Happy Christmas!

I don't expect to be blogging over the rest of Christmas and the New Year, so I wish you all a very happy, peaceful Feast of the Nativity.

Gregory of Nyssa, in his Christmas homilies, developed the same vision setting out from the Christmas message in the Gospel of John: “He pitched his tent among us” (Jn 1:14). Gregory applies this passage about the tent to the tent of our body, which has become worn out and weak, exposed everywhere to pain and suffering. And he applies it to the whole universe, torn and disfigured by sin. What would he say if he could see the state of the world today, through the abuse of energy and its selfish and reckless exploitation? Anselm of Canterbury, in an almost prophetic way, once described a vision of what we witness today in a polluted world whose future is at risk: “Everything was as if dead, and had lost its dignity, having been made for the service of those who praise God. The elements of the world were oppressed, they had lost their splendour because of the abuse of those who enslaved them for their idols, for whom they had not been created” (PL 158, 955f.). Thus, according to Gregory’s vision, the stable in the Christmas message represents the ill-treated world. What Christ rebuilds is no ordinary palace. He came to restore beauty and dignity to creation, to the universe: this is what began at Christmas and makes the angels rejoice. The Earth is restored to good order by virtue of the fact that it is opened up to God, it obtains its true light anew, and in the harmony between human will and divine will, in the unification of height and depth, it regains its beauty and dignity. Thus Christmas is a feast of restored creation. It is in this context that the Fathers interpret the song of the angels on that holy night: it is an expression of joy over the fact that the height and the depth, Heaven and Earth, are once more united; that man is again united to God. According to the Fathers, part of the angels’ Christmas song is the fact that now angels and men can sing together and in this way the beauty of the universe is expressed in the beauty of the song of praise.

Pope Benedict XVI, Christmas homily 2007

The Foundation of the State Conference in UCD

This is a report on the Foundation of the State Conference in UCD which I attended earlier in this month. It was published in the library Staff Update. I may as well get a blog post out of it.

Foundation of the Irish State Conference, 2-3 December

My great-grandmother stopped speaking to her own son because he married a Free Stater. My father, when he was a boy, sabotaged the public address system at an event where De Valera was speaking (and got a hiding from Kevin Boland for doing so—or so he said).

I don’t mention these snippets of family history because they are unusual, but rather the opposite. Many of us have similar stories in our background; grandparents and great-grandparents who were heavily invested in the struggle for independence or one or other side of the Civil War.

It seems such a shame, then, that the centenary of these events has aroused so little public or media interest. It’s true that Covid occupied a large swathe of that period—although, since that meant we all had a lot more time on our hands, that hardly seems a good enough explanation.

Happily, UCD has been an exception to this lack of attention, and this month the Foundation of State conference provided one of the highlights of the Decade of Commemorations.

I attended both days of this two-day conference, and I’m happy to report that it was a triumph—a truly satisfying, many-sided, almost exhaustive examination of the Irish Free State’s foundation. The presence all the way through of sign-language interpreters was particularly admirable, as was the inclusion of a whole session completely in the Irish language.

The first day was held in the O’Reilly Hall, which looked very impressive with an enormous Christmas tree in the corner. (The Finnish ambassador to Ireland Raili Lahnalampi, who spoke at one point on the parallels with Finnish independence, joked that we must have put it there to make her feel welcome, since spruce is so widespread in her country. She also put the bloodiness and divisiveness of our own Civil War into perspective—thirty-nine thousand people died in the four-month Finnish Civil War in 1918). The second day was held in the Fitzgerald Chamber in the Student Centre.

The conference was opened by the Taoiseach Micheál Martin. The Taoiseach is a history graduate, and his personal interest in the subject was obvious. He gave an excellent speech in which he asked wgy the 6^th of December—the date the Constitution of the Irish Free State was ratified and came into effect in 1922, and indeed the date the Anglo-Irish Treaty came into effect the year before—has never been a focus of celebration, either for the country in general or for any single political tradition within in. The answer, he said, was that nobody was particularly happy with the circumstances of independence, even the strongest supporters of the Treaty. He suggested, however, that there was much to celebrate in the foundation of the Irish State—for instance, the foundation of the Garda Síochana and the public legitimacy they enjoyed, the preservation of democracy, and the fact that extreme left- or right-wing movements never gained traction here as they did in much of Europe.

