Daily Bread

Once again, I find myself embarking on a rather fanciful and airy post, yet another attempt to convey the appeal of a particular idea or impression.

Is there any value to these posts? I tell myself that they might help people appreciate life, and thereby have a positive impact. I hope so.

In my non-blog writing, lately, I've been very much preoccupied with facts and solid information. For a year now, I've been writing 900-word long profiles of Catholic converts for St. Martin's magazine, and for even longer I've been 750-word profiles on great Irish priests for Ireland's Own.

The converts so far are: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alec Guinness, Malcolm Muggeridge, Dean Koontz, Ronald Knox, G.K. Chesterton, St. Augustine, St. Justin Martyr, Gregory Zilboorg, Adrienne Von Speyr (a Swiss mystic and theologian), Thomas Merton, and most recently the American gymnast Dominique Dawes.

My priests so far are: Fr. Nicholas Callan (inventor), Fr. Tom Burke (preacher), Canon Sheehan (novelist), Fr. Eugene O'Growney (language revivalist), Fr. Willie Doyle (military chaplain), Fr. James Christopher Flynn (involved in amateur dramatics and speech therapy), Fr. Aedan McGrath (Legion of Mary missionary and prisoner of Communist China), Fr. Patrick Peyton, Msgr. Pádraig Ó Fiannachta (Irish language writer and Bible translator), Fr. James Coyle (Irish-born American priest shot by the KKK for marring a non-Catholic WASP to a Puerto Rican Catholic), Msgr. Patrick Carroll-Abbing (who founded a series of self-governing "Boy's Towns" in Europe after World War II, for homeless boys and girls), Fr. John O'Connor (the model for G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown), Fr. Theobald Matthew, Msgr. Luke Wadding (super-cleric in Rome in the seventeenth century, and the man who put St. Patrick's Day on the liturgical calendar), and Canon John O'Hanlon (historian and hagiographer).

Although these are relatively short articles, I've put a huge amount of research into them. They are meaty, dense and information (I hope). I'm quite proud of them.

So when I turn to my blog, I feel inclined to unwind a bit.

Recently I've been reading a book entitled Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television.

I've been taking pleasure in the sheer plenitude of the subject. Do you find that surprising? I did. One wouldn't think that Christmas-themed horror film and TV would be a huge field. And it's not huge, but it's bigger than one would expect. Even a fairly dedicated horror fan like myself wouldn't have heard of (let alone seen) most of the works listed in it.

There is so much of everything. I know that's an awkward way to put it, but I can't think of a better way.

Life is always bigger than we can take in, and although this might be overwhelming in some ways, it seems primarily joyous and jubilant to me.

I take particular pleasure in those aspects of life which are continuous, regular, daily, incessant.

Film and television are a good example. Every single day there is new programming, on a plethora of different channels. It all piles up. Most is forgotten by most people, some is cherished by this or that cult audience, and some enters into the cultural bloodstream.

Everything that has this perpetual feed has something sublime in it.

Some examples: politics, business, transport, religion, sport, food, cinema.

Take religion, since this is the Irish Papist blog. I'm always thrilled by the thought of all the liturgies taking place all over the country on any given day. In town centres, sleepy villages, monasteries, cathedrals, chapels of ease, and any number of other places. The internet tells me that there are 1,087 Catholic parishes in Ireland. Nobody could remember that many.

The same applies newspapers, radio programmes, train journeys, soccer matches, 

In fact, this gets to the essence of what I'm trying to describe: anything bigger than you can take in.

If you stand in a dark space which is wider than your arms on every side, in a sense it might as well be infinite.

In all these fields I'm talking about, there's always more and there's a deep delight in that. There's always more both in the sense that there's already more than you can take in, and also in the sense that more is always being made.

I think it's something worth remarking upon, worth giving thanks for.