The Central Applications Office tables show that the number of points at Leaving Certificate required to study theology at Trinity College, Dublin is 335; that’s 200 points less than for admission to read law, 220 less than dentistry and 240 less than medicine.. Obviously, there is little demand for the places. The most able students now look for courses that offer them lucrative careers; there seem to be few interested in Holy Scripture. Combined with the continuing decline and closure of most of the seminaries, we are left with a situation where in a generation’s time there will be no biblical scholars in our country. What we once knew will be forgotten; the pages of the Bible will become an unknown country, accessible only to a small, esoteric minority.

I think it will be Ireland’s loss. When people seek to understand the times in which they live, when they look for meaning in otherwise meaningless lives, when they look for hope in times of despair and tragedy, they will have nowhere to look. The Bible will be a closed book. The book from which the founding principles of our society were derived will be to them a strange and alien document.

The professor who taught Old Testament studies when I was training for ordination was very dry and very formal, but I used to love his lectures. He would take a biblical text and work through it step by step. He would explain what was going on in the history of the time. He would explain why God spoke in this particular way to this particular situation. He would explain how the text had reached us in its present form, what bits had been edited, what bits had had additional comments added to them on the way down through the years. What might otherwise have seemed like strange words from long ago suddenly sprang to life.

At the very heart of understanding the Old Testament, and understanding what God might be saying to us in our time, were the days of Jeremiah. They were days of sadness and disaster.

The high point in the history of God’s people was the rule of David. Flawed as he was, David was seen as an ideal king compared with what was to follow in later centuries. To understand the pain and grief of Jeremiah we need to understand the process that led to Jeremiah’s times.

David became king around about 3,000 years ago, about 1,000 BC. He reigned over the united kingdom of Israel and Judah until 961 B.C. and was succeeded by Solomon who reigned until 922 B.C. From that year on things began to decline. Israel and Judah split into two separate kingdoms. In 721 Israel, the northern kingdom, fell to Assyrian invaders and Judah continued alone. There was a bright point in the days of Judah during the reign of Josiah, who was king from 640-609 B.C., the Book of the Law which had somehow been lost was found and there seemed a real prospect that the people would reform. Unfortunately the good times did not last and Judah continued its downward slide.

The worse things got the more people clung on to their belief that God would always be on their side. Jerusalem and the Temple were at the heart of what they believed. As long as they held the Holy City then nothing could destroy them.

Poor Jeremiah comes into the middle of this situation charged with telling the people of Judah a few home truths. The people were angry at Jeremiah, they did not want to believe that what was happening was God’s judgement on their disobedience. Judah was a small and weak kingdom and in the year 597 B.C. the Babylonians come sweeping into the place. They raided the Temple, looted its treasures and carried Jehoiachin the king off into exile. This did not fit into people’s idea of God or of their own place in history. They were angry when they were told that they had deserved this.

The people believed that Jeremiah was guilty of blasphemy to dare to suggest that God’s promises to David would not be kept and that there would not always be a king to follow in the line of David. Jeremiah, for his part, was convinced that they had failed to keep their obligations and that the promises would not be fulfilled.

The events of 597 were bad enough, but Jeremiah told people that this was not the end, that there was worse to come. Jeremiah was persecuted for his words. He was hated, jeered at, ostracised, continually harassed, and suffered a number of attempts on his life. Jeremiah suffered greatly, mentally as well as physically, for speaking the truth.

Jeremiah’s words of warning were fulfilled in 587 when the Babylonians returned, destroying both Jerusalem and the Temple and carrying the whole of the leadership of Jewish society into exile in Babylon. Judah had been given chance after chance, they were given warning after warning, but they persisted in their belief that nothing could go wrong.

Reading Jeremiah’s forewarnings of doom from 26 centuries ago, what relevance can we find for today?

Jeremiah is saying that there are no guarantees, that God makes his own decisions. A nation is like clay in God’s hand, if he chooses to crush it and re-form it, then he will do so.

Why would God destroy a nation he has made? Because it will not repent of its evil ways. The people of Judah were impeccable in their conduct of the life of the Temple, everything was done according to the letter of the law. The problem was that their lives did not match their religious ceremonies.

Reading through Jeremiah now we can be amazed at the arrogance of the people. How could they refuse to accept what God was saying to them?

To understand the days of Jeremiah we need only look around us. We were given the opportunity to build a new and prosperous society in this country. Never had there been so much material wealth. Look at what has happened. Wealth came before justice. Private interests came before any concern for the life of the community or of the wider society. The day came when the money ran out, and what have we left?

