Yesterday evening I bought the second series of Rev., a BBC comedy series about a Church of England vicar in the inner city of London. It's very different from Father Ted and from the Vicar of Dibley (I haven't actually watched more than a scene here and there of the latter show, but I think I know all I need to know from having seen those). This is a comedy that actually takes faith seriously-- although the Christianity of the central character is about as modernized and liberalized as it could possibly be. Still, we do hear him praying, see him struggling with his faith, and watch him striving to live by the Gospels, in his own way.
The show is carefully researched and it takes a sympathetic but honest look at the state of the Church of England, and of the English attitude to religion in general. Of course, this can be pretty depressing. The inner city church around which it is set usually has a congregation of less than ten.
It's also consistently funny and well-crafted, with strong characters and storylines and dialogue. I definitely recommend it and I might write more about it in the near future.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Monday, January 7, 2013
Here is an Odd and Interesting Website
Starring the Computer, a website "dedicated to the use of computers in film and television".
I came upon it while trying to find out which film was the first to have computers as its main subject. I never did find that out.
I came upon it while trying to find out which film was the first to have computers as its main subject. I never did find that out.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
What I Like About Blogging
I am a fogey. Being thirty five years old, I don't know whether I am an old fogey or a young fogey, but I am most definitely a fogey. I like old things because they're old. I distrust new things because they're new. I think life has become too fast, too loud, too convenient, and too crass.
So of course I have a very wary view of the internet. I feel deeply protective of the printed page, and hate to see it supplanted (even partly) by the glowing screen. I prefer the jingle of a shop door's bell to the click of a mouse. And so on.
But....I do like this blogging business, I have to admit.
I was quite embarrassed to set up a blog at first. Even the term "blog" seemed rather wince-inducing; like "waddler" or "networking" or "brunch". My original purpose in starting Irish Papist was quite specific and limited; to defend the Catholic Church in Ireland from those attacking it.
Since then, I have started blogging about all other sorts of things. My initial justification for this was the idea that (as Chesterton wrote) "nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true", and that my Catholic beliefs should pervade my entire worldview. If I blogged about everything, I might impress agnostics and atheists and waverers with a view of life that was both Catholic and catholic. "Hey", they might think, "orthodox Catholics might not be thin-lipped, life-hating fanatics after all."
I still hope that, of course. But I have to admit that I just enjoy blogging about all sorts of stuff. I like the whole format and phenomenon of blogs.
I like that I can write what the heck I like, whenever I like.
I like that anyone can read it, or not read it.
I like that there are no deadlines, restrictions of space, or style manual rules to follow.
Perhaps some of this is down to the fact that I trained as a journalist-- if "trained" is the right word.
After I left school, I did the Dublin Institute of Technology's degree in journalism, in Aungier Street. It was a terrible decision, one that I regret. (Show me a man with no regrets and I'll show you a liar or a sociopath.) I wish I had done a three-year arts degree instead.
It wasn't that it was a bad course. It was a very prestigious school of journalism, and many of my fellow students went on to become very well-known and successful journalists. (Was a "liberal agenda" drummed into us? Not really. Because it didn't really have to be. The assumptions of both staff and students were already so anti-traditional that I remember one lecturer-- something of a free spirit-- suggesting, rather rhetorically, that we may have all discarded the beliefs of Catholic Ireland too unthinkingly.)
But prestigious as the course was, it was wrong for me, because I was anything but journalist material. I thought it might be the way to go because I liked writing. Unfortunately, I hated using the telephone, chasing people for interviews, being confrontational, or indeed doing almost everything that a journalist has to do. I was cripplingly shy-- even more shy than I am today.
I didn't even like to read the newspapers or watch the news. (I still have to push myself to follow current affairs.) The whole thing was a terrible idea and I knew that journalism was not for me long before I graduated.
I want to emphasise my complete lack of potential as a journalist, just in case the reader suspects me of sour grapes when I complain about some of the things we were taught. The reason I didn't become a journalist (or even try to become one) is because I was utterly lousy at it.
But that doesn't mean I'm not entitled to an opinion on the whole tone and drift of the training we were given. In fact, I disliked almost everything about it.
We were taught above all else to strive for succinctness. The journalism lecturer would take our reports and blue-pencil every unnecessary word. He thought us the "inverted pyramid" approach to report-writing, whereby the most important facts are crammed into the first paragraph, in order to grab the reader's attention straight away, and to make the editor's job easier-- the paragraphs further down should be more dispensible.
All that is fairly harmless. It makes sense that news reports should be concise and straight to the point.
What I didn't like was that this attitude extended to feature writing, and indeed to writing in general.
Being snappy was good. Subordinate clauses were bad. Short sentences were good. Adjectives were bad. Attention-getting devices in the opening lines were good. But first lines that were generalizations were bad. You should never, ever, ever begin an article with a sentence like: "Recent years have shown an explosion of interest in the life of Sir Reginald Huffinpuff." You should, instead, write something like: "He was a knight of the realm who was twice arrested for shoplifting."
