Brendan Hoban: Three in one and one in three!!!

Happy New Year and every good wish for 2025.!

Apologies for not getting to send out my columns over the past few weeks. Christmas is that kind of time!

But attached now are the columns from the last 3 weeks Dec. 17th, 24th and 31st. They might help pass the time while we wait for the snow to disappear!

Ireland in the 1980s was not the dark ages                   

Western People 17.12. 2024

It’s not news anymore that religion, particularly the Catholic religion, is now either no news or bad news. That’s obvious in both the general and the particular. 

An example of the first is that, since the recent retirement of Patsy McGarry from the Irish Times, no Irish paper any longer carries a designated religious affairs correspondent. 

An example of the second is that one of the most popular programmes on RTÉ Radio, Liveline, today seems only interested in religion when it affords an opportunity to disparage and disembowel with apparent relish all things Catholic.

There are, I might add, good reasons for both attitudes. 

There’s a declining interest in all things religious and the commercial imperative of sheer survival at a time when newspapers are struggling to cope with the burgeoning influence of a series of modern media makes it good business to give people what they want now. Hence, a gradual ‘dumbing down’ of the more traditional style and content of the Irish Times and the increasing tabloidization of the Irish Independent. 

In the Irish Times, this decline in what were once exceptional standards is reflective of decisions like traditional updates on the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian Church no longer occupying a secure and prominent status and which now seem to be ‘wandering in the desert’ like the Old Testament Israelites of yore in search of a permanent home. The cute bet is against their survival at all. 

The other obvious determining factor underpinning the growing marginalization of religion is the widespread perception (and acceptance) that the Catholic Church is a prevailing negative force in Irish life and a handy obvious target for journalistic shooting practice. If you can’t say something critical about Catholicism and all its works and practices, the prevailing wisdom seems to be, then best to ignore it altogether and hope that it goes away somewhere and sometime soon. 

It often seems now that a veil of insidious and immersive darkness is being drawn over Catholic life which serves as a handy backdrop to advance any thesis that presumes that attitude not just to be true but to be irrefutable. 

A recent example is the new film, Small Things Like These. A rough, very rough translation of a peach of a novel that despite its brevity is beautifully crafted – and attests to a forgotten truth that simplicity in a key element in readability – Claire Keegan’s classic has been mangled into a film that flaunts the past as a place of utter and irredeemable darkness. (And sad indeed to see Cillian Murphy’s popularity as a result of his 2024 Oscar Best Actor Award being used to give such bias such credibility.) But a silver lining to the universal acceptance of that prevailing sense of oppressive darkness in the past is that the past is taking exception to the critique and fighting back. 

That film too has provoked a reaction as fair-minded people are simply asking whether the darkness of the recent past was quite as overwhelming as the film presents. 

No less a figure than Ireland’s foremost historian, Diarmuid Ferriter, has added his authoritative voice to a growing chorus of protest at contriving to misrepresent New Ross in the 1980s as if the depiction of absolute darkness was the defining feature of a time most of us actually remember. Ferriter objects to the presumption in the film of presenting our history as ‘one giant black hole, occasionally interrupted by a lone, bright star’. Strange Things Like These, he writes in the Irish Times, frames the 1980s as ‘an era of unmitigated harshness and cruelty’. Or in Cillian Murphy’s indelicate comment (with the now prescribed expletive that modern sophisticates feel compelled to attach) – ‘like the f******g dark ages compared to now . . . it could be the 1950s in many ways’.

Murphy, of course, is an actor, and actors deal in hyperbole and an enhanced sense of their own importance. Ferriter is a professional historian and historians deal in facts (not fiction). Above all, historians are charged with the responsibility of giving context its due. Thus, Ferriter outlines multiple reasons why Murphy is not, in this instance, ‘at the pictures’ – including what Ferriter calls ‘individual acts of defiance . . . about previously taboo subjects’. He objects to what he calls ‘the embrace of an easier blanket narrative of hell and suffocation’.

In truth, the 1980s was not the dark ages. Most of us remember it and the film, Strange Things Like These, with its unwavering sense of darkness, does not represent it accurately.

(Ferriter’s words found earlier expression in the response of a friend to the depiction of the nun-tyrant: ‘Could they not have found even one nun in New Ross – apart from Sr Mary – who showed some sign of being human’.) 

The truth is that, while not denying that individual members of religious orders perpetrated abuse, there is no explaining away or lessening the reality of what happened and its dreadful repercussions for its victims or that it is rightly demands the ongoing prominence that their stories deserve.

