All the service counters at my local post office have signed above them reading, "Please wait to be called at to the counter". A request with which I try to comply, but people behind me in the queue are invariably prodding me forward as soon as one becomes free.
Recently, on being so prodded (and after having waited what seemed like an unreasonable time anyway), I went up to the counter. The young woman walked away and counted money for five minutes, then came back, looked up at me in surprise, asked if was waiting, and told me the counter wasn't open.
"It looks open", I said. She didn't reply, just walked away to do some more behind the scenes stuff.
I stood there for a while, defiantly, but eventually I gave up and went to another counter.
Today I was in the post office. The same woman was at the same counter, which became free.
"I think that one's free", the guy behind me said.
"I don't think so", I said.
"It looks it."
"Well," I said, waving him forward, "you're welcome to give it a go."
"Thanks", he said, walking up the counter. I rather looked forward to him getting the same treatment-- but of course, he was served right away.
Sometimes I feel like I am in a Woody Allen movie.
Monday, May 15, 2017
Sunday, May 14, 2017
The Narrow Gate
I'm putting the finishing touches to my saints' book manuscript. Writing always makes me want to write more, and the subject matter is of such interest to me, that it's hard not to fire off blog posts while I'm doing it. (I understand why music groups write more songs than they can use when they are recording an album, and can then go months and years without writing much else.)
So many things inspire me about the saints, but the the thing that I find most inspiring about them is the whole concept of "the narrow gate". It's amazing to think that St. Patrick, St. Gemma Galgani, and Blessed John Henry Newman-- to take three saints almost at random-- were, in their very disparate situations and styles, aspiring and attaining the very same thing-- to follow the very specific teachings of Our Lord (which are themselves very different from "natural religion" or "universal wisdom", etc.)
Though it may seem an undignified comparison, it reminds me of the pleasure you feel when you realise that a particular software is compatible with a particular hardware. The saints were so, so different...and yet, all of them passed through this narrow gate.
Well, I don't have time to expand on this...but the point is that, in the past, whenever I heard the words "narrow is the gate", I presumed it was meant to be a foreboding. But, pondering the lives of the saints, sometimes it seems as much something to rejoice over, as to sober us.
So many things inspire me about the saints, but the the thing that I find most inspiring about them is the whole concept of "the narrow gate". It's amazing to think that St. Patrick, St. Gemma Galgani, and Blessed John Henry Newman-- to take three saints almost at random-- were, in their very disparate situations and styles, aspiring and attaining the very same thing-- to follow the very specific teachings of Our Lord (which are themselves very different from "natural religion" or "universal wisdom", etc.)
Though it may seem an undignified comparison, it reminds me of the pleasure you feel when you realise that a particular software is compatible with a particular hardware. The saints were so, so different...and yet, all of them passed through this narrow gate.
Well, I don't have time to expand on this...but the point is that, in the past, whenever I heard the words "narrow is the gate", I presumed it was meant to be a foreboding. But, pondering the lives of the saints, sometimes it seems as much something to rejoice over, as to sober us.
Early Reactions to the Latin Mass
I can't title this post "initial reactions to the Latin Mass" as I've attended it before. A couple of years back I attended one low Mass and one High Mass in St. Kevin's, Harrington Street. However, I've gone back for the last two weeks and I intend to make it a regular thing now, God willing.
These are my initial thoughts:
1) The single biggest advantage is that I can receive on the tongue, kneeling, without any fuss or difficulty. In pretty much every single Mass I've attended, Communion has been awkward-- or at least, I anticipate awkwardness. I've always received on the tongue. Twice the Host has been dropped. Even though I always aim to go to the priest rather than the extraordinary minister, I've occasionally had to resort to the extraordinary minister-- nearly always a lady. So trying to bow down low to receive just makes it more awkward.
For a while, I kneeled when it came to my turn to receive, feeling I should do this. But I always felt self-conscious about it, thinking it ostentatious, and eventually I stopped. I like that it's just the done thing at the Latin Mass.