Jeremiah would have been forthright in his condemnation of the excess, waste and the plain injustice in our society. Jeremiah is a warning to anyone who assumes success automatically follows success, he is a warning to a society where people believe they are under no obligation to anyone. God warns a people that refuses to hear him that he is preparing a disaster for them and devising a plan against them.

Jeremiah can be frightening for us. What is God saying to our country? What is being prepared and devised? Are we listening?

Walking through the beautiful streets of the city of Bath on Monday morning, where parking on streets within ten minutes walk of the city centre was free on account of it being a bank holiday (imagine such a thing being contemplated in Dublin, there would have to be a cut in councillors’ expenses), a newspaper board caught the eye.  So convinced were we that the headline was a misprint that we searched around for another news board before being convinced that the top news story was about seagulls attacking a cat.

What a wonderful place to live.  Bath and North East Somerset unitary authority has a population of 180,000 – considerably larger than Cork or Limerick – and the lead story of the local newspaper is an incident that might barely merit mention in most places.

Unfortunately, both shops were closed, so it was not possible to buy a paper to discover what other issues were concerning the citizens of what must be one of the most picturesque cities in the world.

Perhaps the headline is in the tradition of the alleged 1912 headline, attributed in various forms to various newspapers, but never actually printed anywhere, ‘Titanic sinks: Local man feared dead’, in its emphasis on the local and the particular, or perhaps it is a reflection of a community at peace with itself.

To live in a community where discord in the animal kingdom is worthy of report is like living in some Elysian vision, far removed from drug dealers, graffiti, and teenaged boys drunk on cheap lager; far removed from corruption and ghost estates, and those who have made millions walking away from the problems they have caused.

Perhaps the sheer price of housing in the city makes the community self-selecting, though that did not inhibit graffiti and crime in south Dublin, or perhaps Bath has a secret they should share with others.

Being on a boat recalls again Stoppard’s lines from “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” on being and being.

“You can’t not be on a boat.

I’ve frequently not been on boats.

No, no, no… what you’ve been is not on boats”.

Hamlet’s erstwhile friends are caught in a discussion on being as action and being as existence.  But being comes in many forms; neither Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are drive to refect on beng as identity.  They are Renaissance men, internationalists who move easily from one nation to another; if they are Danish, it is by accident of birth and not through conscious choice.  Being as identity belongs to a world of realpolitik of which they are no part; it is part of the world of military strongarms like Fortinbras, not the world of intellectual loftiness in which Hamlet lives (though that does not bar him from the odd spot of wanton killing).

Being as identity comes to mind while queueing at the ship’s coffee bar. In front stands a man in a Tipperary Gaelic Athletic shirt.  The blue and yellow of Tipperary will be in great evidence on Sunday when their hurling team line out against Kilkenny in the All Ireland final.  82,000 fans at Croke Park plus hundreds of thousands watching on television will have a keen sense of what being as identity means.  The man’s shirt was not like the replica soccer shirts worn by children who have never been near their club’s stadium; it was a declaration of identity, ‘I am of Tipperary; being of Tipperary, I am declaring my allegiance.  Those who wear soccer shirts cannot make such a declaration; unless you live in a particular corner of south-west London, you cannot claim, ‘I am of Chelsea’.  It is as inconsequential to one’s identity as me wearing an Aviron Bayonnais rugby when I am not Basque and do not live in Pyrenees-Occidental.

As the Welsh shoreline fades into no more than a dark blur on the horizon, there is a nagging question of what being British means.  What is signified by the passport in my coat pocket?  What national stories and traditions now hold the place together?  What does being British mean?

You can’t not be on a boat.  Ultimately, you can’t not be anywhere; identity must mean something, but what?

Wandering the cemetery today, swapping memories with those whose names filled the dramatis personae pages of our village life, I wondered if they had disliked school much as I?

‘Ackie, you were my second cousin twice removed weren’t you? Isn’t that right, my grandfather’s second cousin?  I used to see you around all the time, it’s amazing to think you’ve been gone thirty-three years.  Did you like school?  When you walked up Field Road to the village at the beginning of September, did you ever feel sick about the new term starting?  Wouldn’t you have preferred to be back on your farm?’

‘And Bert, what about you?  I remember you cycling down the road every morning with the post.  Your gravestone doesn’t tell how much you meant to us.  You were always smiling and laughing, not a melancholic type.  You must have spent long enough at school to have had a job with the post office, but did it never clash with your natural joviality?’