Speaker after speaker over both days emphasized the difficulties involved in setting up the new state. Bláthna Ruane, of the School of Law, in answering a question as to why Ireland preserved the Common Law tradition in framing its new legal system, said it was a “no-brainer”; there was simply no time to do anything else. John Fitzgerald emphasized the importance of advice from the British Treasury in the Free State’s economic survival.

Many speakers emphasized the achievements of the new State. Joseph Brady of the School of Geography praised Marino, which was the first local authority housing estate in the country, as still the best example of public housing in Ireland. (In my view, Dr. Brady’s was the most interesting of all the talks.) Of course, not all was rosy in new Ireland. Mary Daly’s contribution was a sobering reminder of how very far 1920’s Ireland was from a welfare state.

On the other hand, all three speakers in the Irish language sessions emphasized the huge achievement that had been made in saving the native tongue from extinction. Regina UÍ Chollatáin, chair, said she had no doubt that compulsory Irish in school had played a crucial role in this.

The conference ended in a fascinating and lively discussion between Diarmuid Ferriter, Marie Coleman, and Brigid Laffan. The importance of archives for commemorations was emphasized.

The conference wasn’t without its weaknesses. There was, for my money, rather too much emphasis on fashionable identity politics. On the whole, however, it was a fitting retrospective of a crucial moment in our history, and I left with a deeper appreciation of the huge efforts and sacrifices involved in creating the new State.

The Blessed Sacrament Chapel in Bachelor's Walk

Yesterday, I attended Mass in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in Bachelor's Walk. I've been going there more frequently recently. There is a church right across the road from where I live, but I've been increasingly reluctant to go there for various reasons. One is the aggressive nature of their hawking for donations. In fairness, this church is open considerably longer than office hours seven days a week, which is very rare, and I realize that electricity and heating cost money. But even still, it sticks in my craw. (There are stickers plastered all over the pews given QR codes for instant cash transfers, as well as a "tap and go" machine.) Anyway, that's not the only reason.

So several times recently we've gone to the Blessed Sacrament Chapel. Incredibly, I'd never been in this until this year, when I attended an exhibition it held on Blessed Carlo Acutis and Eucharistic miracles (based on the website that he created). It's run by the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament and there's a small statue of St. Peter Eymard behind the altar.

The Blessed Sacrament Chapel is not at all beautiful, by any standards. It's a long, low room painted a rather unappealing yellow colour. It's a bit dingy. Decoration is minimal and quite modernistic. (The crucifix behind the altar has a highly attenuated, stylized Jesus.) It's very bright. The music is mildly hippy-ish. ("Give me joy in my heart, keep me praising...")

I must admit I like all this. I prefer places of worship that are simple and humble. (Even the word "chapel" appeals to me.) I realize that many people will answer that we should give our best to God, that we should glorify Him through beauty, etc. I'm not arguing with that. But my own taste runs quite to the opposite. Beauty can point to God, that's true. Is it sometimes a distraction?

The atmosphere also appeals to me. The congregation is very diverse. As it's a city centre chapel, they don't seem to be from any particular place or demographic. There's a very random mixture of ages and ethnicities, although I do hear a lot of accents I would call "working class", if that has any meaning today. (I consider myself working class.)

Although I probably shouldn't judge people from looking at them, I always get the impression of very straightforward piety from the congregation. There isn't much chatter and there's always an intriguing air of expectation and intentness about the place. Am I imagining that? I don't know.

The preaching whenever I have been there is always very simple and pious, which also appeals to me.

I also enjoy walking out from Mass into the hustle and bustle of the city.

The Mass is the Mass is the Mass. That's what I've always believed. Whatever language or form it's celebrated in, it's still the making present of our Lord's sacrifice. That's the important thing.

But I think it's legitimate to have tastes and preferences. My own is for simplicity, plainness and humility-- and also, not to be bombarded with demands for donations.

There's a Baby on Fire!

Well, I'm all about tradition, and once again it's time for this blog's Christmas tradition: "The Burning Babe" by St. Robert Southwell SJ, the Elizabethan martyr.

Here it is:

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
Alas, quoth he, but newly born in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel justice layeth on, and mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.
With this he vanished out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.

I've said a lot about this poem in previous years. Check out here and here for some commentary on it.

Reading it just now, the line "So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood" appeals to me particularly. It's so vivid, so visual, almost lurid. The juxtaposition of fire and blood is particularly powerful. It's a suitably potent image of what Christmas is all about, the drama of the Incarnation and indeed the Crucixion.