2) I've greatly admired the supernaturalism and seriousness of the sermons-- although I'm not sure the claim that Lenin was a Freemason is accurate.
3) The absence of the sign of peace is wonderful. Of course! Doesn't everybody hate that?
4) The absence of liturgical abuses is a blessed relief. Liturgical abuses are what drove me to the Extraordinary Form. Priests interjecting their own words into the liturgy, "inclusive" language, priests leaving the altar at the sign of peace, applause during Mass, people receiving directly from a chalice left on the altar, children giving readings, altar boys without vestments, homilies which are of questionable orthodoxy or even downright heretical, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth...I couldn't take it anymore....
I'll still be attending daily Mass in the Ordinary Form, for instance the lunch-time Mass in UCD. But these abuses seem at their worse on a Sunday, anyway. Come to think of it, I rarely encounter abuses on weekdays.
5) Of course, the language and trappings of the Mass are majestic, although I haven't really become habituated to them yet, so it's all something of a blur.
6) I admire the reverence and seriousness of the congregation, but....as with the Ordinary Form, so many people are late! Lateness at Mass has always perplexed me. Somehow, I'd assumed it wouldn't happen so much at the Latin Mass. Is it so hard to make it on time? I understand if a few people were a little late, but people filing in half-way through just baffles me.
These are my initial thoughts:
1) The single biggest advantage is that I can receive on the tongue, kneeling, without any fuss or difficulty. In pretty much every single Mass I've attended, Communion has been awkward-- or at least, I anticipate awkwardness. I've always received on the tongue. Twice the Host has been dropped. Even though I always aim to go to the priest rather than the extraordinary minister, I've occasionally had to resort to the extraordinary minister-- nearly always a lady. So trying to bow down low to receive just makes it more awkward.
For a while, I kneeled when it came to my turn to receive, feeling I should do this. But I always felt self-conscious about it, thinking it ostentatious, and eventually I stopped. I like that it's just the done thing at the Latin Mass.
2) I've greatly admired the supernaturalism and seriousness of the sermons-- although I'm not sure the claim that Lenin was a Freemason is accurate.
3) The absence of the sign of peace is wonderful. Of course! Doesn't everybody hate that?
4) The absence of liturgical abuses is a blessed relief. Liturgical abuses are what drove me to the Extraordinary Form. Priests interjecting their own words into the liturgy, "inclusive" language, priests leaving the altar at the sign of peace, applause during Mass, people receiving directly from a chalice left on the altar, children giving readings, altar boys without vestments, homilies which are of questionable orthodoxy or even downright heretical, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth...I couldn't take it anymore....
I'll still be attending daily Mass in the Ordinary Form, for instance the lunch-time Mass in UCD. But these abuses seem at their worse on a Sunday, anyway. Come to think of it, I rarely encounter abuses on weekdays.
5) Of course, the language and trappings of the Mass are majestic, although I haven't really become habituated to them yet, so it's all something of a blur.
6) I admire the reverence and seriousness of the congregation, but....as with the Ordinary Form, so many people are late! Lateness at Mass has always perplexed me. Somehow, I'd assumed it wouldn't happen so much at the Latin Mass. Is it so hard to make it on time? I understand if a few people were a little late, but people filing in half-way through just baffles me.
Saturday, May 13, 2017
A Sexist Poem Is No Longer Sexist!
Like everybody else, I loved "If" by Rudyard Kipling. But, as you all know, I'm radically committed to gender equality and a non-sexist society, so the final lines:
Yours is the earth-- and everything that's in it--
And what is more; you'll be a man, my son!
Bothered me A LOT.
First of all, it's redundant. If you're a man, then the earth and everything that's in it is ALREADY YOURS, because you benefit from patriarchy and male privilege. Kipling should have written, "And what's THE SAME, you'll be a man, by son."
