The cashtill beside the Dun Laoghaire Allied Irish Bank has a notice with little pictures to show which cards may be used to withdraw cash; amongst them was a picture of an Ulster Bank servicecard as it appeared sometime in the past.  It followed the example of its parent company, National Westminster Bank in having a card coloured white, caramel and orange.  It was not the most striking piece of design; even in 1979 it looked like something from a decade before, had there been cashtills in the 1960s.

Design didn’t much matter in 1979 though, having a card to take out money was something new and exciting.  The National Westminster bank on the Aldwych had a till which was a fascinating combination of the mechanical and the electronic.  The ‘menus’ were printed on a black rubber roll and rolled backwards and forwards behind a glass screen, like the destination boards on London buses, the choices would be aligned with buttons that were pressed to make one’s selection.  4785, the PIN number still remains in the memory.

The tills dispensed £5, £10 and £20 notes, though it would be rare to have occasion to need a £20 note.  Tickets for Wembley to watch England play in the European Nations Cup qualifying group matches were £2 each; a pint of beer was 32p, and on half-price nights it was possible to get six pints for a pound.

The reason the card remains so strongly in the memory is that there seemed a never ending supply of £5 notes.  The student grant in those days was exceedingly generous.  Even half board in a hall of residence cost only £350 a term and the full student grant was £2,000 for the year, £700 for each of the first two terms and £600 for the third, plus travelling expenses incurred above £50 per year.

Unless one was completely profligate, the full grant was sometimes hard to spend.  Go to see the Royal Shakespeare Company on a Monday night and student seats were £1.10 instead of £6.60.  The two most extravagant nights out were going to see Woody Allen in ‘Manhattan’ at a Leicester Square Cinema, which cost £3 – half as much again as a ticket for Wembley – and going to a Leicester Square disco for students from all over London, which had a reduced entrance charge but charged 60p for drinks.

Not only were they days of having cash to spare, they were days when being a student was a passport to reduced prices.  Good old British Rail still had fares that people could afford and while the student railcard could not reduce fares below a certain minimum during the week, the 50% reduction was subject to no minimum at weekends.  Visiting a friend in Brighton one weekend, a single ticket out to Falmer, where the university was located, cost only 8p or 12p, or something so small it was hardly worth requesting the reduction.

Money has never been so plentiful since.  Sometimes I wonder if National Westminster Bank would give me one of their cards again.

Looking in the archive, the very last blogspot post was a piece of spiritual reflection.

“Contemplative prayer at church this evening reflected on the words, “I have carved your name on the palm of my hand”, reassuring lines that speak of our nearness to God and God’s nearness to us.

The words have been the inspiration for children’s talks I have done on at least half a dozen occasions. The idea of writing on your hand so that you don’t forget something is immediate and concrete for children (as well as being in defiance of the teacher who would tell you not to write on your hand!).

Barbara, who led our contemplation, invited us to ponder the words, to make them our own. The suggestion of carving evoked pictures in my mind of richly grained wood being shaped by a mallet and chisel.

The picture took shape of a mallet coming down again and again on the chisel. The chisel had been struck so many times that the wood at the top of the handle was splayed out over the ferrule around the end. As I watched the mallet striking the chisel, the grained wood became a human hand and the chisel became a square black crude nail driven repeatedly into the hand. The names that had been carved were driven deep into blood.

It was an alarming image, the safe and reassuring picture being replaced by one of violent cruelty. This was not a picture that I could have used in a children’s talk, but it was a picture of the profound level of God’s love for us in Jesus, the names being driven into his hand being people for whom he died.

I left the church quietly to ponder a disturbing reflection, feeling uneasy that a gentle and domesticated picture of our relationship with God could shift in my mind to something altogether more challenging, and as I walked the words of one of Stuart Townend’s most beautiful of modern hymns drifted into my mind.