Well, I prefer an opening line that is a generalization. I don't want to feel button-holed or shouted at when I am reading. My favourite essayist, Chesterton, very often opens his essays with some leisurely and expansive generalization. (I just looked at some of his essays online, to substantiate this. The second essay I looked at begins thus: "There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles which I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the silliest ever known among men.")
This might seem like carping. After all, the journalism course was simply trying to equip its students for a career as working journalists. The facts of life are that journalists are expected to be punchy, and that newspaper and magazine readers are not old Anglo-Saxons listening to an epic poem over a tankard of mead, on a long winter's night.
But what if it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious cycle? What if the media-- and not just the media, but advertising and drama and comics and business-- are being sucked into a whirpool of ever-shortening attention spans and ever more dramatic attempts to be noticed? Was it inevitable that we would find ourselves in today's culture of jump-cut editing, charity muggers, Twitter and shock tactic road safety ads? Or did we bring ourselves here?
I visited the Irish Jewish Museum recently. One of its display cases held an old, yellowing Irish Times letters page, in which the infamous Limerick boycott of Jewish businesses was discussed. The page was only a few decades old, but I was struck by the length of the letters-- they were much longer than any letters you would see on the Irish Times letters page today. When I look at newspaper reports and articles from several deacades ago, they too seem to be considerably longer than their equivalents today.
It wasn't just the cult of Hemingwayesque prose that I took exception to. It was also the tyranny of topicality-- the idea that a subject only becomes worth talking about if it links in to some anniversary, film release or other big event.
I have no idea why this idea is so prevalent. There seems no need for it at all. I can see the desirability of not writing about Christmas in the middle of June. I can see the tact in avoiding a column full of jokes on a day that a massive bomb has killed thirty people. Aside from that I have no idea why a writer should not feel free to pluck his topics from all time and space.
But my aim here was not to write a rant about journalism schools, or journalists. I can actually see the romance in the grizzled journo who can turn his pen to whatever subject he is given. I understand the excitement and cameraderie involved in having to make a deadline. I get the appeal of Fleet Street folklore and Fleet Street legends and all the rest of it.
No, I simply wanted to sing the praises of blogging. I think it is a glorious thing to have a format where you don't have to bother with all of these tiresome rules of terseness, topicality, neutrality, direct quotation, attribution and not wandering off the subject. I cherish this modern-day equivalent of getting up on a soap-box in Hyde Park and addressing whoever happens to be passing by. I prize the sheer amateurism of the thing.
The more things change, the more they get worse. Mostly. I think the advent of the blog is one possible exception.
So of course I have a very wary view of the internet. I feel deeply protective of the printed page, and hate to see it supplanted (even partly) by the glowing screen. I prefer the jingle of a shop door's bell to the click of a mouse. And so on.
But....I do like this blogging business, I have to admit.
I was quite embarrassed to set up a blog at first. Even the term "blog" seemed rather wince-inducing; like "waddler" or "networking" or "brunch". My original purpose in starting Irish Papist was quite specific and limited; to defend the Catholic Church in Ireland from those attacking it.
Since then, I have started blogging about all other sorts of things. My initial justification for this was the idea that (as Chesterton wrote) "nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true", and that my Catholic beliefs should pervade my entire worldview. If I blogged about everything, I might impress agnostics and atheists and waverers with a view of life that was both Catholic and catholic. "Hey", they might think, "orthodox Catholics might not be thin-lipped, life-hating fanatics after all."
I still hope that, of course. But I have to admit that I just enjoy blogging about all sorts of stuff. I like the whole format and phenomenon of blogs.
I like that I can write what the heck I like, whenever I like.
I like that anyone can read it, or not read it.
I like that there are no deadlines, restrictions of space, or style manual rules to follow.
Perhaps some of this is down to the fact that I trained as a journalist-- if "trained" is the right word.
After I left school, I did the Dublin Institute of Technology's degree in journalism, in Aungier Street. It was a terrible decision, one that I regret. (Show me a man with no regrets and I'll show you a liar or a sociopath.) I wish I had done a three-year arts degree instead.
It wasn't that it was a bad course. It was a very prestigious school of journalism, and many of my fellow students went on to become very well-known and successful journalists. (Was a "liberal agenda" drummed into us? Not really. Because it didn't really have to be. The assumptions of both staff and students were already so anti-traditional that I remember one lecturer-- something of a free spirit-- suggesting, rather rhetorically, that we may have all discarded the beliefs of Catholic Ireland too unthinkingly.)
But prestigious as the course was, it was wrong for me, because I was anything but journalist material. I thought it might be the way to go because I liked writing. Unfortunately, I hated using the telephone, chasing people for interviews, being confrontational, or indeed doing almost everything that a journalist has to do. I was cripplingly shy-- even more shy than I am today.
I didn't even like to read the newspapers or watch the news. (I still have to push myself to follow current affairs.) The whole thing was a terrible idea and I knew that journalism was not for me long before I graduated.
I want to emphasise my complete lack of potential as a journalist, just in case the reader suspects me of sour grapes when I complain about some of the things we were taught. The reason I didn't become a journalist (or even try to become one) is because I was utterly lousy at it.
But that doesn't mean I'm not entitled to an opinion on the whole tone and drift of the training we were given. In fact, I disliked almost everything about it.