But, more fundamentally, it's exclusionary. How can a woman read this poem and not feel Othered? It's going to Other the HECK out of any woman! (Apparently, it was Ayn Rand's favourite poem, but she was a fascist anyway.)
Today, though, I realised that this poem is no longer sexist because of...GENDER FLUIDITY!
Yes, in order to enjoy the final lines of the poem, you only have to "transition" into maleness and (if you want to) transition back. It only take a moment-- no surgery, HRT, or even wardrobe changes are necessary, these days.
A deep reading of the poem actually undermines gender norms! Kipling, one would have thought, was a believer in essentialist gender roles. But the very title of the poem is "If", and the last line suggests that gender is not fixed or essential. Wooohooo! Even big old fascist Kipling was queer underneath!
Mind you, Kipling is only right-wing from an English perspective. From an Irish perspective, he was progressive, because he was in favour of World War One....and celebrating World War One is progressive in Ireland...because Irish nationalists opposed World War One...and nationalism is bad....well, if you're Irish it's bad....well, in the last few decades it's been bad....being an Irish nationalist was good before that because it was anti-imperalist. I don't know how it all works. It's so confusing. Anyway, at least I feel better that I can enjoy "If" now, without guilt. And so can you!
Yours is the earth-- and everything that's in it--
And what is more; you'll be a man, my son!
Bothered me A LOT.
First of all, it's redundant. If you're a man, then the earth and everything that's in it is ALREADY YOURS, because you benefit from patriarchy and male privilege. Kipling should have written, "And what's THE SAME, you'll be a man, by son."
But, more fundamentally, it's exclusionary. How can a woman read this poem and not feel Othered? It's going to Other the HECK out of any woman! (Apparently, it was Ayn Rand's favourite poem, but she was a fascist anyway.)
Today, though, I realised that this poem is no longer sexist because of...GENDER FLUIDITY!
Yes, in order to enjoy the final lines of the poem, you only have to "transition" into maleness and (if you want to) transition back. It only take a moment-- no surgery, HRT, or even wardrobe changes are necessary, these days.
A deep reading of the poem actually undermines gender norms! Kipling, one would have thought, was a believer in essentialist gender roles. But the very title of the poem is "If", and the last line suggests that gender is not fixed or essential. Wooohooo! Even big old fascist Kipling was queer underneath!
Mind you, Kipling is only right-wing from an English perspective. From an Irish perspective, he was progressive, because he was in favour of World War One....and celebrating World War One is progressive in Ireland...because Irish nationalists opposed World War One...and nationalism is bad....well, if you're Irish it's bad....well, in the last few decades it's been bad....being an Irish nationalist was good before that because it was anti-imperalist. I don't know how it all works. It's so confusing. Anyway, at least I feel better that I can enjoy "If" now, without guilt. And so can you!
Cumha
"Cumha" is the Irish word for nostalgia, and I was just hit by a particularly potent blast of it.
I've given up on reading Irish language poetry, at least for the moment, and I've decided to go back to An Sagart, the journal of the Cumann na Sagart, the Irish language association for priests and other Catholics. Maybe I'm getting excessively sectarian, but after a while of reading non-Catholic stuff, I miss the atmosphere of Catholicism. I think this is particularly pronounced when it comes to the Irish language, because almost everything in Irish that's not written from a Catholic perspective is pointedly anti-Catholic in one way or another. For instance, many of the poems I was reading used Christian imagery, but they used it in an irreverent way. Similarly, contemporary Irish language writers seem to delight in vulgarity and "grittiness", in order to prove how far removed they are from the Christian Brothers schools.
So, once again, I picked up one of the familiar sky-blue volumes of An Sagart. The one I took today came from 1989. I was twelve in 1989. It was the year before the 1990 soccer World Cup in Italy, which seems to me to be a major dividing line in Irish social history. (This guy agrees.)