My mobile phone rings; it is the alarm company phoning for the third time in the afternoon to say the Rectory alarm has gone off, the spell is broken.  Ackie and Bert were of the generation where it would have been impolite to describe school as anything but the best days of your life – even if the teacher was liberal with the use of violence.  I bid a farewell to those whose presence filled every part of village life and engage with the business of phoning an office in Dublin about the alarm problems.  The anxious memories conjured by the thoughts of schooldays are dissipated by the engagement with everyday problems.

There were times in student years when a new term was approached with eager anticipation, when the world of school classrooms was something forever put away.  Those days were something to miss, but the days in the world of Ackie and Bert were left behind with delight.

Four decades on, it is hard to know why school prompted sick-making apprehension.  The school taught lessons well, and was fair in its treatment, it did not deserve to be greeted with such dread.  Yet attempting to rationalise thoughts decades later is a fruitless endeavour; lie telling oneself in retrospect that a childhood fear of ghosts was a piece of silliness.

Walking down the road the dreadful realisation sets in, ‘It’s 1st September on Wednesday’.  Unwarranted or not, a cloud gathers over the days ahead

The churches will fight tooth and nail to hold the ground they have, not because Jesus asks them to do so, but because they value their power and influence, because bishops expect to be people of standing and not merely members of a religious group.  There are some who believe it is possible to turn back the clock of history, to recover the theocratic Ireland of times past, to silence the critics and to put people back into line – read the conservative Catholic papers and they are searching for a recovery of lost ground.

The only way the past may be recovered is by a denial of the freedom of the present; the sort of vision being pursued by the Tea Party in the United States.  Catholic Ireland can only be restored by an explicit attack on individual liberty.  Attempts at revitalisation of what philosopher Karl Popper would have regarded as ‘tribal magic’ can only mean oppressive regimes.  Writing during the Second World War, he says in ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’,

“The lesson which we should learn from Plato is the exact opposite of what he tries to teach us. It is a lesson which must not be forgotten. Excellent as Plato’s sociological diagnosis was, his own development proves that the therapy he recommended is worse than the evil he tried to combat. Arresting political change is not the remedy; it cannot bring happiness. We can never return to the alleged innocence and beauty of the closed society. Our dream of heaven cannot be realized on earth. Once we begin to rely upon our reason, and to use our powers of criticism, once we feel that call of personal responsibilities, and with it the responsibility of helping to advance knowledge, we cannot return to a state of implicit submission to tribal magic. For those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge, paradise is lost. The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, the more surely do we arrive at the Inquisition, at the Secret Police, and at a romanticized gangsterism. Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human. There is no return to a harmonious state of nature. If we turn back, then we must go the whole way – we must return to the beasts”

Are we going back?  No? Well, let’s say so and make it absolutely clear to those who would take us back into the age of magic that their spells are ineffective.

It seemed odd that a tune, becoming bland through its overuse at every possible EU occasion, tied to an institution more known for its bureaucracy and its corruption than for its vision and idealism, should have radical roots.  Bragg is a veteran radical, and having watched Tony Blair’s betrayal of every radical principle, will presumably have a catalogue of his own disappointments.

Having spent a day in Cambridge, where there are visible reminders of disappointed hopes, thoughts on the radicalism that inspired Bragg were fresh.  He spoke of the Levellers, the English radical movement of the Seventeenth Century.  Their hopes were to be betrayed by Cromwell who replaced monarchy with dictatorship and misery.  Medieval churches in Cambridge still have vacant niches where once stood statues of saints, smashed by Protestant zealots.  The men of Oliver Cromwell in the Seventeenth Century had been preceded by the men of Thomas Cromwell a century before, a Cambridge college walk named after Bishop Nicholas Ridley recalling the martyrdom of the English bishops in the Sixteenth Century.

The Levellers had been a radical Christian group, believing the teachings of Jesus should be applied to the life of the country, believing Christians were called to build the Kingdom of God on Earth; they were to learn that the last thing the Church was prepared to contemplate was having Jesus’ words fulfilled.  Radicals long ago gave up on looking to the Church to bring change in society.  In the days of Beethoven, the Church would have striven only to protect its own privilege, contemplating charity only as a means of keeping things unchanged.

Aspirations expressed by Schiller and immortalised by Beethoven in ‘Ode to joy’, aspirations of unity and brotherhood, will never find fulfilment in a Church built on hierarchy and authoritarianism.  The hope that they might find fufilment through political channels seems also to have taken a battering.  It would have been interesting to have asked Billy Bragg where he might have found realistic hope, is hope something that can now find substance only in songs?

