out a unique niche for himself on the broadcasting landscape. At times the programme requires a touch delicate enough to catch butterflies without damaging their wings. Other times, a more forceful approach is called for.

The popular stereotype of RTÉ presenters is that they belong to the exclusive Dublin 4 set, but Joe Duffy is not of that ilk.

“We were never well off,” he recalls. “My father wasn’t always working. He had to go to England to get work for four or five years.

I remember going up every Saturday evening to a public phone in the local butcher’s shop to wait for the call from my father.

“I was born in 1956. By the time my days at national school were coming to an end the big question was could I possibly even think of going to secondary school. The fees were £25 a year. That sounds like nothing today,

“How come I was the only one from Ballyfermot? The statistic which says it all is that if you are born in Mount Merrion you are 44 times more likely to get to Trinity than if you are from Ballyfermot. That inequality really hit me and motivated me to try and change things.”

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since before the famine, and it is fair to say that Mabel and her siblings did not have an easy life.

“But the six girls were a strong and lively sisterhood, working together in the same factories from an early age. She was 24 when her first child James was born. She was living in Mountjoy Place, but things changed dramatically in 1958 when we were picked out of a lottery at City Hall and we got a house in Ballyfermot. She lived in Claddagh Green for over 60 years, refusing any other better housing offers and when she eventually

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but it was a fortune to a family like ours back then. Then the Minister for Education Donogh O’Malley abolished fees for secondary schools. This meant that I could go on and do my Leaving Cert.”

After his Leaving, Joe worked for three years in advertising before going to Trinity College.

The introduction to university life was a seminal experience for him.

“I was struck by the inequality. How come I was the only one – actually I found out since there were four of us – from Ballyfermot? The statistic which says it all is that if you are born in Mount Merrion you are 44 times more likely to get to Trinity than if you are from Ballyfermot. There were more people from Dubai there than from Ballyfermot. That inequality really hit me and motivated me to try and change things, and I got very involved in student politics.”

After working for five years in social work, he was one of 15 people selected to train as a radio producer in RTÉ. He never planned to be a presenter, but was led by the guiding hand of Gay Byrne down that avenue. “I was terrified at first. I don’t have the voice for radio. If I announced that Eamon deValera was dead on radio, even deValera himself wouldn’t believe it!”

As host of Liveline, Joe is the conduit for a wide variety of human-interest stories. He recalls one story which took a huge emotional toll on him. “The death by suicide stories we covered were absolutely harrowing. We’d done quite a few when a woman came on and told us that she was a widow and that two years after her husband died her only child had committed suicide at the age of 22. She went on to say that she’d love to speak to somebody in the same situation.

“I told her that I had a woman on the previous day who lost two sons through death by suicide, but she said that was not the same situation because their mother had other children. Then I told her that a woman had been on the previous day whose son and husband had both died by suicide. Again though, she had other children. I said, ‘I really hope there’s no one in the same situation as

you in Ireland.’ Within half an hour we got a call from a woman in exactly the same situation, and we were able to put them in touch. At times it’s difficult to believe the depth of pain that’s out there.”

TOUCHED BY TRAGEDY Joe’s specialty is applying balms to wounded spirits. He always come across as somebody with great sensitivity and empathy to people in emotional turmoil. Perhaps that is because tragedy has darkened his own door.

“My predominant memory, and at times preoccupation, is of the death of my brother Aidan on Thursday, August 29, 1991. He was killed at noon when the front of his company van collapsed, and he careered under the front of an oncoming truck in Maynooth.

“I was presenting Liveline that day and I heard about the accident on the one o’clock news. I said to somebody, ‘That sounds like a horrific crash.’ After my programme was over, one of my colleagues, Noel Coughlan, told me that my brother had been killed in the accident. I had to then break the news to my mother. My wife June came over and collected me. I said to June, ‘Her life will never be the same again.’ That was the hardest thing I ever had to do. How do you tell a mother that her youngest son has been killed?

“I remember Aidan being born just after the Angelus bell tolled on RTÉ. As Labhair Gaeilge Linn began on our TV, we could hear his first cries upstairs. Almost to the day, he was ten years younger than me. In a large family, I was at a good age to push his pram and ‘mind’ him. His death for me is a wound that will never heal.

“He was a good smart lad, but we had to physically drag him to school, kicking and screaming. Myself and our next-door neighbour dreaded this early morning ritual; at that stage his physical protestations had become too much for my mother. I only realised later that it wasn’t school he hated – far from it – but the fear of leaving my mother at home on her own.

“And so, since he was killed, aged 25 years, I have visited many graves in France and

“The death by suicide stories we covered were absolutely harrowing.

A woman came on and told us that she was a widow and that two years after her husband died her only child had committed suicide at the age of 22.”

Belgium for the First World War. There are some ‘Duffys’, even some ‘A. Duffys’, and likewise at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. War veterans sell dog tags – of course there was one with Aidan’s date of birth, 19.1.66.”

Although Joe had trained as a social worker and worked as a family therapist and bereavement counsellor, he found it difficult initially to articulate the depth of his loss in public.

“I spoke about it on the television programme Would You Believe? I found it cathartic. Up to then, I would never raise the topic nor could bear to look at his photo.”

A native of Roscommon, John Scally lectures in Theology in Trinity College Dublin.

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BAPTISM

RECONCILIATION

EUCHARIST

CONFIRMATION

MARRIAGE

HOLY ORDERS

ANOINTING OF THE SICK

TIME TO RETHINK THE SACRAMENTS? EVERY YEAR CHILDREN AND THEIR FAMILIES CELEBRATE FIRST COMMUNION AND CONFIRMATION, YET ONLY A SMALL NUMBER REMAIN CONNECTED WITH THEIR PARISH AFTERWARDS. PERHAPS IT IS TIME TO SHIFT THE FOCUS FROM TEACHING FAITH TO EXPERIENCING IT

BY CHRISTINA MALONE

A

s I’m writing this it is the beginning of May, and parishes all around Ireland are getting ready for the season of First Holy Communions and Confirmations. It’s no secret that preparation for these celebrations takes up a lot of time and energy in the calendar of schools, parishes and families.

In the preceding months, people in parish ministry often gather the families who are preparing with their children for these sacraments and talk about the ‘three-legged stool’. This image describes how faith is handed on through schools, families and parishes, working t o g e t h e r w h i l e a l w ay s remembering that parents are their children’s first teachers. In recent years, that stool has been ‘wobbling’.

Schools are doing their best.

Parishes are trying to catch up, and families do everything they can to make sure the day is one to remember. Over the past 20 years I have come across

20 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

different models and programmes to prepare for the sacraments, from Do This In Memory to Faith Friends, from The Bridge to Called by Name.

These programmes have tried to be as inspirational and engaging as possible to reach out to families. And still, experience shows, many won’t return or stay connected after the day of celebration. It is a graduation model of initiation, which raises questions about why children are not returning to us after the sacraments.

We’ve had programme after programme, yet many in church ministry are wondering: why are the nets still empty (Jn 21:6)? In a homily at his installation as bishop of Galway, Bishop Michael Duignan spoke about “threshold moments” for the Irish church. The reality is that the church is going through big changes and the effect, he said, is that the church as we know it is crumbling.

There is clear evidence of this

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Many parents have never been asked to speak about their faith. Could your parish provide a space for them to share their experience? You don’t need a parish centre – you have a church building. “crumbling”: lack of vocations, declining Mass attendance, fewer young people or young families actively involved. Every year, there are children in second class presented to be baptised.

There are many reasons why parents may not have had their children baptised but the question arises: why now?

Parents put a lot of effort into preparing for First Holy Communion, but again, for many, their commitment does not continue beyond the day itself. It sometimes seems as if all the energy is focused on second and sixth class, and that’s it.

Many in ministry have witnessed children in Communion classes who don’t know how to make the Sign of the Cross, and Confirmation candidates unable to say the Our Father. Terms like ‘pre-evangelisation’ and ‘lost generation’ are being used to describe the dilemma in which parishes find themselves.

Conf irmation and First Communion ceremonies are sometimes seen as a ‘p er formance ’. Counting “1…2…3…bow” before stepping into the sanctuary can sound more like a military drill than an experience of faith.

MISSED OPPORTUNITY Over the past two years of the pandemic, parishes had to adapt the ways they celebrated the

sacraments. We know some parishes followed Government guidelines while others made up their own. In some places, the Sacrament of Reconciliation was ‘done’ on a weekday morning (without any parents present) while others postponed it to a later time that has still not arrived. Some parishes filled sports stadiums to celebrate Confirmation. Many realised that celebrating the sacraments in smaller groups is more intimate and works well. I wish we had learnt more – not just that smaller groups work better.

I wish the bishops had used the pandemic as an opportunity to ‘pause’ the celebration of the sacraments. It would have been difficult, but not impossible.

Typing this makes me realise how disconnected all of this is from the message of Jesus. At the Last Supper, Jesus said to his friends “Do this in remembrance of me.” He left them with the power of the Holy Spirit to go out and share the Good News.

More than 2,000 years later, people are still coming forward to celebrate the sacraments. This is a great sign of hope and merits deeper exploration. Like Jesus said to Simon: “Put out into deep water and let down your nets for a catch” (Luke 5:4).

During parish gatherings to prepare for the sacraments, I sometimes ask those attending

if they know the band ABBA. There are always some who have never heard of them. I ask if they know Chris Rea and many stare at me, blankly – but once I mention ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ they start laughing and say of course they know that one song. Moving on, I ask who knows Ed Sheeran and, as you can imagine, everyone puts up their hands. I continue by asking: what can you do to make sure your children will know who Ed Sheeran is in 20 years’ time? The idea is to get them talking. I finish by referring to Jesus – 2,000 years ago the message was first preached by his followers, and it was passed on through the generations to this day.

That’s the reason we are here.

EXPERIENTIAL FAITH Moving forward, the Catholic Church in Ireland must be brave and bold. The focus has to be on experiencing faith, not on teaching it. What do I mean by that? Many church leaders in Ireland would agree that children who go through the Catholic school system are well educated when it comes to religion. The junior and senior curriculums in secondary school are comprehensive. However, the connection between head and heart is often missing. This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes from Karl Rahner: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all.”

In Jesus’ time, those who

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requested baptism or decided to follow him did so because they were in his presence and listened to his words. They experienced his healing. They saw the miracles. They participated in communion and shared in his way of living. Following Jesus’ death, the disciples experienced grief, anger, dissolution, fear and a sense of loss, but the encounter with the Risen Christ changed all that – utterly. They found the courage, wisdom and trust to cast out the net again.