The article that I happened to read was about a "reconciliation room" (or perhaps a "confession space") in a church at Cloughjordan, Tipperary. The writer (a priest) was simply describing the church, the stained glass windows (by famous Irish artist Harry Clarke) and the room itself. He also described the time he spent there hearing confessions.
Reading it, I felt an overwhelming sense of nostalgia, of homesickness, of yearning. The atmosphere of the article was so specific to the Ireland of my childhood, the Irish Catholicism of my childhood.
How to describe it? Mellow is the first word that comes to mind. Bear in mind that this was an Ireland that had already been considerably liberalised-- too liberalised, already. But there was still a background respect for the Church and the clergy, for religion in general, which could be more or less taken for granted, to some degree.
Relaxed is another word that comes to mind. I don't think it's projection that the Ireland reflected in such articles is less hectic, less driven, less go-getting than the Ireland of today. A modern economy, for sure, but one where business and commerce still had considerably less glamour and respectability than literature and the arts-- where there was even something slightly apologetic about money-making. (A long way from "Dragon's Den".)
I can't fit the next idea into one word, but I would say "a sense of shared narrative", or "a sense of shared identity". Of course, the writers and readership of An Sagart would be particularly committed to the Irish language and national culture, but it really does seem the case to me that, right up to my childhood, there was a shared sense of narrative and memory in Ireland. The long struggle for national independence; the Irish "spiritual empire" of missionaries abroad; the campaign to revive the Irish language and other national traditions; the scourge of emigration (treated as a national scourge instead of an individual predicament, or lifestyle choice; even the Troubles in the North, universally treated as an unalloyed tragedy, were a part of this. Today, shared narrative seems entirely to do with living conditions, such as housing and hospitals. Important, but the bare minimum.
The desire to use the words "us", "we", and "our" is so potent in human nature. The problem is that, when you make such an admission, you instantly evoke images of collectivism, Orwellian dystopias, Nuremberg rallies, the Borg from Star Trek, and so forth.
But that's not the point. "Us", "we" and "our" doesn't have to be a monolith or a phalanx. In fact, it's precisely when those words refer to a whole landscape-- one which includes divisions, conflict, disagreement, and oppositions of various kinds-- that they are most powerful. Like my favourite images of the snow globe, the words "us", "we" and "our" refer to the unseen borders of a whole world, the glass dome that makes a world.
I've given up on reading Irish language poetry, at least for the moment, and I've decided to go back to An Sagart, the journal of the Cumann na Sagart, the Irish language association for priests and other Catholics. Maybe I'm getting excessively sectarian, but after a while of reading non-Catholic stuff, I miss the atmosphere of Catholicism. I think this is particularly pronounced when it comes to the Irish language, because almost everything in Irish that's not written from a Catholic perspective is pointedly anti-Catholic in one way or another. For instance, many of the poems I was reading used Christian imagery, but they used it in an irreverent way. Similarly, contemporary Irish language writers seem to delight in vulgarity and "grittiness", in order to prove how far removed they are from the Christian Brothers schools.
So, once again, I picked up one of the familiar sky-blue volumes of An Sagart. The one I took today came from 1989. I was twelve in 1989. It was the year before the 1990 soccer World Cup in Italy, which seems to me to be a major dividing line in Irish social history. (This guy agrees.)
The article that I happened to read was about a "reconciliation room" (or perhaps a "confession space") in a church at Cloughjordan, Tipperary. The writer (a priest) was simply describing the church, the stained glass windows (by famous Irish artist Harry Clarke) and the room itself. He also described the time he spent there hearing confessions.
Reading it, I felt an overwhelming sense of nostalgia, of homesickness, of yearning. The atmosphere of the article was so specific to the Ireland of my childhood, the Irish Catholicism of my childhood.
How to describe it? Mellow is the first word that comes to mind. Bear in mind that this was an Ireland that had already been considerably liberalised-- too liberalised, already. But there was still a background respect for the Church and the clergy, for religion in general, which could be more or less taken for granted, to some degree.