I'm increasingly preoccupied with poetry, and my view of its importance grows and grows. Conservatives find fault with so many aspects of modern society, but they rarely comment on its indifference to poetry. Indeed, conservatives are complicit in this. Shamefully so, since they should know better. I'm somewhat worn out making this argument to my fellow conservatives (mostly on social media). They agree with me, but don't show any inclination to take poetry as seriously as they take music, cinema, fiction, liturgy, architecture, and all the other activities they actually value. They'll applaud my general points about poetry, but whenever I try to get a discussion going about a particular poem or poet....the big silence falls.

If I sound bitter, it's because I am. And this isn't just the bitterness of a frustrated poet. Yes, I do write poetry myself, and yes, I am frustrated at my inability to get it published and read. But my frustration goes far beyond the personal.

I now have this quotation from Arthur Griffith, one of the founders of the Irish state, as my "pinned post" on Facebook: " In every properly governed and sensible community the people would spend half their time in making, reading and comprehending poetry". How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear Irish nation...

But enough of that. I'm writing this beside a Christmas tree, enjoying its lights, and also enjoying the Christmas chocolates that are floating around. Whenever I deplore or lament this or that aspect of modern society, I feel I should contrast it with the ever-increasing Chestertonian wonder I feel in life itself. Just to sit in a room, to breathe the air, to see light and colour, to explore memory and imagination, is a blessed state. Even more so if you are sitting beside a Christmas tree and eating chocolate.

Depressing News

There is no longer a majority of self-described Christians in England and Wales.

I think this is something to mourn, for several reasons.

One reason is that I'm a lifelong and fervent anglophile. I particularly have a soft-spot for the Church of England, as I wrote about here.

Another reason is that I think cultural Christianity is important. Christianity obviously has an elevating and ennobling influence on culture-- for instance, the Christian doctrine of the sanctity of life, or the importance of humility.

Cultural Christianity is also important for individual salvation. It spreads the net wider for potential converts. It makes any given person more likely to encounter Christianity.

Is there anything to be said on the other side? Now that Christianity has become a minority religion, might that be of benefit in some way? For instance, might it give the Christian faith the appeal of an "alternative lifestyle", something that is counter-cultural?

Probably. But I think this is outweighed by what has been lost.

Do some Christians get too hung up on the idea of "Christian cultures", to the extent that they seem to forget that Christ's kingdom is not of this world?

Yes, I think so. But that doesn't mean cultural Christianity isn't important.

It's a dark day. God grant that the tide turns soon.

Another Dip into Facebook

I post on Facebook a lot. Is this good or bad? Sometimes I feel it's bad, thinking I've been swept up in a terribly modern habit, despite all my pretensions to fogeydom.

Other times I think it might be a good thing. I have a lot of thoughts in the course of the day and Facebook is a good outlet for them. It's very user-friendly-- more so than this blog, which really requires a desktop computer to write. I tap out my Facebook posts on my phone, in a matter of minutes.

Anyway, here are some of my latest ones. They may be of interest. Buckle up...

 

Here's a possibly odd question. How important is atmosphere to you? I mean it in the colloquial rather than the scientific sense.

 

I'm so preoccupied with atmosphere that it often strikes me as abnormal. I attach atmospheres to times, places, people, activities etc. and have to remind myself that these atmospheres are (most often) private constructions of my own and not "out there". I get as upset about this (repeated) realization as a kid might get in learning the secret of Santa. I don't know how normal or abnormal that is. I have to remind myself, for instance, when I look at an inky, granulated photo from the seventies, that it wasn't actually inky and granulated in reality. In the same way, perhaps, that historians remind us that the milky white statues we associate with ancient Greece were actually painted.

 

My fear is that reality is, after all, just a grid of points in time and space, none of which are really any different from each other. That this is the awakening that awaits; "the desolation of reality", as Yeats said. It feels like sitting in a bath and slowly feeling the bathwater go cold. Except in this case you only ever imagined it was warm.

 

 

I went to an Irish language primary and secondary school. There's lots to be said about that and I'm grateful for it, otherwise my poor grasp of Irish would be no grasp at all.

 

But recently I've been musing on it from another perspective. English-speaking was forbidden in these schools. Although widely flouted, the mere existence of such a ban gave a certain flavour to my school days. Watching films and shows about school life on TV, where the kids openly spoke English, always seemed very weird, bare and somehow primitive.

 

I think taboos are good in themselves, within reason. They create an atmosphere, an environment. One of the many reasons I could never be a libertarian though I am often in agreement with them.