I’d like to suggest that the Irish church throw out the net one more time. It’s time to ask new questions when it comes to preparing for the sacraments.

While parishes are quieter over the summer months, maybe the pastoral council, parish team or sacramental team can use the time to reflect on how to respond to the forthcoming requests for the sacraments.

A NEW MODEL Coaching is one of the fastest growing professions. It is about asking powerful questions and using different ‘tools’ to unlock people’s full potential, and can be adapted for areas such as life coaching, executive coaching or spiritual coaching. One coaching tool is called the GROW model, which stands for Goal, Reality, Options and Will: What do you want? Where are you now? What could you do? What will you do?

As a qualified life coach, I believe the answers we need are already there. If we apply the GROW model to sacramental preparation, our first task is to identify our Goal. Writing the goal will take discernment, prayer, wisdom, and time with 22 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

Pope Francis celebrates Confirmation with young people at the Church of St Cyril of Alexandria in Rome

the Holy Spirit. Here are some questions that might help on this journey: What is it that you as a parish team or pastoral council want to achieve when you think, for example, about the Sacrament of Confirmation? Why are you doing this? What is your motivation? What will your parish look like if you achieve this goal? Crucially, how realistic is your goal?

Once you have a goal, you move on to Reality. Here are some helpful questions about clarifying your parish reality: How many schools are in your parish area? How many children normally enrol for the sacraments? Who are the ‘stakeholders’? Who shares what kind of responsibly? What has the experience been like in

recent years? Cast the net into the deep, and try to find what is at the ‘heart’ of it all.

The third part of the journey is Options. We always have a choice; God has given us free will. The following questions will help explore different ways of moving forward: What are your options when it comes to achieving your goal?

For example, if your goal is to bring families closer to the Eucharist, you could look at the way your parish celebrates the Eucharist. Look at Mass times.

How welcoming is your church?

How energising and life-giving is the celebration of the Eucharist?

If it has lost its relevance, can you breathe new energy into it?

If your goal is to enrich the faith life of parents, you could look at how parents can be helped to

develop the ‘domestic church’.

Many parents have never been asked to speak about their faith.

Could your parish provide a space for them to share their experience? You don’t need a parish centre – you have a church building. Surely Jesus would not mind asking questions in his Father’s house?

There is no need to reinvent the wheel; there are many programmes already available.

The question parish teams need to focus on is ‘What do we have to offer?’ rather than ‘What do we have to do?’

The final step of the GROW journey is Will, putting these ideas into action. When all is said and done, more is said than done; this can often be the way in church circles. Whatever your goal is, make sure it is SMART –

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In Jesus’ time, those who requested baptism or decided to follow him did so because they were in his presence and listened to his words. They experienced his healing. They saw the miracles. They participated in communion and shared in his way of living. specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. And then, most importantly, do it!

Every journey, as we know, starts with the first step.

NEW ENERGY Every time we start a new academic year, I remind myself that children will be confirmed, make their First Confession and receive their First Holy Communion at the end of the school year. As a parish pastoral worker, my Goal has changed very little over the years, but my Reality, Options and Will have developed. Why? Because, like

many others, I have been on the road to Emmaus with the Lord.

My eyes were opened, I left behind the old, I experienced and found new energy. My goal has always been this: what can we do between now and the ‘big day’ to bring the church alive for families?

How can we create opportunities for the hearts of these families to burn like those of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus?

Jesus was a great coach. He knew how to ask powerful questions. “What are you talking about?” “What do you want?” He challenged everyone by asking “Who do you say I am?”

Keeping in mind that parents will knock at the door in September 2022 to register their children for the sacraments, how will we as parishes respond? Now is the time to discern and to act.

To achieve our goals, we might have to break it into steps. But the most important thing is to start.

Christina Malone has been working as a parish pastoral worker for the Archdiocese of Dublin for over ten years. Prior to this she studied and worked for the Diocese of Osnabrück in Germany. She writes regularly for the Irish Catholic column ‘Faith in Family’.

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TIME AND REDEMPTION IN NETFLIX’S RUSSIAN DOLL THE POPULAR SERIES PRESENTS A CHARACTER CAUGHT IN A TIME LOOP BUT YEARNING FOR CONNECTION AND A FUTURE

BY PAUL CLOGHER TIME AND THE CHRISTIAN IMAGINATION Time and its strangeness preoccupy the Christian imagination. In the Hebrew myths of humanity’s first emergence, the rapid passage of days in Genesis 1 gives way to humanity’s long sojourn from, and yearning for, a lost paradise. The remainder of the Torah is, among many things, both a struggle with time and a search for home. In the Exodus, Moses and the Israelites endure a long wandering in a four-decade desert, a journey characterised by impatience, impetuousness and idolatry. The idol always emerges from an attempt to control the divine, the mysterious, and the Other and this urge, at least in part, is rooted in humanity’s inability to bend time to our will.

In a latter episode of the Hebrew Bible, the problem of time in a loop haunts the life of Job, that patron saint of undue hardship, as he endures the consequences of his refusal to curse the God of his ancestors. In Christianity’s creative sequel, otherwise known as the New Testament, Jesus’ street arguments with the unfortunate Pharisees often invoke that lost 24 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

Edenic home, where the first earthlings emerged from the dust, communed, and became one flesh. The loss of Eden, which is more a state of mind than any physical location, and the search for authentic communion animates both the Christian and wider human story. The Christian response to this loss emerges in

TIME OUT OF JOINT The experience of time is simultaneously intimate and alien. We live and move within time but, by the same token, can never grasp, own or control it.

Season one of Russian Doll, a recent entry in Netflix’s ever expanding ‘canon’ of scripture, plays on these themes in the story

When they finally meet, both characters sense that the reason for their predicament may well be to save one another from a life of repeated despair and destruction. The idea of time never-ending is ruptured by encounter, by connection, by a kind of radical closeness and the hope that the loop may yet be ruptured. the dynamic of kenosis, where following Christ becomes a selfemptying that becomes the fertile ground for a renewed culture of encounter with both God and others. In this reflection, I would like to explore how these dynamics remain not only present but vibrant and even popular in contemporary media culture.

of Nadia, played by Natasha Lyonne, who is caught in a time loop as the guest of honour at her seemingly inescapable 36 th birthday party in New York city.

She dies repeatedly, always restarting at the same moment and at the same party. As she dies over and over again, she becomes more familiar with the repeated

structure of events and suspects that some kind of glitch in the system is preventing her from either dying permanently or continuing to live the life she had.

What follows is a concoction of science fiction, comedy and no small amount of spirituality that asks questions about the nature of time, the universe, human being and human becoming.

While Russian Doll was first produced in 2019, its focus on a displaced relationship with time and space seems, in retrospect, vaguely prophetic.

Media culture, in its ever more complex and layered forms, shapes and forms us like the ground that holds the roots of a tree, but in that reservoir there is often much more at play, and this is nothing new for the Christian mind and heart. In the incarnation, the presence of the divine tinges all culture and while many have sought to shape and bend that otherness to their own purposes, there is always an element of the unexpected that emerges and re-emerges in the images and stories we encounter, and which encounter us. A cursory scan through a variety of

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popular series and films suggests a recurring fascination with the prospect of time in a neverending loop or stuck in a void, that terrible feeling, not unlike the mysterious author of Qoheleth, that there is nothing new under the sun and that we are destined to live in an eternal present. A variation on the theme is found in Stranger Things, another Netflix original, where a group of teenagers seek to escape the void of the so-called Upside Down, an imperfect and decaying copy of reality. Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough thriller Memento (2000) offers another variant via the noir drama of a widower suffering from amnesia and in search of his wife’s murderer. Destined to live in an eternal present, Leonard pieces together each clue through external notes and tattoos but is stalked by the uncertainty of never knowing how he found them. One of the most celebrated examples is the 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, where Bill M u r r a y ’s m i s a n t h r o p i c weatherman endures the eponymous Pennsylvanian festival for what seems like eternity until the hope of a real connection with another human being redeems his purgatorial existence.

HAUNTOLOGY Much of this pessimism has at least some of its intellectual roots in the idea of ‘hauntology’, a term first coined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida to describe how Marxist philosophy in a variety of ways haunts European culture and politics.

The term has since been expanded (and perhaps even

Star of Russian Doll, Natasha Lyonne

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appear to be the only people aware of these repeated passages of time. When they finally meet, both characters sense that the reason for their predicament may well be to save one another from a life of repeated despair and destruction. The idea of time never-ending is ruptured by encounter, by connection, by a kind of radical closeness and the hope that the loop may yet be ruptured.

The cast of Russian Doll attends the season premiere at Metrograph Theater, New York

further complicated!) to include the paradoxes of so-called postmodern culture, where retro aesthetics and older social forms of life continue to haunt. Derrida drew the idea from a famous line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet where the titular character describes the feeling of “time out of joint”. From Groundhog Day to Russian Doll and beyond, we encounter a series of attempts to negotiate that feeling of being haunted by the past and the absence of a future.

RADICAL CLOSENESS As Nadia’s story unfolds, she notices that while time may be out of joint, it might yet offer the gift of a future. The product of a dysfunctional upbringing, many of her experiences between deaths invoke the memory of her mother, Lenora, and the emotional instabilities of her childhood. Her present life is equally beset by emotional and spiritual instabilities. One of the most interesting aspects of Nadia’s character is her job as a software developer for a videogame company. The time loop of her life is not unlike the 26 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

structure of a videogame. Like a game, death brings events back to the start rather than to an end.

Her initial approach to the time loop is to treat it not unlike a game and figure out the glitch in the matrix. Her journey through the repeated loops, however, suggests that the logic of the game might only offer a partial understanding. At this stage viewers and readers might think of the story as a relatively facile allegory for the concept of reincarnation but midway through the series, Nadia encounters a man who is experiencing the same time loop in a different event. Charlie Barnett’s portrayal of Alan depicts a man experiencing the same situation but with a different response. While Nadia attempts to play and replay the system until she discovers the glitch, Alan settles into its predictability and welcomes its nihilistic yet reliable character.