How deep the Father’s love for us,
how vast beyond all measure,
that he should give his only Son
to make a wretch his treasure!
How great the pain of searing loss:
the Father turns his face away
as wounds which mar the chosen one
bring many sons to glory!

Behold the man upon a cross,
my sin upon his shoulders;
ashamed, I hear my mocking voice
call out among the scoffers.
It was my sin that held him there
until it was accomplished,
his dying breath has brought me life—
I know that it is finished.

I will not boast in anything,
no gifts, no power, no wisdom;
but I will boast in Jesus Christ,
his death and resurrection.
Why should I gain from his reward?
I cannot give an answer;
but this I know with all my heart,
his wounds have paid my ransom”.

I’ve gone much more grey in the three years since, but Townend’s words are as fresh as ever.

The Wikipedia page on postmodernism quotes the Italian medievalist and semiotician (and excellent novelist!) Umberto Eco who characterised “the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland.”

The world where authorities speak in absolute terms and seek to exercise arbitrary authority is no longer accepted.  The Roman Catholic Church is struggling to come to terms with societies where the bishops say something is so and the people respond by saying “so what?”

Authority is no longer something assumed, it is more in the nature of respect; it must be earned.  Moral strictures are ignored if they are seen as irrelevant, or simply wrong.  Ireland was once a country where condoms were smuggled from the North; now clerical condemnation of contraception is a generally viewed as no more than an anachronism.  People will behave in a way they believe is appropriate.

Questioned about his book The Pope’s Children back in 2006, David McWilliams reflected on the postmodern morality of Ireland:

“The value system is ad hoc, people make up things as they go along?”

“Yes, it’s a la carte. It’s a la carte morality, which I would agree with. You have two ways to live your life: You have rules or discretion. As long as your discretion is based on a certain general view of what’s right and wrong, and I believe they have that, then jettisoning the rather strict rules that have governed this country over the last hundred years isn’t probably a bad thing. If you look at what has happened in terms of violence in this society, it’s not the people I portrayed who are perpetrating violence. They seem to be rather well behaved people”.

People will make their own choices; they will grant authority to those whom they respect.  It is a messy and difficult way of doing things, but it undermines all hierarchies, and allows space for creativity.

The Irish Blog Awards encapsulate the nature of the postmodern world (having been only ever nominated once, and even then having failed to make the long shortlist, there’s no personal interest!).  The initiative of an individual, their authority derives from the respect they have earned.  There is no official body; no hierarchy; no exercise of curial power; rather there are people who are mature enough to make their own decisions, to live without need of ecclesiastical dominance.

“Everything is possible and almost nothing is certain”: reports from the Blog Awards ceremonies suggest it would not be a bad slogan.

In our increasingly secular society, one of the things that remains almost unchanged is language. The Irish equivalent of the word ‘hello’, means ‘God be with you’, to which the response is ‘God and Mary be with you’. Regard for Mary was embedded in people’s daily conversation. Whatever changes there may be in society, Mary remains a major figure in the Biblical account of Jesus, and on this Mothering Sunday it is appropriate to learn from this most famous of all mothers.

‘Sure, even his own mother couldn’t love him’, was one of the worst comments one could make about a man in the North. Sometimes it was said as an insult, the person was regarded with such little respect that it was impossible to imagine anyone having any fondness whatsoever for the man. Sometimes it was spoken with sadness, the man had put himself outside of normal society to the extent that he was considered unworthy of love, a sad indictment of anyone’s life. One has to go a very long way to reach the point where even your own mother no longer loves you.

Mothers carry on believing in children long after everyone else has given up. When every other support has gone, mothers are still there, still present, still caring and feeling pain.

The experience of countless mothers through the ages is the experience of Mary in this morning’s Gospel. We are told that, ‘The child’s father and mother marvelled at what was said’ about Jesus. Simeon pulls no punches. He tells Mary that a sword is going to pierce her own soul. Motherhood for Mary is going to bring a spectrum of emotions beyond her imagination, yet she accepts everything that happens and continues her unflinching love for her Son.