Relaxed is another word that comes to mind. I don't think it's projection that the Ireland reflected in such articles is less hectic, less driven, less go-getting than the Ireland of today. A modern economy, for sure, but one where business and commerce still had considerably less glamour and respectability than literature and the arts-- where there was even something slightly apologetic about money-making. (A long way from "Dragon's Den".)
I can't fit the next idea into one word, but I would say "a sense of shared narrative", or "a sense of shared identity". Of course, the writers and readership of An Sagart would be particularly committed to the Irish language and national culture, but it really does seem the case to me that, right up to my childhood, there was a shared sense of narrative and memory in Ireland. The long struggle for national independence; the Irish "spiritual empire" of missionaries abroad; the campaign to revive the Irish language and other national traditions; the scourge of emigration (treated as a national scourge instead of an individual predicament, or lifestyle choice; even the Troubles in the North, universally treated as an unalloyed tragedy, were a part of this. Today, shared narrative seems entirely to do with living conditions, such as housing and hospitals. Important, but the bare minimum.
The desire to use the words "us", "we", and "our" is so potent in human nature. The problem is that, when you make such an admission, you instantly evoke images of collectivism, Orwellian dystopias, Nuremberg rallies, the Borg from Star Trek, and so forth.
But that's not the point. "Us", "we" and "our" doesn't have to be a monolith or a phalanx. In fact, it's precisely when those words refer to a whole landscape-- one which includes divisions, conflict, disagreement, and oppositions of various kinds-- that they are most powerful. Like my favourite images of the snow globe, the words "us", "we" and "our" refer to the unseen borders of a whole world, the glass dome that makes a world.
Plugging Another Forum
My Irish Conservatives Forum (which has begun to take off) was a sort of spin-off from the Irish Catholics Forum, and was inspired by another spin-off-- the Irish Federalist Forums. So it's only fair to give them a plug here.
This forum was set up by a member of the Irish Catholic Forum who has long argued for a federalist Ireland, along the lines proposed by Desmond Fennell. I've had quite stimulating discussions with him. While I'm not opposed to a federal Ireland, I think culture is much more important than administrative structures. This chap (like Desmond Fennell) also tends to favour a "post-nationalist" Ireland. While I'm very enthusiastic about localism and regionalism, I support them within the umbrella of a unifying nationalism, and not as a successor or alternative to nationalism.
It may be of interest to some.
This forum was set up by a member of the Irish Catholic Forum who has long argued for a federalist Ireland, along the lines proposed by Desmond Fennell. I've had quite stimulating discussions with him. While I'm not opposed to a federal Ireland, I think culture is much more important than administrative structures. This chap (like Desmond Fennell) also tends to favour a "post-nationalist" Ireland. While I'm very enthusiastic about localism and regionalism, I support them within the umbrella of a unifying nationalism, and not as a successor or alternative to nationalism.
It may be of interest to some.
The Irish Times At It Again
Our new beatus, Fr. John Sullivan SJ, was apparently a "half-Protestant, half-Catholic" because he converted from the Church of Ireland. (The Church of Ireland is our branch of Anglicanism, or Episcopalianism in America.)
The Irish Times seize on this phrase from the postulator of his cause (sadly, all-too-typical of a modern-day Jesuit), and spins a whole narrative from it.
It suggests that this beatification is only possible because of the arrival of Pope Francis. Forgetting that Pope Benedict beatified John Henry Newman, the most famous Anglican convert of them all.
A truly cheap shot.
The Irish Times seize on this phrase from the postulator of his cause (sadly, all-too-typical of a modern-day Jesuit), and spins a whole narrative from it.
It suggests that this beatification is only possible because of the arrival of Pope Francis. Forgetting that Pope Benedict beatified John Henry Newman, the most famous Anglican convert of them all.
A truly cheap shot.
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