Driven by routine and structure, he plans to propose to his girlfriend only to discover that she has been having an affair. His loop revolves around this discovery and both he and Nadia

MEMORY AND HOPE In The Principle of Hope, published in three volumes between 1954 and 1959, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch explored the concept of utopian hope and its roots in art, literature, political philosophy and religion. Arguing that human culture is dynamised by a passionate hope for the future that transcends the alienation of the present, his hermeneutics of hope were crucial to the emerging dialogue between Christianity and Marxism in the 20th century and equally influenced the emergence of a renewed theology of hope within the Christian tradition. In 1964, the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann drew on Bloch’s insights to argue for the retrieval of the public and social dimensions of Christian hope. In his acclaimed Theology of Hope, Moltmann argued that while creation groans with suffering, it is also the arena, albeit laden with tension, where the “hope that draws the believer into the life of love” is equally “the mobilizing and driving force of faith’s thinking, of its knowledge of and reflections on human nature, history, and society.” This hope, as the Yale theologian Miroslav Volf

illustrates, is firmly rooted in the present: “Christian hope,” he writes, “is about the promise that the wrongs of the past can be set aright and that the future need not be a mere repetition of the past.” To hope, he continues, “does not mean to dream ourselves into a different reality, but to embrace the promise that this reality, suffused with suffering, will be transformed.”

REDEMPTIVE TIME Time loops are a recurring trope in fiction of many kinds. Often, they are dystopian loops that offer little hope of a future and thus symbolise a whole range of cultural and social anxieties about humanity’s inability to escape cycles of destruction, violence and despair. One of the most interesting dynamics in the first season of Russian Doll is its suggestion that the loop is neither inevitable nor eternal but open to change, transformation and even redemption. That rupture lies in the possibilities of selfless giving that might just give way to a more redemptive experience of time. Just as the theological category of hope might help us better understand the culture in which we live, move and have our being, so, too, might that culture reveal something of that dynamic of redeeming and passionate hope that nourishes the Christian imagination from Genesis to Apocalypse and beyond.

Paul Clogher is a lecturer in religious studies and theology in South East Technological University, Waterford.

COM M E N T

FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS CARMEL WYNNE

WHAT DID YOU HEAR ME SAY?

OFTEN WE THINK WE ARE LISTENING – BUT ARE WE REALLY HEARING WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING?

H

ave you ever wondered why people who take part in the same conversation or attend the same meeting give opposing and sometimes contradictory accounts of what happened? There is a simple explanation. People focus on different, though equally accurate, sets of information.

Maybe you left a dinner party under the illusion that everyone present was up to date with your family news. Two days later a friend, who was with you at the party, phoned you to ask why she was left out of the loop. Everyone, except her, seemed to know all about your good news. She felt bad about being left out. You felt puzzled as to how she missed out.

As children, most of us were taught that God gave us two ears and one mouth so that we would listen twice as much as we speak.

There is a widespread perception that there are just two elements to good communication: talking and listening. In reality there are three: talking, listening and hearing.

People wrongly believe that hearing is a skill that develops naturally. Rather, it is a learned skill that is poorly understood. You can listen to every word in a sentence yet miss the intended message because of a failure to pick up a change in the tone of voice. To hear what is meant, not what is said, you want to listen to the words’ meaning, hear the vocal variety, respond to the body language and intuit the emotional response.

People can only respond to what

they think you mean, which may be an accurate or an inaccurate reflection of your intended meaning. If a teenage friend says “Have you a minute?” in a cheery tone of voice, it will have a very different connotation compared to a parent saying “Have you a minute?” in a sombre tone of voice.

This highlights how identical words, spoken with different cadences, can communicate two very different messages. If the tone of voice is altered, the meaning of the words is changed. You can understand now why, though two people can say exactly the same thing, one person’s words sound pleasant and the same words from the other communicate the nonverbal message: You’re in trouble.

WHAT’S THE NEWS? During the first Covid lockdown one of my daughters suggested that the only way we were going to see each other was on Zoom. So every Sunday evening, in our four different homes, the computers go on the tables and we chat over dinner. As you can imagine there are frequent interruptions to our conversations as dinner, dessert and coffee are served.

Usually, a computer is muted when dishes are taken away or if there are background noises that could sound intrusive. A chorus of “Mute” will quickly remind anyone who forgets. My four daughters and I have a family chat group on WhatsApp. Almost every Monday

one or more of the girls will have a question about something they know they missed when their computer was on mute.

One Monday morning my youngest daughter texted “What’s your news mum?” She had three replies from her sisters. “Maybe that she’s writing an article for Engineers magazine.” “Wasn’t it that she’s not going for coffee with her new editor?” “I thought it was the lunch on Thursday with her friend Liz. I am sad there will be no coffee.”

Those texts would probably have been forgotten if two people on the same day hadn’t asked me “Where do you get your ideas from?” One person was due to give a speech in his Toastmaster club and couldn’t think of a topic. He told me he was planning a holiday, starting in Spain, going on to Brussels and ending in Paris. “Talk about your travel plans,” I said.

“Your life is full of topics.”

“Give me an example of how you get your ideas,” the other person asked. “From life,” I replied and shared this insight from our family

texts. Each daughter focused on a different, though equally accurate piece of information. Two communicated that they listened to the word messages and only one indicated that she heard the total communication.

She responded empathetically to what was said and what was not said. The sentence – “I am sad there will be no coffee” – only makes sense in the context of tuning in to the whole communication. The non-verbal communication that she heard was that I felt sad that the editor could not meet for coffee.

When we listen to words, we also tune in to the tone of voice, observe body language and eye contact, and respond emotionally.

To check if people hear what you mean, not just what you say, try asking “What did you hear me say?” You may be in for a few surprises.

Carmel Wynne is a life coach, crossprofessional supervisor and author based in Dublin. For more information go to www.carmelwynne.org

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SAINTS OF THE ROMAN CANON

PART II

Sixtus

Cornelius

Cyprian

THE SAINTS NAMED IN THE FIRST EUCHARISTIC PRAYER OF THE MASS WERE THE EARLY HEROES OF THE FAITH

the few popes in history whose papacy lasted less than a year.

In that short time, he addressed thorny issues within the church, in particular the question of re-baptism. His predecessor, Stephen, believed that baptism was a once-in-a-lifetime event and he refused to re-baptise heretics, but Sixtus tolerated this practice which was enough to mend a rift between the church in Carthage and Rome.

The emperor Valerian had outlawed Christian gatherings in cemeteries, and this is where Sixtus was captured. One day, Roman soldiers broke into the chapel in the cemetery of Callistus and found Sixtus and his companions there. They beheaded Sixtus while still seated, along with a number of his deacons and attendants. Four days later, just as Sixtus had prophesied, the eminent deacon Lawrence was also beheaded. The church was so afraid of the severity of Christian persecution that they waited two years before electing his successor. Pope Damasus had an inscription placed on his tomb:

CORNELIUS Cornelius was an Italian, born around 180 AD. He was one of the first popes to keep the name given to him at birth. He was elected in 251 amidst a period of terrible Christian persecution. Cornelius was a quiet, unassuming man who didn’t want to be pope and he had to be persuaded. He was good friends with Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, from whom he found great support.

He had to deal with a schism brought about as a result of the Christian persecution.

Novatian was a Roman priest who declared himself pope. He and his followers believed that those who denied their faith in the face of torture and threat of death could not be readmitted to the church. This was a big issue for the early church and Novatian wasn’t alone in his beliefs. But Cornelius welcomed those who had lapsed back to the church, provided they repented and undertook penance. He called an official synod, which agreed and excommunicated Novatian.

After only two years as pope, Cornelius was arrested by the emperor Gallus and sent into exile outside Rome, but he carried on working and wrote letters on church matters including exorcism. He died because of the hardships of exile and so is considered a martyr. Cyprian wrote of his death: “Our colleague Cornelius was a peaceable and just priest and deemed worthy of a martyr’s death by Our Lord.” He was brought back to Rome and buried in the cemetery of Callistus.

BY MARIA HALL

T

his is our final look at the saints mentioned in the First Eucharistic Prayer. Their names are so familiar that I’m sure most of us could recite the complete list! They have been part of this ancient prayer since its completion in the 6th century by Pope Gregory the Great. The early Christians viewed these saints as heroes; they were the personalities of their day. With the passage of time, the details of their lives have become obscure and much that remains is tradition; but that does not diminish the fervour of their faith, and of the Christian community at the time, nor the bravery they demonstrated in facing a torturous death.

Recalling their lives gives us the opportunity to experience the Roman Canon in a new light.

SIXTUS It is generally agreed that the pope referred to is Pope Sixtus II. He was born in Greece, a philosopher, who was elected pope in 257 AD. He suffered martyrdom under the persecution of the emperor Valerian in 258. He is one of

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At the time when the sword pierced the bowels of the Mother… soldiers rushed in and dragged me from the chair.

The Faithful offered their necks to the sword, but as soon as the Pastor saw the ones who wished to rob him of the palm of martyrdom, he was the first to offer himself and his own head…

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CYPRIAN Cyprian is the first martyr in the Roman Canon list who was not a pope. He was born to wealthy pagans and only converted to Christianity in his 50s. He was ordained a priest and two years later was elected bishop of Carthage where he had worked as a lawyer.

During the persecution of Decian he went into hiding and continued to guide his flock in secret. But during this time many people succumbed to apostacy (sacrifiati) and some obtained certificates which said they had offered sacrifices to the pagan gods (libellatici).

When things were safe, Cyprian dealt with the issue of these lapsed Christians wanting to rejoin the church. At a council in 251 AD, it was agreed that the sacrifiati should be forgiven but only when close to death. The libellatici were given suitable penances. Cyprian wrote On the Unity of the Catholic Church, which emphasised that unity was grounded in the authority of the bishop and of Rome: You cannot have God for your Father if you do not have the Church for your mother.... God is one and Christ is one, and his Church is one; one is the faith, and one is the people cemented together by harmony into the strong unity of a body.... If we are the heirs of Christ, let us abide in the peace of Christ; if we are the sons of God, let us be lovers of peace.

Cyprian served as bishop for ten years and became well known for his writings (which we still hear in the Office of Readings). In 258 he was arrested, tried and sentenced to death.

He paid his executioner 25 pieces of gold, knelt down, took off his robes, prayed, and was then killed by a sword in front of a large crowd of his flock, exclaiming “Thanks be to God.” He became the first bishop-martyr of Africa. It is said that he and Cornelius died on the same day, several years apart, and for that reason they share the same feast day.