 

  

I used to watch Open University programmes a lot. For my American friends, they were educational programmes which were shown in the early hours on British TV. The idea was that you could video-tape them and watch them at your leisure. They were a part of a distance learning initiative which could lead to actual qualifications.

 

Anyway, one such programme was a whole documentary on the short poem The Tyger by William Blake, which went into great detail on its meaning and possible associations. I was very excited by this.

 

That's what I mean when I lament poetry's place in modern culture. The lack of that sort of thing. As opposed to the very occasional mention of poetry in general on some arts show.

If the coverage of the arts (in the media but also in general social intercourse) were to be compared to sports coverage, poetry would be equivalent to badminton or volleyball or fencing. I think it should be equivalent to rugby or soccer or cricket instead.

 

I've often found myself thinking about how many of my values and beliefs were absorbed from what I THOUGHT were the values and beliefs of my background and environment, even though I have subsequently realized I was quite mistaken about this.

I've sometimes considered writing a short story which would be a kind of allegory of this experience. It could be a story about a guy who is hugely inspired by a schoolteacher and goes out and lives the beliefs and ideals this teacher instilled in him. He seeks the teacher out thirty or forty years later, only to find that the teacher is puzzled and unimpressed by everything the pupil has done, and tells him he had the wrong idea about him (the teacher) all along.

Anyway, this is definitely my own experience with Irish nationalism. I had an ideal of Irish nationalism which I absorbed in my childhood, and which I sometimes embraced and sometimes consciously reacted against. But the extraordinary thing is that it seems to have been my own ideal even when I was reacting against it.

Essentially it was a belief that there had been some kind of collective decision, made about the end of the nineteenth century, that an independent Ireland was going to go in a very different direction from Britain, America, and the other developed countries. Instead of commerce, cities, technology, modernity etc. it was going to embrace tradition, folklore, myth, culture, rural life, handicrafts, "the things of the spirit."

I took it as read that all the office-blocks named Setanta House and the monuments to the Children of Lir etc. were only the BEGINNING of this collective adventure. I think I really expected we were going to go back to thatched cottages and stone-walls eventually.
Obviously, this idea didn't come from nowhere. There's a little bit of Pearse, Yeats, De Valera, and others in it. I didn't realize that this ideal was abandoned (insofar as it had ever been embraced) way before my birth, and often by people who had fought in 1916, devoted their lives to the Irish language, etc.

It's been a long and painful loss of this illusion. My nationalism has been cauterized. But the ideal is still sublimated into other things.

 

 

Chesterton wrote a lot of indifferent poetry, but he wrote some great poems and this is one of them. Although, personally, I would rather the theme of decrepitude wasn't in it. It would have been just as good if it was simply about the burgeoning sense of wonder.

 

Anyway, the line "the first surprises stay" definitely speaks to me. I can never get over "the first surprises" and have indeed found that "things grow new" and seem "too solid to be true,".

The things Chesterton mentions in this poem have this effect on me, certainly, but other things too,: time and place, which seem endlessly strange and wonderful to me; consciousness; stories, even of the simplest kind; history; masculinity and femininity; the human body, and the beauty of the human form in itself; accents; work; memory; every form of collective identity, from a family to a club to a nation; everything that people get excited about. I take pleasure simply contemplating such things and feeling gratitude for their existence, and indeed astonishment.

 

I loved the line from the TV series John Adams: "I have seen a queen of France with 18 million livres of diamonds on her person, but I declare that all the charms of her face and figure added to all the glitter of her jewels did not impress me as much as that little shrub right there."

 

Anyway, here's Chesterton. (Sometimes I feel like appealing to people to forget that a Chesterton quotation is Chesterton and to come to him without the baggage of the Chesterton passage, of the hearty polemicist. It's so hard to read him "fresh".)

 

A Second Childhood

 

When all my days are ending

And I have no song to sing,

I think that I shall not be too old

To stare at everything;

As I stared once at a nursery door

Or a tall tree and a swing.

 

Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangs

On all my sins and me,

Because He does not take away

The terror from the tree

And stones still shine along the road

That are and cannot be.

 

Men grow too old for love, my love,

Men grow too old for wine,

But I shall not grow too old to see

Unearthly daylight shine,

Changing my chamber’s dust to snow

Till I doubt if it be mine.

 

Behold, the crowning mercies melt,

The first surprises stay;

And in my dross is dropped a gift

For which I dare not pray:

That a man grow used to grief and joy

But not to night and day.