We were taught above all else to strive for succinctness. The journalism lecturer would take our reports and blue-pencil every unnecessary word. He thought us the "inverted pyramid" approach to report-writing, whereby the most important facts are crammed into the first paragraph, in order to grab the reader's attention straight away, and to make the editor's job easier-- the paragraphs further down should be more dispensible.
All that is fairly harmless. It makes sense that news reports should be concise and straight to the point.
What I didn't like was that this attitude extended to feature writing, and indeed to writing in general.
Being snappy was good. Subordinate clauses were bad. Short sentences were good. Adjectives were bad. Attention-getting devices in the opening lines were good. But first lines that were generalizations were bad. You should never, ever, ever begin an article with a sentence like: "Recent years have shown an explosion of interest in the life of Sir Reginald Huffinpuff." You should, instead, write something like: "He was a knight of the realm who was twice arrested for shoplifting."
Well, I prefer an opening line that is a generalization. I don't want to feel button-holed or shouted at when I am reading. My favourite essayist, Chesterton, very often opens his essays with some leisurely and expansive generalization. (I just looked at some of his essays online, to substantiate this. The second essay I looked at begins thus: "There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles which I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the silliest ever known among men.")
This might seem like carping. After all, the journalism course was simply trying to equip its students for a career as working journalists. The facts of life are that journalists are expected to be punchy, and that newspaper and magazine readers are not old Anglo-Saxons listening to an epic poem over a tankard of mead, on a long winter's night.
But what if it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious cycle? What if the media-- and not just the media, but advertising and drama and comics and business-- are being sucked into a whirpool of ever-shortening attention spans and ever more dramatic attempts to be noticed? Was it inevitable that we would find ourselves in today's culture of jump-cut editing, charity muggers, Twitter and shock tactic road safety ads? Or did we bring ourselves here?
I visited the Irish Jewish Museum recently. One of its display cases held an old, yellowing Irish Times letters page, in which the infamous Limerick boycott of Jewish businesses was discussed. The page was only a few decades old, but I was struck by the length of the letters-- they were much longer than any letters you would see on the Irish Times letters page today. When I look at newspaper reports and articles from several deacades ago, they too seem to be considerably longer than their equivalents today.
It wasn't just the cult of Hemingwayesque prose that I took exception to. It was also the tyranny of topicality-- the idea that a subject only becomes worth talking about if it links in to some anniversary, film release or other big event.
I have no idea why this idea is so prevalent. There seems no need for it at all. I can see the desirability of not writing about Christmas in the middle of June. I can see the tact in avoiding a column full of jokes on a day that a massive bomb has killed thirty people. Aside from that I have no idea why a writer should not feel free to pluck his topics from all time and space.
But my aim here was not to write a rant about journalism schools, or journalists. I can actually see the romance in the grizzled journo who can turn his pen to whatever subject he is given. I understand the excitement and cameraderie involved in having to make a deadline. I get the appeal of Fleet Street folklore and Fleet Street legends and all the rest of it.
No, I simply wanted to sing the praises of blogging. I think it is a glorious thing to have a format where you don't have to bother with all of these tiresome rules of terseness, topicality, neutrality, direct quotation, attribution and not wandering off the subject. I cherish this modern-day equivalent of getting up on a soap-box in Hyde Park and addressing whoever happens to be passing by. I prize the sheer amateurism of the thing.
The more things change, the more they get worse. Mostly. I think the advent of the blog is one possible exception.
My Email to my Local TD's
Dear Mr. Ellis, Ms. Shortall and Mr. Lyons
I am thirty-five years old. It's a long time since I voted for any of the mainstream parties (Sinn Féin included); I can't actually recall if I ever did vote for any of them, but I seem to remember voting for Labour at the start of my voting life.
However, since the issue of abortion is of such surpassing importance, I would be ready to vote for a mainstream party that stood up for the right to life, even if I had to overlook a lot of other things I didn't like about their policies. Similarly, I would never vote for a party that supported abortion, no matter how much I approved of their other policies. (Of course, I would take the same attitude to an independent candidate.)
This is by far the most important issue you will ever face in your political career; the opportunity to do the most good, or to do the most evil. A great deal of politics and public life is much ado about nothing; this is a matter of life and death in the starkest terms.
As champions of the left you are supposed to fight for the most vulnerable, the powerless, the voiceless. Is there anyone more vulnerable, powerless and voiceless than the child in the womb?
If the Dáil votes on abortion legislation in 2013, you will have the opportunity to help prevent a holocaust in Ireland. I beg you to take it.
Yours sincerely
Maolsheachlann O Ceallaigh
74, Sillogue Gardens
Ballymun
I am thirty-five years old. It's a long time since I voted for any of the mainstream parties (Sinn Féin included); I can't actually recall if I ever did vote for any of them, but I seem to remember voting for Labour at the start of my voting life.
However, since the issue of abortion is of such surpassing importance, I would be ready to vote for a mainstream party that stood up for the right to life, even if I had to overlook a lot of other things I didn't like about their policies. Similarly, I would never vote for a party that supported abortion, no matter how much I approved of their other policies. (Of course, I would take the same attitude to an independent candidate.)