If Frederich Schiller were alive today, where would he look for a vision of what might be?  And if Beethoven were present to set it to music, what tune would he write?

There was the temptation to object, to point out that good had triumphed and evil had been defeated in Tolkien. It had, but only at the cost of the life of Frodo who dies within a year of the victory. Sadness is always a matter of perception.

Driving through Co Wexford yesterday morning, passing a group of statues of pikemen, a memorial to the 1798 rebellion, there was a moment of sadness. It is hard to think of 1798 without recalling lines from Seamus Heaney’ ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, but even Heaney cannot match William Trevor for sadness.

William Trevor’s ‘Autumn Sunshine’ has a deep shadows. The gentle Canon Moran, Rector of a little Church of Ireland parish in Co Wexford is confronted with an Englishman who believes he understands Irish history and Moran is left to try to find meaning inn sadness. Returning to Trevor’s lines, the darkness of 1798 is debated

“At least Kinsella got his chips”, Harold pursued, his voice relentless. “At least that’s something.”

Canon Moran protested. The owner of the barn had been an innocent man, he pointed out. The barn had simply been a convenient one, large enough for the purpose, with heavy stones near it that could be piled up against the door before the conflagration. Kinsella, that day, had been miles away, ditching a field.

“It’s too long ago to say where he was,” Harold retorted swiftly. “And if he was keeping a low profile in a ditch it would have been by arrangement with the imperial forces.”

When Harold said that, there occurred in Canon Moran’s mind a flash of what appeared to be the simple truth. Harold was an Englishman who had espoused a cause because it was one through which the status quo in his own country might be damaged. Similar such Englishmen, read about newspapers, stirred in the clergyman’s mind: men from Ealing and Liverpool and Wolverhampton who had changed their names to Irish names, who had even learned the Irish language, in order to ingratiate themselves with the new Irish revolutionaries. Such men dealt out death and chaos, announcing that their conscience insisted on it.

The walk to Kinsella’s Barn had taken place on a Saturday afternoon. The following morning Canon Moran conducted his services in St Michael’s, addressing his small Protestant congregation, twelve at Holy Communion, eighteen at morning service. He had prepared a sermon about repentance, taking as his text St Luke, 15:32: ‘ … for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.’ But at the last moment he changed his mind and spoke instead of the incident in Kinsella’s Barn nearly two centuries ago. He tried to make the point that one horror should not fuel another, that passing time contained its own forgiveness.

“The man Kinsella was innocent of everything,’ he heard his voice insisting in his church. “He should never have been murdered also.”

Harold would have delighted in the vengeance exacted on an innocent man. Harold wanted to inflict pain, to cause suffering and destruction. The end justified the means for Harold, even if the end was an artificial one, a pettiness grandly dressed up. In his sermon Canon Moran spoke of such matters without mentioning Harold’s name. He spoke of how evil drained people of their humour and compassion, how people pretended even to themselves

He could tell that his parishioners found his sermon odd, and he didn’t blame them. He was confused, and naturally distressed.

There is no happy ending for either character in the story. Perhaps it is captures more than the ambivalence of Irish history, perhaps Canon Moran symbolises the human condition, where endings are not happy but are greater or lesser degrees of sadness.

A couple of dozen photographs in our albums are in the friend’s style – though without his technical ability.  Pictures of gates and billboards sit alongside family holiday photographs.  It was the 1980s, cash being not plentiful, spending money on colour prints that were not records of anything was a pointless indulgence.  Photography had always been about serious matters, family occasions, holidays, visits, important events.

Arriving in my childhood home, the age of computer scanners and printers has brought a new age of old photographs.  Little black and white snaps taken on Brownie or Instamatic cameras, and spending long years tucked deep in albums or in envelopes along with their negative counterparts, have made a comeback.

Hanging on the wall is a picture taken around 1965 or 1966, its existence due to the visit of an aunt from Southampton.  Unlike most family pictures, it is not taken against a background of a wall or the garden, but is in the farmyard.  People do not change much over the years; individuals change, but people generically don’t alter much.  Hairstyles may differ and in years to come the small boy’s shirt and shorts will look quaint, but real changes are man made.

The farm well with its concrete cover lies in the foreground, it was to prove invaluable in the drought of 1976.  Close by is a tall round corrugated iron water tank that was used for the collection of rainwater.  The well water was ‘hard’ and my grandmother would use the ‘soft’ rainwater for the weekly wash.  To the rear lies the barton and the haybarn, the small rectangular bales will forever date the picture to the mid 20th Century.