Mary always has confidence in Jesus, even when others would have doubted. Do you remember the story of the first miracle? Jesus and his friends are at a wedding feast at the town of Cana in Galilee and the wine runs out. What happens? Mary comes to Jesus and says, “They have no more wine.” She gets a short reply from Jesus.

“Dear woman, why do you involve me? My time has not yet come.”

But Mary is Jesus’ mother and you don’t tell your mother what to do. She is not going to be put off, she says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Jesus realises that his mother is not going to give in and tells the servants to fill six stone jars with water – and the rest is history.

There was huge potential for embarrassment here – what if Mary had told the servants to go to Jesus and he had done nothing? What if Mary had misunderstood Jesus completely? Mary has confidence that the most extraordinary, most supernatural thing is going to happen – that water in jars used for washing away the dust of the day is going to be transformed into wine fit for a wedding reception.

This mother has confidence in her son.

The miracle of turning the water into wine marked a dramatic beginning to Jesus’ public ministry. As we head towards Holy Week and Easter, we know where that ministry was heading. Jesus’ integrity, his desire for truth and justice, his overthrowing of the old ways of doing things, brings him into direct conflict with the authorities and powers. Jesus isn’t just troublesome to them, he is a direct threat to wealth, to their influence, and to their standing in Jewish society.

As Mary watched Jesus’ ministry unfold, as she saw the miracles, as she listened to his teaching, she would have been very conscious of the direction in which matter were heading. Mary would have heard the whispers, she would have heard the mutterings amongst the onlookers. She would have watched the men of authority turn away in anger. Simeon’s words to her when Jesus was a baby would have come back to her with increasing frequency, “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”

What would it mean that a sword would pierce her own soul? She could not have imagined how great would be the pain that lay ahead. As the tumultuous events of the first Holy Week in Jerusalem came to a head, she discovered what Simeon’s words really meant. Yet Mary’s compassion never fails, even in the darkest moment, even facing the most hellish of scenes, Mary remains. Mary stands at the Cross as her son dies.

This mother has compassion for her son.

Simeon’s promise was that “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many”. In her wildest dreams Mary could not have imagined what the full truth of Simeon’s words would mean. One of the most moving pieces of religious art is the ‘Pieta’, the depiction in painting or sculpture of Mary holding in her arms her son’s broken body. Mary’s soul has been pierced, her heart is broken, her world is shattered.

Mary has been left in the care of John and it would have been from him she would have learned the greatest piece of Good News ever – that Jesus was risen from the dead. Mary’s confidence has been vindicated, her compassion has been rewarded. Mary is present at the birth of the Christian Church, she is present when Matthias is chosen to take the place of Judas. Mary knows the greatest consolation of all time – that her son has defeated the power of death and that his people can share in his eternal life.

This mother knows the consolation of her son.

On this Mothering Sunday we could do no better than to seek in our lives to follow the example of Mary – to have confidence in Jesus, to have compassion for Jesus, and, so, at the end of our lives, to know the consolation of Jesus.

In Somerset, there were there knights in shining armour who would ride back from the dead in the moment of need and, in Devon, a navy waited the hour when it would again put to sea.

The English teacher in the little Dartmoor secondary school belonged to a conservative Christian church, but loved to teach us poems rooted in legend, even if they meant heroes rising from the dead (something strictly forbidden in the conservative Christian worldview).  The rhythms of ‘Drake’s Drum’ still conjure memories of her reading:

DRAKE he’s in his hammock an’ a thousand mile away,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?)
Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
Yarnder lumes the island, yarnder lie the ships,
Wi’ sailor lads a-dancin’ heel-an’-toe,
An’ the shore-lights flashin’, an’ the night-tide dashin’
He sees et arl so plainly as he saw et long ago.

