For the fainthearted . . .

Sermon for Sunday, 5th September 2010 (14th Sunday after Trinity/Proper 18)

“Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand.” Jeremiah 18:6

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.…

Gulls attack cat and other stories

Holidaying in the Channel Islands in 1997, the evening news was enlightening. Having flown from Belfast, where the process of members of the opposing communities agreeing not to kill each other was proceeding at snail-like pace, the Channel Islands’ local news headline that someone had been threatened with a knife outside of a nightclub was strangely reassuring. Not that someone had been killed, or injured or attacked; the fact that someone had been threatened merited inclusion at the top of a bulletin. Imagine living in a community so safe that…

Being British

Awareness of being on a boat is undeniable; the walls and floors are vibrating as the engines of the elderly Stena vessel power us across the Irish Sea from Pembrokeshire to Co Wexford; a wake runs from the stern in the unusually calm waters. The ferry spends most of its time neither in one place or the other; a self-enclosed world where there is nothing to do except wait.

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

“You can’t not…

Back to school fear

There can be no moment more melancholic than the last day of the summer holidays when you are twelve years old and must the next day begin a new year at a new secondary school. The sick feeling at the pit of the stomach recurs like those nightmares where one is sitting in an examination hall with a paper file with questions on subjects never studied. The prospect loomed like a dark cloud, overshadowing the whole summer.

Wandering the cemetery today, swapping memories with those whose names filled the dramatis…

No turning back

Looking homewards from English shores, Ireland still seems a very different place, still outside of European liberal secularism, still not fully engaged with an Enlightenment worldview, still unprepared to contemplate a separation of church and state, still unprepared to accept a desacralisation of society.

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…

Ode to hope

A serendipitous moment – flicking through the radio channels on the road over Salisbury Plain, an untypical voice appears on BBC Radio 3, radical singer Billy Bragg talking about Beethoven’s musical setting of Frederich Schiller’s 1785 poem ‘Ode to joy’. The tale of the music drew upon the hopes of the French and American Revolutions, upon beliefs in human equality, upon a vision of the world very different from that which prevailed. Beethoven, Bragg explained, wrote from a feeling of disappointment that such hopes would not be fulfilled in his…

Moran’s endings

“That book is like “The Lord of the Rings”, it has a sad ending”.

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…

Pictures of record

A friend from the ’80s was a good amateur photographer (good to the point where he had exhibitions); he took photographs of unlikely things, interesting things. Driving along the Bangor to Belfast dual carriageway one morning, he stopped to photograph the side of a barn, upon which was painted Bible verse. The prophecy of the forthcoming judgment was juxtaposed with dark thunder clouds in the Ulster sky to the west.

A couple of dozen photographs in our albums are in the friend’s style – though without his technical ability. Pictures…

Snagging tunes

For the man telling the story the sound of Chuck Berry’s ‘No particular place to go’ evoked memories of an isolation ward in a London hospital in the early 1960s. He recalled the nurses bringing him newspapers and cigarettes and running bets for him.

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…

No time for Michael, now

In the last light of a late August evening, a full moon hung low in the sky and the presenter on RTE Radio 1 played a selection of mellow music. Announcing that he was going to play some ‘smooth soul’, he introduced two songs from The Chi Lites, the Chicago band he suggested had more in common with their Detroit and Philadelphia counterparts than with the other soul bands from that city, which he felt were much more ‘edgy’. ‘It’s sweet; it’s innocent – and it’s good for you’ was…