JOHN AND PAUL These two brothers were serving soldiers in the Roman Army. Some details of their lives are derived from legend rather than fact, but they were certainly martyrs and included in the Roman Canon in the 5th century. Favoured by

the Emperor Constantine, they were assigned to look after his daughter Constantina. When she died (and was canonised) they dedicated their lives to serving those in need. Julian, a nephew of Constantine, succeeded him, but rejected Christianity (in fact he was the last of the pagan emperors). He asked the brothers to return to court and offer sacrifices to Jupiter, but of course they refused. They knew their actions would cause trouble, so they started to disperse their wealth and possessions to the poor of Rome. The emperor Julian was aware of their popularity and feared a public outcry so he sent Terentianus, a Roman officer, to deal with them at home. They refused to deny their faith and so were beheaded then and there. The three Christians who were assisting them were also killed. Terentianus buried them in the grounds of their house and spread the rumour that they had been sent into exile, but the truth soon emerged after someone praying in the house saw a vision of what really happened. Many people were converted, including Terentianus himself. A year later, Julian himself faced death by an arrow, and his dying words were, “Thou hast conquered, Galilean!”

The account of their brave lives and death lived on and their feast day, June 26, is mentioned in the medieval story of the Pied Piper of Hamlyn! In the 6th century, a basilisca was built in their honour. It survives to this day and beneath the high altar are the remains of John and Paul.

COSMAS AND DAMIAN Very little is known about the lives and deaths of these twin brothers from Syria. Their mother was St Theodota and their pagan father died when they were young. They became eminent Christian doctors who were known as ‘the moneyless ones’ because they refused to take any payment for the medical services they offered. They reputedly cured many ailments through prayer and treatment including paralysis, blindness, fever, and even expelled a breast serpent.

Under the persecution of Diocletian, in 287 AD they and their three brothers were arrested.

First, they were thrown into the sea but were

Cosmas and Damian

saved by angels. Next, the soldiers tried to burn them at the stake, but they survived. Still alive, they were hung on a cross, stoned and shot by arrows, but their death only came when they were finally beheaded.

A basilica was built over their tomb which became a place of pilgrimage. One story says that there was a man who served at the church and had a diseased leg. The saints appeared to him in a dream, carrying ointment and a surgical instrument. They proceeded to remove his bad leg and replace it with the leg of a Moor who had recently died and was buried in a nearby church. When he woke, the man held a light to his legs and saw they were both fit and healthy, though one clearly wasn’t his.

He visited the tomb of the Moor and saw his old leg attached to the body – confirmation of what had taken place! He immediately shared the amazing news with all his friends.

The emperor Justinian claimed to have been healed by the saints’ intercession and he built two churches in Constantinople their honour. Their gift of healing, charitable life and courageous death has made them popular saints. They are the patron saints of twins, surgeons and pharmacists.

Maria Hall is a music director at St Wilfred’s Church, Preston, England. A qualified teacher, she has a Master’s degree from the Liturgy Centre, Maynooth, and is a consultant on liturgical matters for schools and parishes. www.mariahall.org

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LOST IN TRANSLATION

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS TO ESCAPE THE PITFALLS OF A NEW LANGUAGE, OFTEN WITH HILARIOUS RESULTS

BY COLM MEANEY CSsR

T

he Bible begins with the creation of everything that exists. How is this creating done?

Does God overcome some primordial, recalcitrant demonic force? No, although such accounts are found in the book of Psalms. In the book of Genesis, God creates simply by speaking: “God said ‘let there be light’, and there was light” (Gen 1:3). And so it proceeds for the first six days.

The creation of everything, including humans, is accomplished simply through words. And the intriguing fact is that, among all that has been created, we humans are unique in having the same power of speech.

I take this to mean that in having the ability to communicate with one another with words, we are

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enjoying a divine-like power. Of course, such power can be used both for good and ill, hence the teaching of St Paul, “do not use harmful words in speaking, only the kind that will build up” (Eph 4:29). And in the letter of James, we read, “With our tongue we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God” (Jm 3:8-9). So clearly, our power of speech is an ambiguous one, able to produce words of beauty or abuse, words of encouragement or anxiety.

When I arrived in the Philippines in 1986, I studied at a language school run by the Maryknoll missionaries (New York), staffed entirely by locals. The five-month course gave us a fine grounding in

one of the major languages in the country (spoken by about 30 million). It was like being back at school: we had lessons from 8am12 noon, then lunch and siesta (a break from the tropical heat), followed by classes again from 2-4pm. Each evening we had homework: for example, to practise our grammar, we completed sentences like “I went/ will go to the shop” and so on.

Actually the languages, two of which I speak with some fluency, are quite simple grammatically: just a past, present, and future tense, and you read the words exactly as they are written on the page (no silent letters, like the letter ‘b’ in lamb). The challenge in the Filipino languages is the vastness of their vocabularies:

every day, in the hinterlands, I learn new words. For instance, for our verb ‘to carry’ they have multiple words: to carry in the hand, under the oxter, on the shoulder, on top of the head, across the shoulders (a pole, with buckets on either end, bringing water from the well), two or more people carrying an object (as in the Gospel story of the paralytic being lowered through the roof, having been carried on his stretcher by his companions). To be sure, the generic verb for carry (dala) could be used for all of these cases, but what a shame to neglect the richness of the language. The various languages have lovely touches. For example, they abound in onomatopoeia: the verb ‘to knock’ is tuktuk; the

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verb ‘to complain’ is yawyaw.

Even if you don’t speak the language, you can probably hear the resonances.

PITFALLS There are certain pitfalls which most non-native speakers have encountered, often with hilarious results. Presumably this can happen in most languages.

Think of a non-English speaker writing home describing his latest adventures. He writes: “I went to the fish shop to buy some soul, then later I had a new soul put on my shoe.” This should not lead us to imagine that the fishmonger or the cobbler were people of an exceptionally spiritual nature.

Or he may write: “There was a great sail at the mall today. Then I went to sea and brought a sale with me.” The first sentence may lead the reader to imagine a store covered in rigging, while the later may conjure up images of the man selling things cheaply in the harbour. But these slips only occur in writing; spoken, each of the above sentences makes perfect sense.

Languages in the Philippines are predominantly spoken, not written – hence the abundant opportunities for blunders.

Some words are spelt exactly the same, but where the accent is placed determines which word is meant, and the words are entirely different. So the word baga can mean either ‘lungs’, ‘cinders’ or ‘thick’ (bulky, solid), depending on the stress. By using the wrong stress, you may say “I have an infection in my cinders” or “I will gather up the lungs and put them into the bin.” The word puso also has multiple meanings: depending on the accent, it can

mean ‘a well’, ‘corn on the cob’ or ‘the heart of the banana plant’ (not the fruit). So an innocent foreigner may say “I’m going to the banana plant to get water” or “I’m going to boil the well for lunch.”

Then there are words with many of the same letters, but in a different order, and it’s easy to confuse these. An example is the word kalinaw which means ‘peace’. The word for a variety of dried fish is kinilaw. By confusing the two words, the priest, during the Mass, may say to the people just before the Lamb of God,

herself, I meant to say that she disfigured her lovely face using peppers to ward off any possible suitors, such was her devotion to the Lord. Unfortunately, in speaking a different dialect, I attributed to the saint practices which surely would have called into question not her extreme and unhealthy austerity and self-discipline, but her being a person of any decent virtue at all. According to my misuse of a word, she used to engage in acts more at home in a bordello than a Catholic household in Peru! But Filipinos are a forgiving people

Languages in the Philippines are predominantly spoken, not written – hence the abundant opportunities for blunders. By using the wrong stress, you may say “I have an infection in my cinders” or “I will gather up the lungs and put them into the bin.”

“The dried fish of the Lord be with you all.” By far the most egregious error one can commit is at the Prayers of the Faithful.

The response “Lord hear us” translates word for word as Ginoo pamatia kami, the middle word being the verb ‘to hear’. If, however, what is stressed is not the letter ‘i’, but the preceding ‘mat’, the result is “Lord kill us.”

Ouch!

Then there are words which mean one thing in one dialect, something entirely different in another. The word sili means ‘pepper’ in one language; however, in another, it refers to a delicate part of the male anatomy. As I was describing the somewhat extreme penances inflicted by St Rose of Lima on

and, instead of guffawing at my faux pas, a few merely smiled discreetly.

Filipinos speaking English can also be occasions of unintended mirth. Some years ago, while conducting a mission in an area of sugar plantations, one of the overseers came to me with a request. Speaking in the local dialect he asked if I would bless his jundir. Now, I speak that dialect with some fluency, but I had never heard the word jundir before. Was it some article of devotion perhaps? Or a new machete to use harvesting the sugar? Sugar plantations can be quite extensive, so I finally understood that he wanted me to bless his new tractor, a John Deere.

TEMERITY In the larger Christian scheme of things, it is almost a mark of respect if occasionally we get ridiculed or scoffed at because of our words. Think of Jesus being called to help a girl who was “at the point of death” (Mk 5:23-43); as he was approaching the house, messengers announced that she had already died. But Jesus ignored the message and reassured the girl’s father, saying “Do not fear, only believe.” When he arrived at the house, the crowd was mourning loudly, but Jesus said, “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The girl is not dead but sleeping.” The crowd’s response? “And they laughed at him.” Of course, Jesus wasn’t mispronouncing anything, but engaging in his relentless battle against the forces of darkness.

Think also of St Paul, who was openly laughed at in Athens when, in front of the philosophers gathered in the Acropolis, he had the temerity to declare that Jesus had indeed been raised from the dead (Acts 17:32). Although, to be fair, Paul wasn’t making any slip of the tongue, but engaging in an altogether more revolutionary activity: announcing the completion of the unheard of, that what had been an inchoately hoped for next-world or after-life possibility or promise, had already in fact happened, in a garden on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

A native of Limerick city where he went to school in St Clement’s College, Fr Colm Meaney CSsR first went to the Philippines as a student and has spent most of his priestly life there.

31

F E AT U R E THE SOUNDCHECK SERIES

THEOLOGY AND MUSIC

“NOTHING ON MY TONGUE BUT HALLELUJAH…” LEONARD COHEN ON EXPERIENCING THE TRANSCENDENT

Leonard Cohen

THE HAUNTING MUSIC OF LEONARD COHEN REFLECTS HIS LIFELONG SEARCH FOR LOVE, CONNECTION AND HEALING

BY MICHAEL SHERMAN

L

eonard Cohen was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Westmount, Quebec, in 1934. His parents gave him the Jewish name Eliezer, which means ‘help of my God’. Cohen once said that his childhood was “very Messianic” and he had been told as a child that he was a descendant of Aaron the high priest, elder brother of Moses. Religion and seeking the divine remained a continuous thread through Cohen’s long and varied life. This is reflected in his engagement with various religious traditions in his life and his music. He credits his mother, who sang songs around the family home, for his love of music. “I know that those changes, those melodies, touched me very much. She would sing with us when I took my guitar to a restaurant with some friends; my mother would come and we would often sing all night.” In his late teens, he took up classical guitar and discovered his love of poetry. In this article I will explore

32 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

what is arguably Cohen’s most famous song, ‘Hallelujah’, which features on his 1984 album Various Positions. But first, I will consider Cohen’s search for the transcendent in his life and music.

and a Zen Buddhist, he noted that there was no contradiction here. “In the tradition of Zen that I’ve practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity. So theologically there is

“I’m very fond of Jesus. He may be the most beautiful guy who walked the face of this earth. Any guy who says ‘blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek’ has got to be a figure of unparalleled generosity and insight and madness.”