This is by far the most important issue you will ever face in your political career; the opportunity to do the most good, or to do the most evil. A great deal of politics and public life is much ado about nothing; this is a matter of life and death in the starkest terms.
As champions of the left you are supposed to fight for the most vulnerable, the powerless, the voiceless. Is there anyone more vulnerable, powerless and voiceless than the child in the womb?
If the Dáil votes on abortion legislation in 2013, you will have the opportunity to help prevent a holocaust in Ireland. I beg you to take it.
Yours sincerely
Maolsheachlann O Ceallaigh
74, Sillogue Gardens
Ballymun
Things You Never Hear Anybody Say
"I've stopped drinking because I don't want to harm the embryo."
"Yesterday I felt the foetus move for the first time!"
"Do you know if the clump of cells is a potential boy or a potential girl?"
"Yesterday I felt the foetus move for the first time!"
"Do you know if the clump of cells is a potential boy or a potential girl?"
Saturday, January 5, 2013
What I Fantasize About in Bed
I can never get to sleep without the aid of fantasies.
No, not those kind of fantasies. I assure you that all my bedtime fantasies are suitable for family viewing. (This is not because I am as pure as the full moon, but because I do my best to push away less savoury imaginings.)
Most of my bedroom fantasies revolve around the idea of safety, of invulnerability.
I think this is because bed is both a very safe and a very vulnerable place. On the one hand, you are lowering all your defences, extinguishing the lamp of the eye and barring up the portal of the ear. You are as defenceless as a baby in the cradle. On the other hand, bed is the one place where you know you are unlikely to be berated, embarrassed, frozen, rained on, rushed, stressed, or to suffer any of those other ills that flesh is heir to during waking hours.
So, being both uniquely sheltered and uniquely vulnerable, our minds turn in the direction of safety. At least, mind does.
One of my oldest bedtime fantasies is that I am being driven around a city in the back of a van. People-- my enemies-- are looking for me, intent upon working me ill. But my allies have me smuggled away in the back of the vehicle, and my enemies will never find me. (Please note how this fantasy combines megalomania and paranoia.)
Another of my oldest fantasies is the fantasy of having the best of both worlds-- having the warmth and comfort of pillows and blankets, while also being able to go out under the sky and into the streets.
How do I manage this? Well, this fantasy occurred to me when I was a schoolboy, creeping unwillingly to school on some cold morning or other. Wouldn't it be wonderful, I found myself thinking, if I could somehow send a doppelganger to school-- a double of myself that would brave the morning chill, sit through classes, and endure all the unpleasantness of the school day, while I lay snug in bed? I would be able to see through the eyes of this other me, and hear through his ears, and enjoy all the enjoyable parts of the day. But all the time the real me would be warm and safe in bed. And when I didn't want to see through this doppelganger's eyes any more-- say, if he was getting a dressing-down from a teacher-- I would simply switch off the connection and lay back, knowing that my other self could manage things on auto-pilot.
In the years since, I have developed an enormous amount of variations on this theme. The agent I control from my pillow is not always a doppelganger. Sometimes it is a whole army. They surround the house I am sleeping in (in the fantasy it is often a house in the middle of a deserted and picturesque countryside) and protect me from my multitudinous, fanatical enemies.
(Lest you should think I am being cruel to these doppelgangers, I should explain that-- though I didn't mention this at first, since the basic idea was bizarre enough and I didn't want to complicate things even more-- they are not so much doppelgangers as holographic projections. They have weight and solidity and can interact with the world, but are not independent entities. It's like a more elaborate version of throwing your voice.)
Another favourite fantasy actually came to me while I was asleep. I was on a day off sick from work. (I would like to point out here that, even though I am an Evil Public Sector Worker and I doubtless deserve to be put in the stocks and pelted with rotten fruit, I don't think I have ever reached the private sector average for sick days in a year, never mind the public sector average.) As I lay asleep, dreaming feverish dreams, I imagined that I was in work but that I was invisible. Nobody could see me, because I wasn't officially there, but I could see and hear everything around me. I remember standing by the water cooler and listening to the conversation.
Well, you see the appeal of that, I'm sure. I quickly incorporated it (and variations thereof) into my repertoire.
I can imagine some psychoanalyst reading this and muttering, "Oh my Lord, this man needs help, and quick. I've never encountered a case as bad as this. We need to get someone out there right away."
Well, I warn them that they'll drag me away kicking and screaming. And also that I have a mind-controlled army to protect me.
No, not those kind of fantasies. I assure you that all my bedtime fantasies are suitable for family viewing. (This is not because I am as pure as the full moon, but because I do my best to push away less savoury imaginings.)
Most of my bedroom fantasies revolve around the idea of safety, of invulnerability.
I think this is because bed is both a very safe and a very vulnerable place. On the one hand, you are lowering all your defences, extinguishing the lamp of the eye and barring up the portal of the ear. You are as defenceless as a baby in the cradle. On the other hand, bed is the one place where you know you are unlikely to be berated, embarrassed, frozen, rained on, rushed, stressed, or to suffer any of those other ills that flesh is heir to during waking hours.