Drake he was a Devon man, an’ ruled the Devon seas,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?),
Rovin’ tho’ his death fell, he went wi’ heart at ease,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe,
“Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,
Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low;
If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,
An’ drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.”

Drake he’s in his hammock till the great Armadas come,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?),
Slung atween the round shot, listenin’ for the drum,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
Call him when ye sail to meet the foe;
Where the old trade’s plyin’ an’ the old flag flyin’,
They shall find him, ware an’ wakin’, as they found him long ago.

It was the same English teacher who lent pupils her copy of Frederick Forsyth’s ‘The Shepherd’, a wonderful story about a de Havilland Vampire jet in thick fog over the North Sea at Christmas Eve 1957 when all its instruments failed.  An old Mosquito bomber appears out of the mists and leads the jet to safety before disappearing.  The Mosquito had disappeared without trace on Christmas Eve some fourteen years previously; its ghost continued in active service.

Heroes felt no pain.  They rode into a story for a brief time and went on their way as quickly as they had appeared.  There were no ‘helloes’ and no ‘goodbyes’; no tears and no regrets.

Sometimes to be a ghostly figure, appearing and disappearing when the task is accomplished seems attractive; sometimes it seems it would mean much less pain than real life.

Not knowing who the Beatles were in the 1960s would have had little impact upon the reality of daily life.  It might have left one open to mockery, but it would not have affected how one communicated, how one did business, how one heard news, how one went shopping, how one managed one’s finances, how one presented oneself to the world.

As great as the Beatles were, their influence did not change the way we lived.  The Internet, on the other hand, has had a profound impact in almost every area of human activity – it has, at once, shrunk and expanded the world.  Nothing is now remote, but infinite knowledge is now available.

Profound social and ethical issues are raised by questions that range from who controls information on a global basis to what intimate details are being shared in social networks.  Massive opportunities arise for those who are in the business of communicating a message.

Christians, reputedly in the business of being concerned at the issues confronting humanity and alleging that they have news to share with the world, might reasonably be expected to have some interest in the Internet.

In fact, serious Christians could surely be assumed to be running to keep up with all the developments.  Mobile broadband, Wifi hotspots, social networking, iPhone appliances: these are changing the way we live, the way we communicate, the friends we have.  Amongst the vast raft of complex issues, virtual relationships pose questions about personal morality; online trading poses questions about business morality; blog smear campaigns pose questions about political morality; the list is potentially endless.

Imagine yourself as a Christian who believed in changing the world: wouldn’t you be saying, ‘we need to look at these issues’.  Wouldn’t you be saying, ‘this is where our young people are; we need to be here’?  Wouldn’t you be saying, ‘there are an awful lot of people using the Net for an awful lot of thing; I think we should be there in the middle of it all”.

If you were part of a church committee and you wanted to engage with the 21st Century world, you would surely be urging that resources be devoted to taking the church to where the people are.  Mission work has shifted from distant lands to cyber space; but the church cannot comprehend that the world has changed.

The Church of Ireland so struggles with the 21st Century that this morning it approved the disbandment of its Internet Committee (a colleague announced this on his Facebook page using his iPhone).  Perhaps the committee had been very limited in its remit, and perhaps more might have been achieved, but instead of strengthening its resources and expanding its work, the Church of Ireland Standing Committee agreed that the Internet Committee should cease to exist.

It is a decision that is hard to comprehend.  It demonstrates a disconnectedness from reality on a par with the legendary magistrate who asked in the 1960s, “who are the Beatles?” More than that, it demonstrates a turning of the back on the world that Jesus came to save.

Some encounters are no more than single brief moments in time, others are repeated, but seem like a single moment.  Sitting, earlier in the evening, we had talked about the songs played at the end of discos.

“Did you have Frank Sinatra singing ‘New York, New York”?

“No, we had Jeff Beck singing, “Hi, ho, silver lining”.