BELIEFS AND PRACTICES Throughout his life Cohen had a fascination with the spiritualities of Judaism, Buddhism and Christianity. He described his religious interests as ranging from “the Communist party to the Republican Party” and from “Scientology to delusions of me as the High Priest rebuilding the Temple”. Describing himself as both a Sabbath-observing Jew

no challenge to any Jewish belief.”

He practised Zen Buddhism from the early 1970s and was ordained a Buddhist priest in 1996, but he always considered himself Jewish.

In addition to his interest in religion, he was fascinated with the person of Jesus. In an interview printed in Jim Devlin’s Leonard Cohen: In His Own Words Cohen states explicitly his affection for Jesus. “I’m very fond of Jesus. He

may be the most beautiful guy who walked the face of this earth.

Any guy who says ‘blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek’ has got to be a figure of unparalleled generosity and insight and madness ... A man who declared himself to stand among the thieves, the prostitutes, and the homeless. His position cannot be comprehended. It is an inhuman generosity. A generosity that would overthrow the world if it was embraced because nothing would weather that compassion.”

Cohen is clearly fascinated with the person of Jesus as the human expression of the divine.

VARIOUS POSITIONS Between 1967 and 2016, Cohen recorded 14 studio albums and eight live albums. During that time, he also wrote 15 poetry collections and two novels.

It is an extraordinary output that continues to influence contemporary writers and composers. His seventh album,

F E AT U R E

Various Positions (1984), stands out for his use of modern synthesized sounds as well as the beautiful haunting harmonies of Jennifer Warnes (‘Up Where We Belong’ with Joe Cocker and ‘(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life’ with Bill Medley). Warnes is credited equally with Cohen as singer on all of the songs on the album.

Many of the songs on Various Positions deal with religious themes and their overlap with everyday experiences. Cohen said that on the album he wanted to explore “how things really operate, the mechanics of feeling itself” and “what love is”. In I’m Your Man, a biography on Cohen by Sylvie Simmons, Cohen is quoted as saying “I think people recognize that the spirit is a component of love…it’s not all desire, there is something else. Love is there to help your loneliness, and prayer is to end your sense of separation with the source of things.” Life is difficult and love and prayer provide solace and connection with

something outside of yourself.

In her discussion of the album, Simmons observes that there are different characters in these songs offering a variety of instructions.

In ‘Night Comes On’, Cohen’s dead mother sends him back into the world. In ‘The Captain’, the commander sends him back to battle. And similar characters reappear in different songs in different contexts; in ‘Heart with No Companion’ there is a mother with no son and a captain with no ship. Each of these songs display undertones of a pilgrim or seeker with a burning desire to connect with someone and to belong.

Despite the difficulty of life, the characters in these songs are sent ‘back into battle’ as it were. They are told to stop running away and hiding from their life tasks. For love, healing and connection with the transcendent, the characters in these songs must first attend to their own particular matters.

This idea is similar to Pope Francis’ vision for the church as a “field hospital after battle”:

The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask seriously injured people if they have high cholesterol and about the level of their blood sugars! You have to heal their wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds... And you have to start from the ground up!

HALLELUJAH ‘Hallelujah’, the fifth song on Various Positions, is beyond doubt one of Cohen’s bestknown songs. Having achieved little success when first released, this song took on a life of its own and has been covered by several artists including the stunning version by Jeff Buckley. Following its introduction to a younger audience after featuring in the film Shrek (2001), the song has been covered and recorded over 300 times. There are echoes of

both early rock n’ roll and gospel music in the song. It is written in the musical key of C major, and the chord progressions match the lyrics of the song: It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift.

After drafting more than 80 versions of the song, the final version contains several biblical references, including the story of Samson and Delilah (“she cut your hair”) and King David and Bathsheba (“you saw her bathing on the roof, her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you”). There are layers and layers to this song. It is about the craft of song writing, the power of the word and music, the painful side to desire, the healing power of love, and the ultimate surrender and affirmation that comes after a great struggle. It is about experiencing a joyful oneness with the source of life. To paraphrase Karl Rahner, the song bears witness to the fact that in the end we have no choice, God is with us, 33

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and we come to know ourselves as mysterious beings in the presence of the Mystery of all being, which is absolutely incomprehensible. In Cohen’s words, “regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms… and you just say ‘Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.’”

It took him over five years to write the song. He gathered several books of notes of various verses and versions of the song.

The opening line of the song depicts the transcendent and earthly realities of life interwoven together: Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord That David played, and it pleased the Lord But you don’t really care for music, do you?

However, in the next verse, Cohen is cryptic about whom his words are directed towards.

34 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

Your faith was strong but you needed proof You saw her bathing on the roof Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you She tied you to a kitchen chair She broke your throne, and she cut your hair And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah Cohen goes from singing about King David in the first verse to presumably addressing him directly in the second verse.

But it is not clear to whom he is speaking. Is it himself or King David? We are never told. This song is so well written that it could be a conversation with anyone, taking place anytime and anywhere – like any conversation with yourself and your God. In 2016, shortly after Cohen died, fellow Canadian singersongwriter K.D. Lang said that for her the song was about “the struggle between having human

desire and searching for spiritual wisdom” and being caught between those two places. The song certainly alludes to finding the divine in the human realities of earthly life.

In an interview with The New Yorker shortly before he died, Cohen talked about music, work and preparing for death.

He quoted from a song he was working on which would later be released posthumously in 2019 as ‘Listen to The Hummingbird’.

This song is so well written that it could be a conversation with anyone, taking place anytime and anywhere – like any conversation with yourself and your God.

Listen to the hummingbird Whose wings you cannot see Listen to the hummingbird Don’t listen to me Listen to the mind of God Which doesn’t need to be Listen to the mind of God Don’t listen to me.

For Cohen, it is only in this earthly world, amongst the hummingbirds and the battles with ourselves and life, that we can experience God.

Michael Sherman teaches theology at Carlow College, St Patrick’s.

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F E AT U R E

A QUESTION OF CONSCIENCE IN CLAIRE KEEGAN’S NOVEL SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE, THE MAIN CHARACTER FACES A CHOICE BETWEEN COLLUDING WITH AUTHORITY OR ACTING WITH INTEGRITY

BY EAMON MAHER

C

laire Keegan first came onto my radar when she was described by no less an authority than Professor Declan Kiberd, on the occasion of the publication of her first short story collection Antarctica (1999), as “a writer already touched with greatness”, and as one of the possible successors to John McGahern. At the time, I was doubtful that such accolades were merited, but since reading the subsequent work, another short story collection Walk the Blue Fields (2007), the novella Foster (2010), and most recently a short novel entitled Small Things Like These (2021), I understand what all the hype is about. Every word of Keegan’s published work has weight, her characters have real depth, and her rendering of place is exceptional. Kiberd once described McGahern’s work to me as exemplifying the ‘iceberg effect’, by which he meant that although one only sees what is above water (in this case, on the page), the mass of unseen material underwater is what makes the work so perfect. This could also be said of Keegan.

Her publications are sparse (another trait she shares with McGahern), but when she does release work for public consumption, the rigorous rewrites it has undergone are felt in the perfection of the prose and the authenticity of the human situations that are evoked.

For the purposes of this article, I have decided to concentrate on Small Things Like These, which recounts the journey that leads Wexford coalman Bill Furlong to pit himself against one of the most powerful institutions of 1980s Ireland, the Catholic Church, by taking a girl out of the local Good Shepherd convent where she has ended up as a result of becoming pregnant outside of marriage.

36 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

By dedicating the novel to “the women and children who suffered in Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalen Laundries”, Keegan reveals from the outset the main thrust of the novel’s plot. In an interview with Claire Armitstead for The Guardian newspaper, however, Keegan, when asked why she wrote a novel about the Magdalene Laundries, denied that this was her objective, before adding: “I think this is the story of a man with five daughters, in a marriage, who’s running a coal yard and is probably a workaholic, and maybe facing some kind of midlife crisis. I think it’s the story of a man who was loved in his youth and can’t resist offering the same type of love to somebody else.”

EMPATHY At this point, some background information will be necessary for those who have not yet read the novel. Bill Furlong’s mother fell pregnant when she was 16 and was then abandoned by the man who had impregnated her. She was working at the time as a domestic for Mrs Wilson, a Protestant widow who lived in the Big House a short distance outside the town of New Ross.

Rather than removing the girl from her position after hearing about the pregnancy, Mrs Wilson said that both she and her child would always be welcome in her house. Bill Furlong had therefore been a beneficiary of kindness from the moment he came into the world and so it was natural that he should try to demonstrate similar charity to others in unfortunate circumstances. This may be what prompts him to regularly give the son of local drunkard Mick Sinnott any change he has in his pocket, and to be moved to

tears on seeing a young schoolboy drinking milk out of a cat’s bowl behind the priest’s house one cold winter’s morning. But feeling empathy with the socially deprived does not involve confronting any power blocks or losing valuable customers, whereas taking up the cudgels for those in the care of the Good Shepherd nuns in the local conventcum-laundry business clearly could have dire consequences for Bill and his family.

Arriving one day before Christmas with a load of timber and coal, he makes his way towards the rear of the convent where he spies within a small lighted chapel more than a dozen inmates, “down on their hands and knees with tins of old-fashioned lavender polish and rags, polishing their hearts out in circles on the floor.” None of them is wearing shoes and they all look malnourished and neglected. One of them glances up at him plaintively and asks, “Mister, won’t you help us?”

From that point on, the path that Bill Furlong must follow begins to take shape.

He cannot get the image of the girls out of his mind, as it reminds him of the fate that would have befallen his mother had it not been for her Protestant benefactor. After all, this is how the church and state dealt with what they referred to as ‘fallen women’ during the 1980s: many of those incarcerated were only ‘guilty’ of falling pregnant outside of wedlock, or coming from families that were too poor to look after them properly. When he discusses his dilemma with his wife Eileen, she recognises immediately that no good will come out of challenging the authority of the church, and that the immediate upshot will be her husband losing the contract with the nuns. She tries to make him see sense: “If you

F E AT U R E

miles away from the love of sinners that characterised the life and teaching of the founder of Christianity. This may explain the upbeat tenor of Keegan’s character as he makes his way home with Sarah: The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been – which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life.

want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.”