So, being both uniquely sheltered and uniquely vulnerable, our minds turn in the direction of safety. At least, mind does.
One of my oldest bedtime fantasies is that I am being driven around a city in the back of a van. People-- my enemies-- are looking for me, intent upon working me ill. But my allies have me smuggled away in the back of the vehicle, and my enemies will never find me. (Please note how this fantasy combines megalomania and paranoia.)
Another of my oldest fantasies is the fantasy of having the best of both worlds-- having the warmth and comfort of pillows and blankets, while also being able to go out under the sky and into the streets.
How do I manage this? Well, this fantasy occurred to me when I was a schoolboy, creeping unwillingly to school on some cold morning or other. Wouldn't it be wonderful, I found myself thinking, if I could somehow send a doppelganger to school-- a double of myself that would brave the morning chill, sit through classes, and endure all the unpleasantness of the school day, while I lay snug in bed? I would be able to see through the eyes of this other me, and hear through his ears, and enjoy all the enjoyable parts of the day. But all the time the real me would be warm and safe in bed. And when I didn't want to see through this doppelganger's eyes any more-- say, if he was getting a dressing-down from a teacher-- I would simply switch off the connection and lay back, knowing that my other self could manage things on auto-pilot.
In the years since, I have developed an enormous amount of variations on this theme. The agent I control from my pillow is not always a doppelganger. Sometimes it is a whole army. They surround the house I am sleeping in (in the fantasy it is often a house in the middle of a deserted and picturesque countryside) and protect me from my multitudinous, fanatical enemies.
(Lest you should think I am being cruel to these doppelgangers, I should explain that-- though I didn't mention this at first, since the basic idea was bizarre enough and I didn't want to complicate things even more-- they are not so much doppelgangers as holographic projections. They have weight and solidity and can interact with the world, but are not independent entities. It's like a more elaborate version of throwing your voice.)
Another favourite fantasy actually came to me while I was asleep. I was on a day off sick from work. (I would like to point out here that, even though I am an Evil Public Sector Worker and I doubtless deserve to be put in the stocks and pelted with rotten fruit, I don't think I have ever reached the private sector average for sick days in a year, never mind the public sector average.) As I lay asleep, dreaming feverish dreams, I imagined that I was in work but that I was invisible. Nobody could see me, because I wasn't officially there, but I could see and hear everything around me. I remember standing by the water cooler and listening to the conversation.
Well, you see the appeal of that, I'm sure. I quickly incorporated it (and variations thereof) into my repertoire.
I can imagine some psychoanalyst reading this and muttering, "Oh my Lord, this man needs help, and quick. I've never encountered a case as bad as this. We need to get someone out there right away."
Well, I warn them that they'll drag me away kicking and screaming. And also that I have a mind-controlled army to protect me.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Christmas Reflections
This morning I squired Michelle, my American fianceé, to Dublin Airport for her flight back to America. Neither of us said goodbye, since we hate goodbyes, but that didn't make the parting any less sad. She was here for two weeks of wedding preparations (including getting a marriage license), of discovering more of Dublin and Ireland, and of meeting friends and family. Don't ask when she is moving to Ireland. We don't know yet. But most of the wedding preparations are well in hand, the biggest exception being a photographer. (If anyone knows a good one, I'm listening.)
She was feeling pretty poorly as she went through security, so any prayers for her good health are also very welcome.
After we had said goodbye-- or had pointedly not said goodbye-- I finally made my way to the church in Dublin Airport, which I had never visited before, despite always meaning to do so.
I liked it, though I am sure that many people would find it ugly. The ceiling is low, concrete features heavily in its construction, and the stained glass and stations of the cross are designed in a modernistic, almost cartoonish style.
Though I am a traditionalist in most matters-- including my attitude to architecture-- I can't help liking modernist churches. I find they are an aid to devotion. They startle and spur my imagination. I approve of their otherworldliness, their aura of the alien, of the disturbing. The appearance of angels and heavenly messengers in the Bible are nearly always met with consternation and alarm. In the same way, I welcome places of worship that make me feel, perhaps not alarmed, but a little on edge and disorientated.
Is a church a temple to Beauty or a temple to God? Yes, beauty can be an avenue to God, but (like everything else) it can also be a distraction, even an idol-- and I do think that it often is such a distraction. In any case, I have to admit that beautiful churches-- or the type of churches most commonly so described-- leave me rather cold. But plain churches and strange-looking churches thrill me. There it is.
Last week (sticking with the theme of art and religion) I went to see Handel's Messiah for the first time. I enjoyed it, though I imagine that a lot of it was above my head. I appreciated the fact that the entire libretto was taken directly from Scripture, and I know that Handel's own faith was deeply held. But I did wonder how many of the audience (or the performers, for that matter) took the subject matter of the oratorio any more seriously than they would have taken the mythological references in Wagner's Ring cycle.
This matter of Christian culture, and of cultural Christianity, is one that seems quite knotty to me. This year, for the first time since I started going to church about three years ago, I attended Midnight Mass in my home church of the Holy Spirit, Ballymun. I was flabbergasted to find that it was completey packed out, and that I had to stand at the back. Of course I knew that congregations swelled for Midnight Mass, and I had not been too surprised, last Christmas Eve, to encounter a full house in the Pro-Cathedral.