 

Men grow too old for love, my love,

Men grow too old for lies;

But I shall not grow too old to see

Enormous night arise,

A cloud that is larger than the world

And a monster made of eyes.

 

Nor am I worthy to unloose

The latchet of my shoe;

Or shake the dust from off my feet

Or the staff that bears me through

On ground that is too good to last,

Too solid to be true.

 

Men grow too old to woo, my love,

Men grow too old to wed;

But I shall not grow too old to see

Hung crazily overhead

Incredible rafters when I wake

And I find that I am not dead.

 

A thrill of thunder in my hair:

Though blackening clouds be plain,

Still I am stung and startled

By the first drop of the rain:

Romance and pride and passion pass

And these are what remain.

 

Strange crawling carpets of the grass,

Wide windows of the sky;

So in this perilous grace of God

With all my sins go I:

And things grow new though I grow old,

Though I grow old and die.

 

 

In a previous post, which drew a gratifying amount of responses, I pondered on the ideal of Irish nationalism that I internalized as I grew up, and how-- in retrospect-- it seems to have been as much my own invention as it was something I took from my environment.

Someone asked me some good questions in the comments. I thought my reply might be worth a new post. I said (I'll only use one set of quotation marks, at beginning and end):

"I don't have time to give a proper reply to your questions. Indeed, I could easily write a long essay about them. Thanks for showing such interest.

 

Was the ideal of Irish nationalism I absorbed/invented wholly illusion? No, because it did indeed draw on aspects of Irish nationalism that really existed. However, I think I was badly mistaken in assuming that the PARTICULAR aspects of Irish nationalism I seized upon were shared by a great many people. By the particular aspects I mean my romantic, poetic, agrarian, "folkish" interpretation of Irish nationalism, the sort of Irish nationalism expressed in the poetry of Pearse and the famous St. Patrick's Day speech of De Valera.

 

What gave me this illusion? Lots of different things. My father was the biggest influence on me and he very much tended towards the romantic, the poetic, the culturally conservative. When I grew up a bit and noted that even his Irish republican friends were much cruder, crasser, and more modern, I was shocked. Their nationalism didn't really seem to boil down to more than "Brits out". It was Brendan Behan nationalism, Shane MacGowan nationalism-- urban, anarchic, taboo-smashing, even vulgar. Things like the Irish language, cultural Catholicism, Irish mythology etc. were really just used as tribal badges, two fingers to the Brits. Kathleen Ni Houlihan was ridiculous and sexist, etc. etc.

 

I think Lord of the Rings, strangely enough, also had an influence on me. I transposed the high fantasy, refinement, and elven dignity of LOTR onto Irish nationalism.

 

Then there was my Irish language school, which put an emphasis on mythology, Irish sports, the Irish language (obviously), Irish music and dance, and all those "cultural" things. I didn't realize that most Irish people only had a very abstract interest in reviving Irish culture.

Why do I come to the conclusion that I was deluded in thinking this ideal was ever widely held? So many reasons. For instance, I have access to the Irish Newspapers Archive, an online portal of most national and regional Irish newspapers from the early twentieth century onwards. From browsing editions from the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties, it has become obvious to me that, from very soon after Irish independence, Irish people lost much interest in national or cultural ideals and became absorbed in the bread-and-butter issues of everyday life, entertainment, consumerism, etc. This is plain not only in the articles but in the letters pages.

 

How has my romantic nationalism been sublimated? In my approach to the Catholic faith, and also in my approach towards other causes I care deeply about, such as poetry-- the revival of traditional poetry."

 

 

Reading a book about the Church of England from 1945 to 1980, because I have a real soft spot for the C of E. 

 

The chapter about the sixties is interesting. When social conservatives look back at the sixties we tend to deplore them for their liberalism. However, contemporary church spokesman of all denominations seemed to put more emphasis on the rise of materialism, though they certainly deplored liberalism too. It's interesting that the hippies were also reacting against materialism.

Has materialism become invisible to us by now?

It's That Time Again

Do you have World Cup fever? Then you'll want to read my four-year-old blog post on the subject.

Do you detest everything to do with the World Cup and want to go into hiding until it's over? Then you'll want to read my four-year-old blog post on the subject.

And while you're out at it, check out Baddiel, Skinner, and Brodie's impish updating of their now-traditional classic. (The Lightning Seeds are one of my favourite bands.) It could have been awful, but I think they pulled it off.