Yet, a further truth is that the vast majority of nuns have being tarred with the same brush even though they lived lives of admirable service: in teaching, in nursing, in care of the poor and in multiple hidden roles of support and kindness to generations of families. 

I sometimes wonder how the hundreds of innocent elderly (and very elderly) nuns who now live in nursing homes see the work of long lifetimes being rubbished (as they themselves often are) by being so often and so casually bracketed with the worse that could be said about them.

Cillian Murphy’s false blanket narrative of the 1980s as the ‘dark ages’ is not just inaccurate but unacceptable.

Christmas is a season when we take stock                   

Western People 24.12.2024

Christmas is coming – in fact it’s almost here – and the big news is that Santa Claus has, if not now, then in the New Year, a gift for everyone in the country, a sparkling new government. Well, maybe not that new and not that sparkling but after a lot of huffing and puffing – real or imagined – Fianna Fáil (FF) and Fine Gael (FG) have made their peace with each other and we are once again more or less where we were. 

There is, someone said once, nothing new under the sun. At least we have a few days to get used to the inevitable – another step in the long slow boil in the on/off courtship of FF and FG, now over a century on the back boiler and gradually making its way into a slow burn of history, a merging if not an amalgamation – as a papal nuncio might contrive it. 

For a while there it looked as if a proposal of ‘a Government of the Left’ might be invented at the last minute to add a bit of Christmas sparkle to the dance but it flattered to deceive as those inveterate campaigners unsurprised us all by taking to the floor in the dance, as Mary Lou would say, of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

The ‘Left Alternative’ was, as everyone knew then and now, just a mere matter of smoke and mirrors. Being there, done that, back to the drawing-board for another five years. 

First there is Christmas to get over. Another predictable season, pickled with its own rituals, its own dance – with its long pattern of Ho! Ho! Ho! and the liturgy of loss and luminosity that creeps up on us at Christmastime and takes us unawares. What’s another year? Another counting of the cost of time drifting past us as memories from the past insist on emerging from the shadows to be lovingly mulled over or to be held at arms’ length, to be enjoyed or to be placated. 

Memories, especially of Christmas past. For me, a never-to-be-forgotten memory of kneeling in the kitchen at home in Ballycastle on Christmas night saying the Rosary. My father telling the beads as I watched him through the rails of a kitchen chair and longed to be old enough to lead my own decade. And going to Mass on Christmas morning, a liturgy that seemed less important than the rush home to see what Santa Claus delivered.

Or in later Christmases walking through the Christmas shoppers and meeting friends and neighbours savouring the hopeful mysteries of a lived life like the birth of a baby born during the year or grieving the loss of a loved one with the difficult memory of an empty chair to recall what was a loving presence but now an overwhelming absence. Picking our way through the bits and pieces of the present moment to try and put some shape on them, to hug them closely or to hold them at arms’ length. 

2024 was the year it was when people fell in love or out of love. When good news of promise brought happy thoughts of hope and expectation that mingled with bad news of that diagnosis that brought people to places they would rather not be. When children came home for the Christmas and when the season was marked by a sense of longing for loved ones as far away as ever in Australia or America. And soon enough the positives and the negatives spill into the perennial post-Christmas diagnosis on how we got over the Christmas. 

As 2025, already a quarter century since the turn of the millennium, beckons us to imagine or wonder what delights or nightmares will pickle the coming of another year, we find ourselves wondering (as we do) about how happy we are.  

There’s something about the Christmas spirit that seems to underline, even presume an expectation of happiness. This is the one time of the year when people sense that they deserve to be happy and when they’re not, the loss is felt all the sharper.

Maybe there is a sense in which we expect too much. The words ‘Happy Christmas’ are used so often that we begin to imagine that everyone has an automatic right to them. The bouncy music, the flashy ads on television, the bright lights in the shops, the lift that so many get at this time of the year, even the store Santa Claus drumming up a bit of business and the irrepressible Rudolph jingling his bells . . . all of that carries us on a great sea of expectation.

The reality is of course that we will be as happy at Christmas as we are at any other time of year. The only difference is that at Christmas we are more aware of how happy or unhappy we are.

There’s a kind of annual stock-taking that we seem compelled to make as the hours are counted down to Christmas midnight. It’s an examination of where we are and how it’s going, a night when the eyes can fill with tears as the memories flood in and the expectations of other years seem to have come if not to nought at least to less than was expected. And we mull over the remains not just of Christmas but of what we have made of our lives.

Reality is always less than it might be. And at Christmas we can find ourselves searching through the bits and pieces that go to make up the lives we have. That’s why so many people buy so many presents on Christmas Eve. That’s why so many who never come near the church for the rest of the year somehow find themselves drifting towards the Church on Christmas night for an annual visit. That’s why so many say that they resent, even hate Christmas.