But in Ballymun? In the Holy Spirit Church, which usually boasts a scanty Sunday congregation of sixty or so, with many aisles completely empty? It stunned me.
What accounts for this? Why do people who wouldn't darken the door of a church any other day of the year go to Midnight Mass-- on an evening when there are so many other things to do, so many holiday preparations to get through? Do they go out of nostalgia for childhood? Is it for the sake of the carols? Do they go from a feeling that Christmas would be incomplete without midnight Mass? Do they believe in God? Do they believe that Christ rose from the dead?
I don't know the answers to those questions. I wish I did.
The priest celebrating the Mass-- an African from Burkina Faso, who has been helping in the parish for the last few years-- couldn't resist making an appeal to the once-yearly worshippers. He made it before the closing prayer, when the congregation was mentally preparing to leave. I could see from the expression on his face that he knew it might not go down well, but that he simply couldn't resist it. He told us that Jesus was our friend and that, if you only visited a friend once a year, there must be something wrong with the friendship.
Of course, he is right. And of course Midnight Mass, like every Mass, should be an opportunity for evangelization. But rebuking those who turn up on one evening of the year seems like a bad idea to me; it's more likely to alienate them than to draw them in. There is certainly occasions for priests to admonish their congregations, but that doesn't seem like one of them.
Still, the problem is an interesting one. How should the Church make the most of this Christmas surge in Mass-going? Is it an opportunity to be grasped, or would people simply stay away if they felt they were going to be pounced on for more of a commitment, or told off for their fickleness?
But it's not just once-a-year Mass-goers who find themselves doing something unusual at this time of year. Christmas, for almost all of us, is a time of routines disrupted. We go on visits, and have visitors, and socialize more than usual. It is often a time of sleeping in an unfamiliar bed, and of finding ourselves talking to unfamiliar people, or perhaps to familiar people in unfamiliar settings. I imagine that lots of people find themselves jolted out of their ordinary thought patterns at this time of year. Certainly this was the case for me this year.
I was so busy over the Christmas period that I had almost no time for reading or writing. Instead, I found myself in social situations and long conversations where I often had little to contribute, and where I was often confronted with my own ignorance on many ordinary subjects.
Rather comically, perhaps, I often ended up wistfully scanning bookshelves, both in shops and in private homes, and even browsing the bottom-of-the-barrel books on a stall in Limerick train station.
And I found myself asking: what is it that is so very comforting about books, about the printed word?
I think it has something to do with their definite nature. I am the kind of person who feels ill at ease in situations where I'm not sure what is happening, what is expected of me. (I don't for a moment think I am special because of this. Nearly everybody, it seems, claims to be shy or to suffer from anxieties of one sort or another.)
Conversation with a person you don't know very well can be a daunting experience. What do you talk about? What is worth talking about? What can you expect the other person to know? What do they expect you to know? Should you try to be clever, or funny, or deep?
If the uncertainties of conversation can be intimidating, the uncertainty of the world in general can be terrifying-- or (even worse than terrifying) paralysing. What should I be doing, right now? What is going on-- in the world, in society, in my immediate environment? Who knows what is going on? Does anybody really know what is going on? What should my reactions be? What is normal? What is dependable? What is reality and what is illusion?
If you took any scene-- a photograph, a shopping centre, a deserted street-- could you find any non-arbitrary answer to the question, "What's happening in this picture?". Is the couple holding hands in the foreground more significant than the twinkling lights in the distance, or the grass growing beneath their feet, or the writing on the shop signs? Never mind the grand narratives of history and politics, or the competing theories of Marxists and Christians and feminists and nihilists-- who is to describe, in the most literal and straightforward sense, what is happening right now, right here, in front of me?
This rawness and radical indeterminacy, intrinsic to life as it is lived, is entirely absent when we turn to books, to the printed page. Pretty much every book, article and essay is about something. While we read, the world is fed to us at the rate of one word at a time. We know that we will not be bombarded by too much experience at once, and-- far more to the point, as far as I'm concerned-- that we will not starve for something to think about, something to get our teeth into, something to accept as significant and worthy of our attention. Because, in the mental world we share with Professor Zachary X. Baumgarten as we read his Some Aspects of Bavarian Belltowers, Bavarian belltowers simply are intrinsically important.
Today I took myself to Chapters in Parnell Street, to its wonderful second-hand section upstairs. And I went straight to the poetry section, because I was in the rarest of moods possible-- I was actually in the mood for poetry.
I am a poetry lover, and I always have been, but it's been my experience that the enjoyment of poetry always requires effort. A poem by Yeats, a verse from Housman, or a few lines from Kipling may give us intense and lifelong pleasure; but actually reading poetry, especially poetry we haven't read before, is always something of a drudge. The morning air may be glorious, but getting out of bed is always a wrench.