It would not have occurred to us to have taken photographs of the farmyard simply for having them; why would anyone have wanted such pictures when farms for miles around offered similar scenes every day?  Yet were our daily lives not as important as the people we met every day?

Perhaps someone in Somerset went around taking odd pictures; pictures of well covers, water tanks, bales and barns.  Perhaps someone walked through bartons and cowstalls snapping away without thought for expense or criticIsm.  Perhaps out there on the web somewhere there are  recorded those things that provided a landscape for the lives featured in everyone else’s snaps.

Songs have a power of association; sometimes songs that seemed not so apparent at the time; sometimes songs that you may not have even particularly liked.  Thinking about evocative numbers played by disc jockeys in times past, a string of records came to mind.

Of all The Beatles songs that could have stuck in the memory, most of which would have been more appealing to the ear of a child, it is ‘Eleanor Rigby’ that remains, the sadness of Father McKenzie being poignantly narrated through the radiogram n the living room. The radiogram must have been advanced for its time for it had an FM waveband, not that there was much to listen to on FM apart from the radio conversations of the local police force.

Teenage years were filled with music, BBC Radio 1 was always on.  The Radio 1 daytime playlist was hardly very adventurous, during the daytime it didn’t venture much beyond what was in the charts.  In the course of a day, it would be possible to hear a song a half a dozen times, yet few of them retained a place in the consciousness.  The songs that go with particular places seem odd in retrospect.  Carly Simon’s ‘You’re so vain’ was played at the village youth club.  ‘Sylvia’s Mother’ sung by Doctor Hook conjures pictures of the Devon seaside resort of Westward Ho!  On the other side of the county, the town of Teignmouth is tied to Paul McCartney and Wings singing ‘Listen to what the man says’.  Closer to home, Dire Straits’ ‘Sultans of Swing’ brings memories of Beckett’ pub in Glastonbury.

Student years should have been filled with topographically tied records, but the early 80s seemed filled with instantly forgettable material by bands more concerned with their appearance than their music.  Blondie’s ‘Atomic’ recalls laughter with friends in Cranleigh and Dexy’s Midnight Runners singing ‘Come on Eileen’ goes with a summer in Co Down, but not much else remains.

It’s not that the songs seemed particularly appealing at the time, just that they seemed to have become snagged on the briars of memory.  In retrospect, perhaps the songs that remain the clearest were songs with a strong narrative element, perhaps it was the story that caught the imagination more than the music.  People were still speculating until recently about the identity of Ms Simon’s vain lover.

Sadly, the list stops years back.  Maybe there was not time to listen to music, maybe the music itself lost staying power.

Sweet? Innocent? Probably not. 1975 was not a time of innocence; it was a time of bombs and bullets, but maybe there remained an innocence, a tolerance.

Most communities would have had their ‘Michaels’; their characters equivalent to the character played by John Mills in Ryan’s Daughter. The terms for such people were cruel, inhuman sometimes. The Wikipedia entry for Ryan’s Daughter describes John Mills’ part as that of the ‘village idiot’, a term I have not once heard in 27 years living in Ireland; however, the local terminology would not be much more charitable.

Yet, whatever the terminology, there was a gentle attitude towards those who did not conform to the notional norm. There would have been knowing nods, euphemisms, a generosity of spirit. It may not have been sweet innocence, but nor was it vicious malevolence.

Driving a road far from home one day, I gave a lift to a ‘Michael’, who had been standing at the roadside in the rain, dressed in a shirt and trousers.  For some reason I decided to Google his name a couple of days later. I was astonished when I found it appeared on a string of web pages. Unsecured social network pages had comments about him from a circle of young people; one had taken his photograph with a mobile phone. The comments were on a spectrum from mocking to vicious; there was a nastiness in someone making up a page purporting to be from the man himself, with the sort of comments he might make and a deriding of his mannerisms.

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies would quickly move from fiction to fact if such young people were ever isolated anywhere; when a harmless ‘Michael’ is considered fair sport when there are 101 other attractions, he would be an easy victim in more severe times.

Maybe the RTE man was right, perhaps The Chi Lites sang of sweetness and innocence, perhaps the times were different. Maybe our terms for our ‘Michaels’ lacked the correctness of contemporary phraseology, but it would not have occurred to us to have considered them a target. To have mocked a ‘Michael’ amongst a circle of friends would brought criticisms upon one’s own head – particularly from the girls. Perhaps that is why Goldingesque sentiments can now be expressed; perhaps girls have lost their civilising influence, perhaps that is what has been lost.