A Strange Thought

I haven't got the time or energy to expand this into a proper blog post, but I was struck by a strange thought the other day.

I was thinking about the Ireland of my youth, and specifically how the stories and doctrines of Catholicism were fairly frequently invoked at this time.

This could be easily exaggerated-- they certainly weren't a feature of everyday life or ordinary conversation.

But they were there. It was not unusual for conversation to turn to sacred matters. Even if they were not discussed (or alluded to) from a viewpoint of explicit belief, they were generally discussed respectfully enough.

What I find interesting is the counterpoint this involved. There was, on the one hand, the ordinary world of school and buses and television and shopping trolleys.

On the other hand, there was the world of first century Palestine, a world of miracles and demoniacs and impassioned theological debate. And then there was the whole history of Catholicism, full of martyrdoms and wonders and apparitions, many of them occurring in exotic countries, or in distant times.

It's the mixture that I find intriguing, and beguiling. Ordinary life had a window onto an utterly different world, an utterly different mode of being. It threw its light onto the mundane world, however fitfully.

This is more or less gone now, and Ireland seems correspondingly shrunken and impoverished to me.