So to be seized with a sudden hunger for poetry is (I think) a rather rare and wonderful thing. But what is even more rare and wonderful is the particular sort of poetry I was hungering for. I was hungry for half-page poems, written in free verse or at least in relaxed and irregular metre, full of wistful and wayward thoughts. In other words, I was hungry for exactly the sort of poetry that I usually despise; the sort of poetry that I do not even think requires very much talent to compose. (Whatever talent is required is negative rather than positive; knowing how to avoid too much naivety, too much bathos, too much obscurity, too much incongruity. It takes a genius to write "Man is in love and love what disappears", or "Words at once true and kind, or not untrue and not unkind"; but a literate fourteen-year-old could write a passable free verse poem.)
Rather bizarrely, this sudden hunger came to me in a dream. I dreamt I was in a shop browsing poetry of just this sort, and woke up with a hankering for it.
After a long and pleasant time scanning the shelves (in the real, waking world), I left with a volume by John Updike, another by Patrick MacDonogh, and an anthology of 1930 poets (with a political poster on the cover).
Poetry seems to me to be the great test of a society's culture; more than anything else, the thing that separates a society from a civilization, a civilized life from an uncivilized life, a first class magazine from a second class magazine, and a liberal education from an illiberal education. Poetry is never a priority. There is always something more pressing, more amusing, more compelling, more productive. Poetry is something we can always dispense with. But even a little bit of poetry makes all the difference in the world. And even amateurish, navel-gazing, rambling poetry is better than no poetry at all.
Speaking of rambling, I have done more than my share of it here. Having reflected on the unanswerability of the question, "What's happening in this picture?", I realize I have earned the question, "What the heck is this post supposed to be about?". More disciplined posting will resume in future; I just felt like getting all these Christmas reflections out of my system, and getting my fingertips back on the keyboard.
Happy New Year!
She was feeling pretty poorly as she went through security, so any prayers for her good health are also very welcome.
After we had said goodbye-- or had pointedly not said goodbye-- I finally made my way to the church in Dublin Airport, which I had never visited before, despite always meaning to do so.
I liked it, though I am sure that many people would find it ugly. The ceiling is low, concrete features heavily in its construction, and the stained glass and stations of the cross are designed in a modernistic, almost cartoonish style.
Though I am a traditionalist in most matters-- including my attitude to architecture-- I can't help liking modernist churches. I find they are an aid to devotion. They startle and spur my imagination. I approve of their otherworldliness, their aura of the alien, of the disturbing. The appearance of angels and heavenly messengers in the Bible are nearly always met with consternation and alarm. In the same way, I welcome places of worship that make me feel, perhaps not alarmed, but a little on edge and disorientated.
Is a church a temple to Beauty or a temple to God? Yes, beauty can be an avenue to God, but (like everything else) it can also be a distraction, even an idol-- and I do think that it often is such a distraction. In any case, I have to admit that beautiful churches-- or the type of churches most commonly so described-- leave me rather cold. But plain churches and strange-looking churches thrill me. There it is.
Last week (sticking with the theme of art and religion) I went to see Handel's Messiah for the first time. I enjoyed it, though I imagine that a lot of it was above my head. I appreciated the fact that the entire libretto was taken directly from Scripture, and I know that Handel's own faith was deeply held. But I did wonder how many of the audience (or the performers, for that matter) took the subject matter of the oratorio any more seriously than they would have taken the mythological references in Wagner's Ring cycle.
This matter of Christian culture, and of cultural Christianity, is one that seems quite knotty to me. This year, for the first time since I started going to church about three years ago, I attended Midnight Mass in my home church of the Holy Spirit, Ballymun. I was flabbergasted to find that it was completey packed out, and that I had to stand at the back. Of course I knew that congregations swelled for Midnight Mass, and I had not been too surprised, last Christmas Eve, to encounter a full house in the Pro-Cathedral.
But in Ballymun? In the Holy Spirit Church, which usually boasts a scanty Sunday congregation of sixty or so, with many aisles completely empty? It stunned me.
What accounts for this? Why do people who wouldn't darken the door of a church any other day of the year go to Midnight Mass-- on an evening when there are so many other things to do, so many holiday preparations to get through? Do they go out of nostalgia for childhood? Is it for the sake of the carols? Do they go from a feeling that Christmas would be incomplete without midnight Mass? Do they believe in God? Do they believe that Christ rose from the dead?
I don't know the answers to those questions. I wish I did.
The priest celebrating the Mass-- an African from Burkina Faso, who has been helping in the parish for the last few years-- couldn't resist making an appeal to the once-yearly worshippers. He made it before the closing prayer, when the congregation was mentally preparing to leave. I could see from the expression on his face that he knew it might not go down well, but that he simply couldn't resist it. He told us that Jesus was our friend and that, if you only visited a friend once a year, there must be something wrong with the friendship.
Of course, he is right. And of course Midnight Mass, like every Mass, should be an opportunity for evangelization. But rebuking those who turn up on one evening of the year seems like a bad idea to me; it's more likely to alienate them than to draw them in. There is certainly occasions for priests to admonish their congregations, but that doesn't seem like one of them.
Still, the problem is an interesting one. How should the Church make the most of this Christmas surge in Mass-going? Is it an opportunity to be grasped, or would people simply stay away if they felt they were going to be pounced on for more of a commitment, or told off for their fickleness?