However, Furlong can no longer remain inactive when he discovers a young girl in the convent fuel shed, still lactating after having given birth to a baby a few months previously, shivering and suffering from possible hypothermia. The traces of excrement on the shed floor show that she has been there for some time. In his subsequent discussion with the mother superior, Furlong is told that the girls must have played a prank on their friend and locked her in the shed. The nun’s sole concern seems to be with administering punishment to those in her care and making as much money as possible from their unpaid work in the laundry. In her interview with Armitstead, Keegan was at pains to point out that her desire was not in any way to demonise the nuns, who were after all in concert with the state agencies and society in general in behaving as they did. She left Ireland in 1986, the year that Ann Lovett, a young teenager, gave birth to a child in a local grotto to the Virgin Mary in Granard, Co. Longford, an incident that intensely shocked Irish society and caused a number of women to ring Gay Byrne’s radio programme to share their stories of unplanned pregnancies.

TAKING A STANCE This may well have influenced the gloomy tone of Keegan’s novel. She explained to Emily Hourican, a journalist with the Irish Independent: “I felt the darkness that is in

Small Things Like These. I felt that atmosphere of unemployment, and being trapped maybe.” There is a sense in which Bill Furlong, by taking the young girl (Sarah is her name) out of the convent and bringing her to his own house, is redeeming the collusion of so many people in Ireland, who knew what was happening in industrial schools and Magdalene Laundries, and did nothing.

Walking with Sarah along the streets of New Ross, he achieves a type of catharsis: As they carried on along and met other people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

Very important questions are raised here in relation to the obligation on the part of a Christian to face down injustice and bear witness to the Gospel message of love, especially for the poor, the sick and the oppressed. Who could be considered more in need of help than those young women committed to the Magdalene Laundries? By taking a stance that will almost certainly have serious repercussions for himself and his family, Bill Furlong strikes a blow for the innocent victims who were kept in horrible conditions, sometimes tortured, poorly fed, all in the name of a public morality that was

The quote that is often (wrongly) attributed to Edmund Burke – “All that is needed for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” – immediately springs to mind at this point, as it captures how evil is often allowed to thrive by people not being prepared to confront or combat it. Bill Furlong will never have to live with the guilt associated with inaction, which may well explain his optimism in the last lines of the novel: Climbing the street towards his own front door with the barefooted girl and the box of shoes, his fear more than outweighed every other feeling but in his foolish heart he not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage.

It is no coincidence that Keegan’s novel ends on a cold Christmas Eve, at a time when people are looking forward to spending time with loved ones, sharing food and presents, and perhaps reflecting on how different this is from the night that God took human form in a stable. Small Things Like These is a beautiful novel that highlights how people should follow their conscience if they aspire to live authentic lives. Bill Furlong knows that and hence he takes the only decision that would allow him a future free of guilt. When faced with similar dilemmas, hopefully many of us would act in a similar manner.

Eamon Maher is director of the National Centre for FrancoIrish Studies in TU Dublin and a regular contributor to Reality.

37

IF THE RAINS DON’T COME…

HOW SUPPORT FROM TRÓCAIRE IS HELPING TWO FAMILIES SURVIVE DEVASTATING DROUGHT IN ETHIOPIA

BY DAVID O’HARE

E

thiopia is facing its fourth consecutive season of drought, compounded by the recent rise in food and fuel prices due to the war in Ukraine. The World Food Programme (WFP) says with crops continuing to fail and livestock being wiped out, an estimated 7.2 million people are waking up hungry every day in southern and south-eastern Ethiopia. We hear from two people fighting the impact of climate change with the help of Trócaire.

GUYO Just three years ago, before the start of the current cycle of no rain, Guyo and his family had 28

38 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

cattle, three camels and twelve goats. Now, he has just three cows and one camel to sustain his family.

“We have had three consecutive years of drought. It’s the worst drought in the last two decades,” Guyo said.

“Some of my friends have migrated away, but the drought reaches far and wide, you cannot escape it. The only thing we can do is invest in animal feed to keep our remaining livestock alive. The livestock are our only way to generate an income, without them we are as good as dead.”

If the rains don’t come it will be the fourth consecutive failed season. Time is fast running out

for Guyo and other families who are struggling to survive.

“My biggest fear is that once all our livestock are dead, next it will be the women and children.

Our community is malnourished already, death is not far away. We have lived here for centuries and have weathered droughts before, but this is different, this feels unnatural. Climate change is killing us,” Guyo said.

Trócaire, in partnership with Community Initiatives Facilitation and Assistance (CIFA) and CST (the three Catholic humanitarian agencies CAFOD, SCIAF and Trócaire), have been working with Guyo and his community in the

Borena zone to help reduce poverty and improve the economic opportunities of 5,351 women and young people over three years. The programme received funding from Jersey Overseas Aid. “Trócaire helped us to fence off large areas of pastoral land to stop animals from grazing there and to allow the grass to grow so that we can harvest it for future use. We were also supported to clear the pastoral land of all bushes to prepare for grass growth. We were paid for our labour too. I think we cleared between 300 to 400 hectares in two months. The temperature was around 40 degrees, but we

In South Omo in southern Ethiopia, mother of five Hadoya Rubitte (25) is struggling to provide for her young family due to the ongoing drought.

Photo: Barnaby Jaco Skinner

knew it had to be done for our future survival.”

Guyo thanked the people of Ireland for their continued support. “Please stand by us during this unprecedented time.

We will do whatever is in our power to survive, but I fear it is no longer enough.”

HADOYA In South Omo in southern Ethiopia, Hadoya Rubitte (25) is struggling to provide for her young family due to the ongoing drought.

Hadoya works as a pastoralist and makes a living from releasing her herd onto large areas of land for grazing. Pastoralism is practised in areas that are too dry to grow traditional crops and that are vulnerable to climate change.

“The drought has taken all the grass, there is no grazing anymore.

Fattening my goats is becoming more and more difficult,” said

Hadoya.

Trócaire and partners CST and Agri Service Ethiopia (ASE) are supporting 1,692 people in the area with funding from the EU. Hadoya has taken out Index Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) to buy food for her livestock.

“Trócaire gave me three goats to fatten, multiply and sell for a profit. But I will never sell all my goats, I will always keep some for my family. When I’m sleeping, I dream about what I have been given. These goats are my life,” said Hadoya.

The mother of five said that before the project she was lost, but now she has learned to sustain her livelihood.

“I am very happy. I love working hard. I love being able to look after my family. The income has allowed me to buy two mobile phones which has changed our lives in two major ways,” she said.

“I can give one of the phones to

my eight-year-old son, Arkol, when he takes the goats out to graze. Before we had the phones, I would worry so much about him, he is so young and the world is such a dangerous place. I wouldn’t know if Arkol had fallen down a ravine, been bitten by a snake or even attacked by an enemy. But now I can call him on the phone to check on him, make sure he is okay.”

Having the phone also means that she doesn’t have to travel to the market to negotiate a price for a goat. “Now I can call my contacts and do all my business from home. It has saved me so much time and money. I can spend my time looking after my family and working, as it should be.”

“Please stand by us during this unprecedented time. We will do whatever is in our power to survive, but I fear it is no longer enough.”

FIND OUT MORE To find out more about Trócaire’s work visit www.trocaire.org

39

CO M M E N T REALITY CHECK PETER McVERRY SJ

LET’S PUT TRAVELLER RIGHTS FIRST

THE EXCLUSION OF TRAVELLERS FROM IRISH SOCIETY HAS GONE ON FOR TOO LONG

I

f Travellers were Black, Ireland would be universally condemned as a racist, apartheid country.

Housing and employment exclusion are the most visible signs of apartheid.

Travellers often face opposition from the settled community at any attempt to provide them with housing or Travellerspecific accommodation. Over 500 Traveller households are currently on unauthorised sites, which have no basic facilities, many on the side of busy roads, and are vulnerable to eviction.

A welcome development was the recent Supreme Court ruling to overturn a decision to evict a family from public land where they had been living for five years, citing article 40.5 of the Constitution on the “inviolability” of a dwelling and article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Other Travellers live in overcrowded halting sites in bad conditions. The Ombudsman for Children published a damning report on the conditions on a halting site in Cork, describing it as filthy, overcrowded, rat-infested, and unsafe, with poor sanitation and waste management, and in violation of the rights of Traveller children. He has referred his report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. Other Traveller sites, because they are designated as ‘temporary’, are not properly maintained and are in an equally bad condition.

Over 500 individual Travellers are homeless, 11 times the rate

40 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

for the general population.

Governments have come to rely on the private rented sector to provide accommodation for homeless or low-income households, but Travellers seeking accommodation in the private rented sector are 22 times more likely to be discriminated against by landlords.

Travellers also face discrimination

degree compared to over 25 per cent in the general population.

Many Traveller children do not feel included, wanted or safe in school, and sometimes their parents, who may have had dreadful experiences themselves in school, worry about them while in school. In a recent book (Unseen Homelessness in the Traveller Community – Pavee

in relation to employment; 85 per cent of Travellers are unemployed.

Many blame Travellers themselves for being unemployed, rather than the underlying racism which is largely responsible. While many Travellers give up seeking employment, the reason is that constant rejection is demoralising and undermines a person’s selfworth. The walls Travellers have to climb to get a job are often insurmountable.

The needs of Traveller children are failed by the educational system. Some 55 per cent leave school with no qualification, compared with 13 per cent in the general population. Just 1 per cent have a third-level

Point), one author describes very movingly the experience of a young child, oblivious to the fact that he is a Traveller, slowly coming to the realisation that he is being treated differently from other children and feeling unwanted. He comes to realise that other children have been told by their mothers not to play with him, and to wonder why he has to live on the edge of a motorway with no running water or toilets.

The life expectancy for Traveller men is 15 years less than for the general population and over 12 years less for women. The suicide rate is seven times higher than for the general population.

Their experience of exclusion is certainly a major cause. We can inflict violence on others by our inaction, as much as by our actions. The failure of Irish society to address the exclusion faced by Travellers is a societal violence perpetrated against them. Their exclusion is a stain on the soul of this country.

For Travellers to participate in society equally with others, many of us need a change of mind and heart. Changing minds and hearts is what religion is about. The churches have a major role here. I would love to see every bishop put Traveller rights at the top of their social justice agenda, and make a commitment that they will do everything to ensure that in 12 months’ time, there would be no Travellers living on the side of the road or in “temporary” halting sites. That means actively lobbying their local authorities, and challenging those who want to keep Travellers apart, and accepting the opprobrium and abuse which will come their way.