Did we though? Were there to be an inquiry into songs being badly sung by people who had drunk too much, could I testify that Jeff Beck’s lyrics were sung on every occasion?

Maybe we didn’t always sing Jeff Beck; maybe we sang him only once, and the moment became the mood felt at the end of every disco.

Maybe it was that Jeff Beck created a mood in which you escaped for a few minutes from the fact that the evening was over, and that very mundane life continued in the morning.  Was it that we were all pretending to be jolly as the refrain was raucously shouted?

Perhaps ‘New York, New York’ played a similar role in rural Ireland.  You couldn’t be much more removed from the Big Apple than a town in the Irish midlands, yet for a moment you could escape; forget about the boredom of everyday life.

Maybe ‘New York, New York’ was a more considered response to the reality of rural life than Jeff Beck, or maybe Irish teenagers of the 1970s were more cheerful than their English counterparts, able to imagine themselves in a different world, while we just sang loudly to blot out the things that annoyed us.

None of it matters.  We moved far from our respective worlds to be able to be sat in Bray on a spring night, but there are moments when one could write an entire autobiography in a series of songs; at least one that ran to the point where listening departed from the present to retreat into the world of nostalgia.

Maybe it would be possible to pick a playlist to express the moods of a life.  Maybe that was what prompted sitting on the table to listen on Friday night, while everyone else talked.  ‘Ain’t no sunshine’ would have its place in those years of teenage angst.

‘Keeping things ticking other is not such a bad thing to do’.

It wasn’t a very good answer. On reflection, there might have been a more positive response.  The point of keeping things ticking over is to be counter-cultural; to re-assert the values of community, to affirm those who have held on to a belief in something other than money and possessions in the face of rampant materialism.  Keeping things ticking over allows a rediscovery of roots. True radicalism is about going to the roots and building from there.

None of that would have made the slightest sense in a local newspaper, and is probably no more than a post hoc interpretation of a decision to move to the country that was really a matter of pragmatism, but the Lord moves in mysterious ways.  Maybe a rediscovery of the soul of the church, and of our community, needs to come from the rural roots of our parishes.

Fintan O’Toole’s Ship of Fools suggests that Ireland never had the chance to mature as a modern democracy before being overtaken by all that happened in the past decade.  Perhaps, though, it is more than the development of modern political culture, where TDs are not glorified county councillors, that is the problem.

Irish society moved from traditional Irish Catholicism, through the experience of the Enlightenment (which took three centuries in Protestant Britain), to the current state, which is described as post-modernity, all in the space of one generation.

The South African writer David Bosch in his 1991 book Transforming Mission said:

The Enlightenment creed taught that every individual was free to pursue his or her own happiness, irrespective of what others thought or said.

This entire approach had disastrous consequences. The so-called openness of modern liberalism really means that people do not take others seriously – indeed, that they do not need others.  It follows that individuals can no longer take themselves seriously and that, in spite of the fact that they have the liberty to believe and do as they like, many do not believe in anything any more, and spend all their lives “in frenzied work and frenzied play so as not to look into the abyss” . . . Too confident to acknowledge or draw on their religious roots, too urbane to be duped by the lure of some irrational ideologies, all that remains in the end is the embrace of nihilism.  Free to use their power any way they wish, modern humans have no referent outside themselves, no guarantee they will use their freedom responsibly and for the sake of the common good.  The autonomy of the individual, so much flaunted in recent decades, has ended in heteronomy; the freedom to believe whatever one chooses to believe has ended in no belief at all; the refusal to risk interdependence has ended in alienation also from oneself.”

There is an overwhelming sense of alienation within Ireland; particularly from the political structures that now place the burden of the greed of the super rich upon the backs of working people.  Alienation from the state is accompanied by alienation from the self-serving churches, which once provided community and interdependence.  People feel isolated and voiceless.

Keeping things ticking over maybe means the opportunity to look and listen and to find community and the values that made this country a special place.  It wouldn’t be bad plan, but would hardly sound like sense in the paper.