But it's not just once-a-year Mass-goers who find themselves doing something unusual at this time of year. Christmas, for almost all of us, is a time of routines disrupted. We go on visits, and have visitors, and socialize more than usual. It is often a time of sleeping in an unfamiliar bed, and of finding ourselves talking to unfamiliar people, or perhaps to familiar people in unfamiliar settings. I imagine that lots of people find themselves jolted out of their ordinary thought patterns at this time of year. Certainly this was the case for me this year.
I was so busy over the Christmas period that I had almost no time for reading or writing. Instead, I found myself in social situations and long conversations where I often had little to contribute, and where I was often confronted with my own ignorance on many ordinary subjects.
Rather comically, perhaps, I often ended up wistfully scanning bookshelves, both in shops and in private homes, and even browsing the bottom-of-the-barrel books on a stall in Limerick train station.
And I found myself asking: what is it that is so very comforting about books, about the printed word?
I think it has something to do with their definite nature. I am the kind of person who feels ill at ease in situations where I'm not sure what is happening, what is expected of me. (I don't for a moment think I am special because of this. Nearly everybody, it seems, claims to be shy or to suffer from anxieties of one sort or another.)
Conversation with a person you don't know very well can be a daunting experience. What do you talk about? What is worth talking about? What can you expect the other person to know? What do they expect you to know? Should you try to be clever, or funny, or deep?
If the uncertainties of conversation can be intimidating, the uncertainty of the world in general can be terrifying-- or (even worse than terrifying) paralysing. What should I be doing, right now? What is going on-- in the world, in society, in my immediate environment? Who knows what is going on? Does anybody really know what is going on? What should my reactions be? What is normal? What is dependable? What is reality and what is illusion?
If you took any scene-- a photograph, a shopping centre, a deserted street-- could you find any non-arbitrary answer to the question, "What's happening in this picture?". Is the couple holding hands in the foreground more significant than the twinkling lights in the distance, or the grass growing beneath their feet, or the writing on the shop signs? Never mind the grand narratives of history and politics, or the competing theories of Marxists and Christians and feminists and nihilists-- who is to describe, in the most literal and straightforward sense, what is happening right now, right here, in front of me?
This rawness and radical indeterminacy, intrinsic to life as it is lived, is entirely absent when we turn to books, to the printed page. Pretty much every book, article and essay is about something. While we read, the world is fed to us at the rate of one word at a time. We know that we will not be bombarded by too much experience at once, and-- far more to the point, as far as I'm concerned-- that we will not starve for something to think about, something to get our teeth into, something to accept as significant and worthy of our attention. Because, in the mental world we share with Professor Zachary X. Baumgarten as we read his Some Aspects of Bavarian Belltowers, Bavarian belltowers simply are intrinsically important.
Today I took myself to Chapters in Parnell Street, to its wonderful second-hand section upstairs. And I went straight to the poetry section, because I was in the rarest of moods possible-- I was actually in the mood for poetry.
I am a poetry lover, and I always have been, but it's been my experience that the enjoyment of poetry always requires effort. A poem by Yeats, a verse from Housman, or a few lines from Kipling may give us intense and lifelong pleasure; but actually reading poetry, especially poetry we haven't read before, is always something of a drudge. The morning air may be glorious, but getting out of bed is always a wrench.
So to be seized with a sudden hunger for poetry is (I think) a rather rare and wonderful thing. But what is even more rare and wonderful is the particular sort of poetry I was hungering for. I was hungry for half-page poems, written in free verse or at least in relaxed and irregular metre, full of wistful and wayward thoughts. In other words, I was hungry for exactly the sort of poetry that I usually despise; the sort of poetry that I do not even think requires very much talent to compose. (Whatever talent is required is negative rather than positive; knowing how to avoid too much naivety, too much bathos, too much obscurity, too much incongruity. It takes a genius to write "Man is in love and love what disappears", or "Words at once true and kind, or not untrue and not unkind"; but a literate fourteen-year-old could write a passable free verse poem.)
Rather bizarrely, this sudden hunger came to me in a dream. I dreamt I was in a shop browsing poetry of just this sort, and woke up with a hankering for it.
After a long and pleasant time scanning the shelves (in the real, waking world), I left with a volume by John Updike, another by Patrick MacDonogh, and an anthology of 1930 poets (with a political poster on the cover).
Poetry seems to me to be the great test of a society's culture; more than anything else, the thing that separates a society from a civilization, a civilized life from an uncivilized life, a first class magazine from a second class magazine, and a liberal education from an illiberal education. Poetry is never a priority. There is always something more pressing, more amusing, more compelling, more productive. Poetry is something we can always dispense with. But even a little bit of poetry makes all the difference in the world. And even amateurish, navel-gazing, rambling poetry is better than no poetry at all.
Speaking of rambling, I have done more than my share of it here. Having reflected on the unanswerability of the question, "What's happening in this picture?", I realize I have earned the question, "What the heck is this post supposed to be about?". More disciplined posting will resume in future; I just felt like getting all these Christmas reflections out of my system, and getting my fingertips back on the keyboard.
Happy New Year!
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