But that is surely the Christian way. For Christians, the equal dignity of every human being is a fundamental core belief and reaching out to the ‘other’ is a basic commandment.

For more information or to support the Peter McVerry Trust: www.pmvtrust.ie info@pmvtrust.ie +353(0)1 823 0776

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Praying the Rosary

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MEDITATING THE GOSPEL STORY WITH THE MOTHER OF THE LORD

By Fr George Wadding CSsR Archbishop Fulton Sheen said that when we pray the rosary in a prayerful, contemplative manner, it lifts us into a world where “we see and enact the greatest drama of love the world has ever known.” Fr George Wadding CSsR is well-known for his thoughtful but simple and imaginative style of writing. In this little book, he invites us to explore the twenty scenes from the story of Jesus our Redeemer that make up the Joyful, Sorrowful, Luminous and Glorious mysteries of the Rosary. Walking and praying with Mary, we accompany the Lord along his way. This beautifully illustrated book is for beginners, as well as those who have been praying the rosary for many years. It can be used by the family or a prayer group. It is ideal for those who wish to pray the rosary tranquilly, resting in the mysteries, like Mary, ‘who pondered them in her heart.’ It is well-bound but still small enough to slip into a handbag or a pocket, and the colourful images for each decade will long stay in the memory.

May God’s Spirit be with all who seek comfort in its pages.

To Order:

ONLINE: www.redcoms.org EMAIL: sales@redcoms.org PHONE: 00353 (1) 4922 488 Redemptorist Communications, St Joseph’s Monastery, Dundalk, Co.Louth A91 F3FC

THE BEST COMPANION BOOK FOR THE LITURGICAL CALENDAR

Aglow with the Spirit Irish Saints in the Ordo

Aglow with the Spirit offers some ready-to-hand material on Irish saints celebrated in the Ordo, that is, the Liturgical Calendar for Ireland. Aglow with the Spirit also has a word on certain other saints of Ireland, North Britain and beyond, in whom the author has found inspiration from having lived and worked and prayed in places evangelised by them.

Among the saints featured here are the national patrons, Patrick, Brigid and Colmcille. Featured, too, are such regional guardians as Ita and Gobnait in Munster and Moninna whose remit reaches from Slieve Gullion in Armagh to the Cooleys and the Mountains of Mourne. True, biographical information on many saints may be sparse, but there is nearly always enough to fire the imagination.

Redemptorist John J. Ó Ríordáin writes in a popular and readable style, suitable for sacristy and private use. Covering over 80 Irish saints, this book is rich in our cultural and religious heritage.

To order, contact Redemptorist Communications St Joseph’s Monastery, St Alphonsus Road Dundalk, County Louth A91 F3FC

€9.95 (plus P+P)

Telephone: 00353 (0)1 4922 488 Email: sales@redcoms.org www.redcoms.org

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Christian Community Bible

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Hardcover edition of the popular Christian Community Bible. Clear print and useful additional information make this a popular choice. The commentaries, maps and useful introductory texts provide an excellent background to the scriptures, ideal for getting to know the bible.

How to Read the Bible

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WellͲknown Redemptorist scripture scholar, Fr Brendan McConvery C.Ss.R has written this ‘manual’ with ordinary people in mind. Its warm and friendly style invites and enthuses the reader into the subject which is presented in a sound, practical way.

The Three Faces of Christ

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Scripture scholars Fr Brendan McConvery C.Ss.R & Fr Ciaran O’Callaghan C.Ss.R provide reflections and insights into the Sunday Gospels for the threeͲyear liturgical cycle. Written with a warm and accessible style, this book will encourage you to be a little better prepared for Mass.

Christian Community Bible & How to Read the Bible

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GOD’S WORD THIS MONTH

CARRY ON MY MISSION! Not long before the episode which we heard about in our Gospel reading today, Jesus had 14TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME sent out the Twelve on a mission of preaching the Kingdom, accompanied and illustrated by works of healing and exorcism. Now, Jesus sends out a larger group with a similar commission and they come back to report that their mission has been successful. We might note that, for Luke, the Twelve are essentially disciples of Jesus among a wider group. They have been specially chosen

from this larger number, among whom Luke specifically mentions women by name. Thus, the sending of the seventy-two mirrors the sending of the Twelve.

The twelve apostles represent symbolically the twelve tribes of Israel. They are, in the Gospel tradition, essentially witness to the risen Jesus, but are eclipsed very shortly by the deacons and then by the apostle Paul, who had not known Jesus during Jesus’ earthly life. Luke shows that Jesus includes the wider group of disciples in his mission: it is not restricted to Peter and the other members of the Twelve.

Jesus tells the disciples that if the citizens

WHOSE NEIGHBOUR ARE YOU? In today’s Gospel extract, we hear of a hostile encounter between a 15TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME lawyer, who obviously wants to catch Jesus out on a point of law, and Jesus himself. Jesus sidesteps the trap of being lured into a legalistic debate on theoretical questions by getting straight to the heart of the matter: what is the moral value at stake here?

Jesus answers his interrogator by placing love of one’s neighbour equivalent to one’s love of God. Love, in the Bible, does not refer to an

emotional attachment, but has more the sense of proper treatment, respect, concern. Jesus’ illustration by the parable of the Good Samaritan is an exquisite treatment of this theme. We are, in our reading of today’s Gospel during Mass, in Samaria, a region in which the hostility towards Jesus and other pilgrims to Jerusalem would be particularly acute. Hence, Jesus’ reference to official religious figures is especially critical: the wounded individual may be dead, therefore to approach his corpse rendered anyone who approached it ritually impure and therefore excluded from public worship and community activities.

The person who shows human, and religious,

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of a town refuse them hospitality, a sacred duty in the culture of the time and place, “it will not go as hard with Sodom as with that town.” The sin of Sodom to which Jesus refers was the breach of the law of hospitality, which is the reason why the disciples should leave, shaking off the very dust of the place as a sign to those who failed to live up to their obligations to the stranger and traveller.

TODAY’S READINGS Is 66:10-14; Ps 65; Gal 6:14-18; Lk 10:1-12. 17-20

compassion for the injured person, whom the others may not realise to be still alive, is one of the most despised groups in cultural Jewish thought at the time.

Jesus turns the lawyer’s question back on him. His questioner asks, “Who is my neighbour?” Jesus is posing the question the opposite way round: “Whose neighbour are you?”

TODAY’S READINGS Deut 30:10-14; Ps 68; Col 1:15-20; Lk 10:25-37

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GOD’S WORD THIS MONTH WHAT DOES JESUS REALLY NEED? In the course of his journey to Jerusalem, Jesus is welcomed into 16TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME the house of a woman named Martha and her sister, Mary. Women feature more prominently, and by name, in the Gospel version of Luke than in the other accounts.

In this episode, Jesus encounters hospitality, not just friendliness or politeness, but an essential element in the culture of that time and place. Up to now, we have heard warnings and examples about hostility and rejection. But even in this apparently cosy, domestic scene there is a message.

Most of us would feel sympathy for Martha: we can imagine the clashing of pots and pans increasing in volume as her frustration at being left in the kitchen to prepare the meal alone grows. Eventually, her patience runs

out and she bursts into the conversation between Jesus and Mary. But if she had her way, Jesus would be left sitting alone while the two of them busied themselves in the kitchen. Is that what hospitality means? Does it centre on the accepted duties of the host being fulfilled, or is it a matter of meeting the needs of the guest? What were Jesus’ needs at this point? A meal, or rather human company and attention?

Martha is clear about her duties towards her guest. But Jesus gently points out that perhaps she has got her priorities wrong. It is Mary who is presented as “choosing the better part”. Luke is suggesting that that the Word of God takes precedence over other considerations. On a practical level, the story of Martha and Mary is posing an important question: what does the person in front of you really need? Whose needs are you addressing: theirs or yours?

TEACH US TO PRAY One feature of the writings of Luke is his emphasis on prayer. From his first appearance as 17TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME an adult, at his baptism, Jesus is shown as praying at significant points in his ministry, as well as regularly, as in our Gospel reading today.

The disciples have noticed him spending time communicating with God and ask him to instruct them how to do this themselves.

They are not asking Jesus simply as an individual teacher, but one with the authority of a prophet, someone in the line of John the Baptist. Jesus the prophet is another theme running through Luke’s version of the Good News.

Luke’s presentation of the Lord’s Prayer is shorter, less detailed than Matthew’s (the one we normally use). It consists of five requests:

the first two refer to God and the coming of God’s kingdom: God’s name being held holy and the establishing of God’s kingdom are, in some ways, the same thing.

The other three petitions concern the reader and reflect important themes of Luke’s Gospel. These are, firstly, asking for our daily needs to be met: the second request is that God forgives us our sins, but we might note that God’s forgiveness depends on our willingness to forgive those who have offended us in some way or other; the third and final appeal asks that we may not be put to the severest test, which means standing up for what we believe in the face of persecution, because we might well not pass the test.

The second part of our Gospel extract today emphasises the importance of keeping on praying and not giving up, even if we seem to be receiving no answer.

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TODAY’S READINGS Gen 18:1-10; Ps 14; Col 1:24-28; Lk 10:38-42

TODAY’S READINGS Gen 18:20-32; Ps 137; Col 2:12-14; Lk 11:1-13

TO HAVE OR TO BE? Throu ghout Luke ’s Gospel, the theme of riches and possessions and the danger they 18TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME pose to the human person keeps recurring.

In today’s extract, an anonymous person in the crowd surrounding Jesus asks him to intervene in a family dispute concerning inheritance. Very often, a rabbi would be asked to adjudicate in such a matter. But Jesus dismisses his request, and rather abruptly at that: he has more serious issues which he wants his hearers to consider. Jesus does not think that the matter is as simple as ensuring fair shares all round: he uses it as a springboard for teaching about avarice, or greed, quite a different subject. Money or possessions may well be necessary for human life, but when they become an obsession, when people think that this will bring them security, they are sadly mistaken, as Jesus illustrates in the parable of the rich fool: this follows his warning about never being satisfied, but always wanting more. Both

these responses are provoked by the initial, perhaps seemingly reasonable, request from the voice in the crowd.