Trawling through the archives, a story was found about an encounter with someone not expected deep in rural Ireland

It was the summer of 1988 and I was driving on a road out of Galway city heading westwards. Having been an impoverished student not so long before, I was in the habit of feeling sorry for hitch hikers and picked one up on the outskirts of the city.

It turned out that he was an artist, making a few pounds by selling pictures of Galway scenery. He lived in a cottage halfway up a mountain.

We talked about this and that and, given the fact I was wearing a clerical collar, we talked about religion. He said it was something he couldn’t accept.

When we reached the turning off the main road for his cottage. I said I would drive him up. I had a little Austin Metro and I had to coax it up the winding mountain road.

When we reached the cottage, J offered me coffee and because I was curious about him, I accepted.

The cottage was as I expected. There was a stone floor; embers still glowed in the open fireplace; it was not very clean; the dishes were dirty and a woman’s clothes, including underwear, were strewn around the place; I didn’t ask.

Apart from a fridge, a kettle and a cassette player, the house could have been something out of a museum.

We drank black coffee from china teacups that had no saucers and talked about what had brought him to a cottage on a mountainside in Galway.

He had grown up in Co Tyrone. His father had gone to jail for membership of an illegal organisation. From an early age, he had been under pressure to support the cause. He couldn’t agree with the rest of his family, so he left home and school and drifted.

I asked him if he went home at all.

Every couple of years, he said, but it was painful. Going home meant threats, because of the people he mixed with and because he refused to support his family’s beliefs.

Two of his brothers were in prison, serving long sentences for terrorist offences. ‘I can’t understand it’, he said, one of them came to visit me when I was down in Cork. He was just an ordinary fella. Two days later he was caught planting a bomb’.

J had no time for religion, or the church, or anything that went with the; he saw them as destroying the life he felt was important. J’s life was lived outside of the law and outside of society.  He spoke warmly of the kindness and care he had received from people he had never met before. He talked about how he was trying to help a friend with drink problems.

As I rose to go, he cuddled a puppy and thanked me for the lift. He walked to the car with me and said he hoped I would call again.

I never did call.

You meet the most unexpected people in country places.

Simon Kuper, my favourite journalist, writes a sports column in the Weekend edition of the Financial Times. One need have no interest whatsoever in the sport in question; Kuper finds human interest in the most esoteric and the most mundane of sporting stories.

He wrote with a touching passion about the Dutch cricket team some years ago, a piece that does not seem to be in the FT archives. He knew many of the players and noted that they were coming to the end of their playing days. Kuper’s closing line was, ‘the sad thing is, five minutes ago, we were all fourteen’.

Kuper’s words came back to me this week.

A cousin announced her 50th birthday party for Sunday, 4th April.  Working in a parish, the date proves impossible, it is Easter, but the announcement of the party brought back many memories

Her father, my uncle, was one of those figures who would always loom large in a young boy’s imagination; sometimes he could be very serious, but often there was mischief and humour. His mouth would be set firm and then crinkle into a smile before a roar of laughter. He did things that other people wouldn’t do. He would get in the car and go on holiday in the middle of the night. He would shout with delight at silly situations. He would have no care as to what people with disapproving faces thought.

I think I went on holiday with he and his family three or four times between the ages of eight and thirteen. Visits from him were always a very welcome interlude in my very rural life. There was always an air of excitement when he was around – anything might happen. Even on my wedding day in 1983 he came to me at the end of the reception and said ‘Well, Ian, fancy going camping?’ At any other moment I might have leapt at the opportunity.

Pondering not being able to attend an ‘80s Party’ (I never liked the 80s anyway, bad perms and awful music) I thought back on the moments and smiled.  My uncle died suddenly five years ago. The memories of so many happy moments remain.

The sad thing is that five minutes ago my cousins and I were all fourteen.