Wherever you are and whatever space you’re in, can I wish all my readers the happiness you wish yourself this Christmas time.

We can choose between two versions of God              

Western People 31.12.2024

Some weeks ago Catholics celebrated (as we do every year) the Feast of Christ the King. It’s usually on the last Sunday of the Church’s calendar year – or the Sunday before the First Sunday of Advent. It usually falls around the end of November.

Christ the King is not an ancient feast so it even hasn’t age and heritage to commend it. In fact, Pope Pius XI just introduced it in 1925 to remind Christians that their allegiance was to their spiritual ruler in heaven as opposed to earthly supremacy.

However, in the hundred years since then, royalty and kingship seem to have lost their sheen. Even hereditary monarchies have fallen on hard times and those still surviving – as in the UK – are little more than a ceremonial presence on the sidelines of society with little or no political power.

Once royalty mattered. Or were respected. Or even sometimes loved. Not anymore. That brand has lost its substance, not least because of the recent antics of ’royals’.

The rise of democracy, even with all its faults and limitations, has also helped to isolate royalty as a relict of a distant past. The royal dividend now delivers whatever value it retains in attracting tourists or in children’s stories where kings and queens are part of a magic mix of palaces, dungeons, crowns and sceptres – or at least were before Harry Potter upped that particular ante.

So where am I going with this? Let me put my cards on the table here. I’m not gone on celebrating Jesus as a king or on the feast that celebrates his kingship. I think Christ the King sends absolutely the wrong message here and it may be that in present circumstances the theology that underpins it may be a bit suspect as well.

As I understand it, Jesus came among us to reveal God to us. In simple terms to show us what God was like. Philippians 2:5–8 is a key scriptural text, part of which reads: Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. 

The writer, Brian McLaren, points to an apparent discrepancy between God as a Supreme Being ­– meaning almighty, supreme, omnipotent (all powerful), who dominates as tradition has stereotypically represented God the Father, as in full and absolute control – and the image of God represented by Jesus whom we describe as ‘the revelation of God’.

As we know from reading the New Testament, Jesus presented a very different image of God the Father. There is no sign of the Supremacy of God, more obvious in the Old Testament.

On the other hand, the God Jesus reveals (and exemplifies) – who we might call the God of the New Testament – is the very opposite of a king. The image Jesus puts before us seems completely at variance with the image of the God in the Old Testament – a God who dominates, controls, demands and is aggressive, even sometimes violent and warlike.

In a recent article in the Irish Dominican journal, Conversations, John Scally quotes a scripture scholar:

There are six hundred passages of explicit violence in the Hebrew (Old Testament) Bible; one thousand verses where God’s own violent actions of punishment are described; a hundred passages where Yahweh (God) expressly commands another to kill people; and several stories where God kills or tries to kill for no apparent reason.

In comparison, the image of God that Jesus presents to us in the New Testament is very different from the image of God in the Old Testament. The God Jesus presents is the very opposite of a violent and sometimes war-like God. Not a dominating-God even to the extent of physical violence but a servant-God who carries a basin and a towel to wash his disciples feet; not a God who threatens hell-fire and brimstone but a gentle God weeping in compassion for his people.  

It might even be said, as John Scally suggests in the article mentioned above, that the Old Testament God represents a form of aggressive masculinity that perpetuates ‘a toxic masculinity’ that is causing such devastation in our world. The corollary is that the image of God represented by Jesus in the New Testament is a gentler, kinder, more loving, more human, even more feminine God.

Whereas the Old Testament God was one who exuded fear and for whom the fires of hell were held over his people like the sword of Damocles, the New Testament God is one of gentle and loving care who is the bearer of the Good News that our God is a God of love and that we are loved by God beyond all our imagining.

The spiritual writer, the Dominican priest, Donagh O’Shea, wrote recently that, in examining the old Green Catechism many of us learned off by heart in national school, it was found that the word ‘love’ was never mentioned – even once!

Is it any wonder that so many of us have spent so much of our lives in thrall to an Old Testament God submitting us to lifetimes of terror and oppression? And missing out on our New Testament God who represented love and care. God’s love, Donagh O’Shea has written, ‘is not a bounty we have to earn, but a gift  that’s offered to us that’s life-enhancing, liberating and often a sheer joy’.

So, gentle reader, as we look forward to another year, can I leave you with a question to mull over? Is your God the God of the Old Testament or the God of the New?

I wish all my readers health and happiness in 2025.