The rich man thinks that he can assure his life by what he owns: he does not grasp that life is a gift from God, and that it is God who decides when to withdraw his gift. Another element in the stories of people accepting Jesus’ message is that it puts possessions and money in a different light. One result

LEADERSHIP EQUALS SERVICE Our Gospel reading today turns towards the final judgment at the 19TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME coming of the Son of Man. Jesus’ audience are advised to remain in a constant state of readiness, as they do not know when the Master will return. However, judgment is ongoing in the present, as the Lord is aware whether people are living up to their responsibilities or taking advantage of the master’s absence.

It is difficult to overemphasise the shock of the householder’s reaction towards the faithful and watchful servants who are

awaiting his return. He does not expect them to serve him a meal, but instead puts on an apron, sits them down and waits on them himself. Such a reversal of roles would be unthinkable in a society where a person’s position in the social hierarchy would determine their behaviour. But we do find in the gospels this idea of authority as service, expressed here as table service and, elsewhere, Jesus sets this out as the model of leadership for his disciples.

Jesus responds to Peter’s question about who this parable applies to, but Jesus answers generally with another parable, this one about what kind of person the steward in charge of the household should be. This official was responsible not just for carrying out the

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of being converted to Jesus is to share what the person has, that the person becomes free in themselves and is no longer shackled to what they own. Life is a gift and should be treated as such.

TODAY’S READINGS Ecc 1:2, 2:21-23; Ps 89; Col 3:1-5. 9-11; Lk 12:13-21

instructions of the owner of the house, but also for the welfare of the servants in his charge. So, to be a faithful steward to the master, this person had to be attentive to the needs of the other members of the household.

Thus, service is not just vertical, upwards to the one above, but also horizontal, toward the other members of the community.

TODAY’S READINGS Wis 18:6-9; Ps 32; Heb 11:1-2. 8-19; Lk 12:32-48

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GOD’S WORD THIS MONTH JESUS THE SOURCE OF DIVISION? Luke presents Jesus as a prophet, the bearer of 20TH SUNDAY IN the Word of God. People ORDINARY TIME are challenged to make a decision: do they accept the prophet and the prophet’s message or not?

However we understand the opening sentences of today’s Gospel reading, there is no mistaking the urgency with which Jesus sees himself and his mission.

Jesus is not encouraging or approving family quarrels or disputes. He is saying, as a prophet, that people have to decide where they stand

in regard to himself and his message. This will inevitably lead to disagreements, even splits, within family and other close relationships. But this is a consequence of individuals deciding for themselves whether they accept Jesus and his preaching. It is a matter of faith and theology, the person’s understanding of God, not of human domestic or personal relationships.

Often, the image we have of Jesus is a compassionate, perhaps harmless, teacher of religion. The idea that Jesus could promote fierce arguments within families or the wider community does not figure in most people’s imagining of the Gospel narrative.

Jesus, in line with the biblical tradition, teaches

the doctrine of reconciliation. The process requires the person initially to confront the other with the perceived wrongdoing: if that does not resolve the issue, then the wider community becomes involved, but the desired result is not the conviction of an offender, but the restoration of the relationship. Peace at any price is not the teaching of the Scriptures.

If someone decides not to remain within the community, then God will accept their decision.

Jesus asks us all to decide where we stand.

MARY, OUR MODEL In the Hebrew scriptures, there are certain types of stories which have a FEAST OF THE definite structure. One of ASSUMPTION these patterns is known as ‘birth annunciations’.

This means that the child to be born is of particular significance. Luke has two of these narratives, concerning the coming arrival of John the Baptist and Jesus. The final element in such a structure is the giving of a sign.

The purpose of a sign in this context is to

guarantee to the person who has received the message that they were not dreaming: to confirm the reality of their experience.

The sign given to Mary during her visionary encounter is that her elderly cousin Elizabeth is (unexpectedly) pregnant. So Mary’s visit to Elizabeth is not an act of charity but part of a literary pattern: she goes to confirm the angel’s communication.

The unborn John the Baptist makes his first announcement of the coming of the Lord by leaping for joy in his mother’s womb. Elizabeth greets Mary with a beatitude for the one who

“believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.” Mary responds with her song, the Magnificat. In this scene, many of the themes which run through the Gospel of Luke are stated: the importance of believing (or trusting) in the Word of God; the Lord’s concern with those who are on the margin of social and religious society; the reversing of human social structures.

WHO WILL BE SAVED? Luke reminds us at the beginning of our Gospel extract today that 21ST SUNDAY IN Jesus is on his journey ORDINARY TIME towards Jerusalem and to his destiny, which he discussed with Moses and Elijah on the mountain in Galilee just before he set out. The theme of prophetic preaching returns: Jesus emphasises to his hearers the importance of living out the Word of God in their – and therefore our – daily lives.

A major vision of the later prophets was the gathering of the scattered people of God in

Zion, in Jerusalem. The question about who will be admitted to this community is put in the familiar Christian terminology of ‘being saved.’

Jesus makes it clear to his Jewish audience that simply being a member of the people will not guarantee being allowed through the door and the imagery recalls the story of the wise and foolish bridesmaids and the importance of being ready.

Salvation in the Bible does not mean confirming the present order: in the opening chapters of Luke’s Gospel we find Mary’s song, the Magnificat, which presents God’s saving action as the reversing of human structures.

This idea is captured perfectly in Jesus’ pithy

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46 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022

TODAY’S READINGS Jer 38:4-6. 8-10; Ps 39; Heb 12:1-4; Lk 12:49-53

TODAY’S READINGS Apoc 11:19, 12:1-6. 10; Ps 44; 1 Cor 15:20-26; Lk 1:39-56

comment that “there are those now last who will be first, and those now first who will be last.”

We also have another strong teaching from Luke, that God’s concern for human beings is universal: the ingathering of the scattered people of Israel can also be understood as the coming to the Lord of people from over the world, and they may well take priority over those who imagine that they have a claim to be included.

TODAY’S READINGS Is 66: 18-21; Ps 116; Heb 12:5-7. 11-13; Lk 13:22-30

THE REALITY CROSSWORD NUMBER 6 JULY/AUGUST ���� SOLUTIONS CROSSWORD No. 4 Across: 1. Jotter, 5. Inhume, 10. Pouting, 11. Funeral, 12. Oxen, 13. Zulus, 15. Scan, 17. Tax, 19.

Sat-nav, 21. Ignore, 22. Western, 23. Sphinx, 25. Eerier, 28. Apt, 30. Hobo, 31. Epsom, 32. Myth, 35.

Succubi, 36. Surplus, 37. Sirens, 38. Lunacy.

YOU ARE INVITED… The community to which Luke belonged apparently had a sizable proportion of non-Jewish members: hence, elements of Gentile or Greek 22ND SUNDAY IN culture would be understandable to the readers of ORDINARY TIME his Gospel account. Thus, the setting of a banquet meal would be quite in line with discussing matters of a serious nature about human life and religious belief. This occurs several times in the Third Gospel and finds its highest expression in Jesus’ teaching at the Last Supper.

We might note a couple of interesting details from the first line of our Gospel reading today: Jesus has obviously been invited to a meal with a prominent member of the Pharisee party. To accept such an offer to share table fellowship suggests that Jesus had no fundamental issue with his host, otherwise he could not have gone to his house.

But there are a couple of warning bells ringing for the reader: first, this occurs “on a sabbath day”, usually heralding a controversy of some sort; secondly, the unspecified others “watched him closely” in a hostile manner, waiting to catch him out.

Jesus’ remarks to the other guests about not pushing themselves forward at social occasions is not just a matter of good manners or etiquette: there is, as in all parables, something deeper at work. Jesus illustrates his teaching about God reversing human order with the parable about the guest who is embarrassed by having to give up the place at table, to which they had assumed they were entitled, to someone more important. He also warns them against being apparently generous but expecting to be rewarded, or compensated, in return.

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Down: 2. Opulent, 3. Twin, 4. Ragout, 5. Influx, 6. Hank, 7. Morocco, 8. Spooks, 9. Plunge, 14.

Laptops, 16. Pawns, 18. Agnes, 20. Vex, 21. Ire, 23. Schism, 24. Hibachi, 26. Idyllic, 27. Rehash, 28.

Aphids, 29. Tonsil, 33. Luke, 34. Erin.

Winner of Crossword No. 4 Enda Hayes, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary.

ACROSS 1. Ancient and current counting device. (6) 5 Type of cloud. (6) 10 French chemist who helped makes milk safe. (7) 11 Take something surreptitiously (slang) (7) 12 Fe. (4) 13 Underground hobbyist. (5) 15 Without hair. (4) 17 Archaeological excavation. (3) 19 The book of revelations. (6) 21 A sound like the movement of dry leaves. (6) 22 Probationary religious. (7) 23 Giant Egyptian statue near the Pyramids. (6) 25 The beautiful home of Kublai Khan. (6) 28 Type of high explosive. (3) 30 Sign of a company or group. (4) 31 Material applied to violin bows. (5) 32 Fly or rise high in the air. (4) 35 A thin Indian pancake cooked on a griddle. (7) 36 Abraham’s first son and narrator of Moby Dick. (7) 37 Anointing oil, also called myrrh. (6) 38 The mighty hunter of the Old Testament. (6)

DOWN 2. Senior clergy. (7) 3 The people who operate a ship. (4) 4 Padres for a snack. (6) 5 Spice and a greyish-brown colour. (6) 6 The natural satellite of Earth. (4) 7 Trust Pa is an arrogant and presumptuous person. (7) 8 Move suddenly into a season. (6) 9 Card game and billiards hand support.

(6) 14 Mystical visual experiences. (7) 16 A reddish dye for hair. (5) 18 Lazy revolving tray for a woman. (5) 20 Smoked salmon by another name. (3) 21 A Latin king. (3) 23 A close comfort in sorrow or distress. (6) 24 Ridiculous speech or writing to get a clean pig. (7) 26 Alligator pear and dull greenish colour.

(7) 27 Difficult or impossible to control. (6) 28 I muted the boredom. (6) 29 Italian painter who gave his name to a colour. (6) 33 Casper, Melchior and Balthazar. (4) 34 Hams hide something false. (4)

Entry Form for Crossword No.6, July/August 2022 TODAY’S READINGS

Name: Address:

Ecc 3:17-20. 28-29; Ps 67; Heb 12:18-19. 22-24; Lk 14:1. 7-14 Telephone:

All entries must reach us by Friday August 26, 2022 One €35 prize is offered for the first correct solutions opened. The Editor’s decision on all matters concerning this competition will be final. Do not include correspondence on any other subject with your entry which should be addressed to: Reality Crossword No.5, Redemptorist Communications, St Joseph's Monastery, Dundalk, County Louth A91 F3FC

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