Séamus Ahearne – ADVENT TIMES:

These are interesting days. Advent is such an evocative time if it isn’t taken over by the razzmatazz of Christmas. I do wish that we could all open our Advent Calendars and discover the God-moments of life. The little hidden treasures. The whispers of grace. We can create our own windows in that calendar. For us all, we get crowded out with so much going on.

Here we have had ten funerals for this week. Those funerals consume us totally and leave little space for patient reflection. I have to go back to that window! But each person and each family deserve our full attention. I remember a bishop at one time, trying to comfort us by saying, you don’t have to get involved! He was trying to help us but in fact, he was being totally unpastoral, and was neglecting how the Word has to become Flesh, at those times.

And then there is the little job of arranging interviews for a new Principal in one of our schools. Very difficult and fraught. As Church, we do give so much time to our schools and rightly so. It was special to listen to all the children for their Christmas Carols. They sing so well. They sing all the words with such heart and conviction. The Churches were packed for those occasions. I hope something of the words seep into their souls. We also had our own Carols and Reconciliation. We do a very simple version. The ‘sins’ vanish into the Cloud! But Confession isn’t really about sin… Now is it? Our old idea of Confession contaminated our faith experience.

CHRISTMAS TIMES:

Age must be addling my brain. I wander back to the past. To living on Lord Waterford’s Estate. In Curraghmore. To the smell of timber. To being collected by Charlie Graham (in the Estate’s minibus) while he was drunk. To Charlie rushing into the house as he brought us back from Midnight Mass. To Charlie (being helpful) trying to light the Tilly Lamp. To the yearly visit by the Lord and Lady with a meat parcel.

To going along for the following morning Mass with Fr Kiely and being the only Altar boy, while trying to say all those Latin responses. To that awesome sense of the crib and the wonder of it all. To the wish to give that poor child a gift. To the awaited presents; a cowboy hat and gun. To the death of Jimmy Keyes – our friend and a shepherd. He died on Christmas Day (how appropriate) and he was a gentleman. He too knew his sheep. To that earlier time when he played the box up in Tower Bill on my Ordination night. To the memories of the locals and the camaraderie among us all. To the trip up to Biddy (my Godmother) and her apple tart. To the overall half remembered decorations and the holly. To the nostalgia that something very mysterious was happening, and no-one could find the words for it all. There was a quietness surrounding everything. It was a taste of awe.

THE CHILD GOT IT RIGHT: THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES.

It is hilarious that Trump would be suing anyone for saying something about him. Could Rob Reiner sue, I wonder? I know he is dead. I expect the BBC can make a proper show of him in court when all the related language and activity of Trump is  shown around that 6^th January and the follow on to the Capitol. But then again, we should be feeling sorry for the man, who is so unaware of his own stupidity. But then he may be very unwell. The kettle and the pot comes to mind; when he dismisses Joe Biden’s cognitive health. Might his Presidential Walk of Fame, with those plaques of his predecessors, provide an opportunity to sue the Donald? Poor Trump may be an unbeliever in climate change, but he is definitely a severe pollutant to the body politic. I think Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert (late night TV Shows in America) get him right.

A WRITER ON WRITERS:

John Carey died. He was 91. He was an outstanding literary critic. His language was fluent. His wording was acerbic. His asides were playful. He had his biases and was very critical of many writers who had emerged from the elite. Even our own Yeats was considered to be rather useless at school, incapable of spelling and was rather sickly, in being besotted with Maud Gonne. John Carey was an outsider/insider.

He didn’t come from the Literary Establishment but in many ways he became just that. Carey too was a distraction. His own eloquence took over. He was always worth reading. His own writing was mesmeric. The books he reviewed almost became only an excuse for John to express himself. Often, the reviewed book was a side issue, which gave us an opportunity to listen to the music of Carey’s language. The book became irrelevant! It was never important to agree with the critic’s view. All that mattered was the lyricism of the language. He could make many of us very jealous.

THE NEWS:

It is Christmas time. It is sacred. Gaza has disappeared from our News. But the people are still living the consequences of the war. Trump hasn’t won a peace there. He did force the beginnings of something. Russia continue to bombard the Ukraine. Europe can’t agree on those frozen assets. The craziness of guns and stabbings are commonplace. The queues stretch for ages at the Capuchin Day Centre. The SVDP is run ragged. Jim Gavin and his money owed to the renter takes over some of the News. The Report has arrived, and there is noise about who knew what, and when. Was Jim ever a suitable candidate, surely is the more basic question? Catherine Connolly could demolish Jim with a few sentences. Heather Humphreys seemed lovely, but wasn’t a real candidate. Mairéad McGuinness was missed. The Rohingya Refugee camp is the biggest in the world. They escaped from Myanmar and now are in Cox Bazar in Bangladesh. Our world is sore. We are blessed here. But nonetheless so much whinging goes on. And those foolish people hang up flags in the middle of the night. Overall the question is for everyone and everywhere: Do they know it’s Christmas?   (From Band Aid).  

Seamus Ahearne osa 19^th December 25.

PS. I rather like this Reflection.

Courageous Vulnerability

I am a Christian because of women who said yes.

—Rachel Held Evans, Wholehearted Faith

Public theologian Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) reflects on how Mary’s yes was pivotal to the Incarnation.

I am more aware than ever of the startling and profound reality that I am a Christian not because of anything I’ve done but because a teenage girl living in occupied Palestine at one of the most dangerous moments in history said yes—yes to God, yes to a wholehearted call she could not possibly understand, yes to vulnerability in the face of societal judgment, yes to the considerable risk of pregnancy and childbirth… yes to a vision for herself and her little boy of a mission that would bring down rulers and lift up the humble, that would turn away the rich and fill the hungry with good things, that would scatter the proud and gather the lowly [see Luke 1:51–53], yes to a life that came with no guarantee of her safety or her son’s.  

By becoming human, God encourages us to honour the vulnerability of our own lives: 

It is nearly impossible to believe: God shrinking down to the size of a zygote, implanted in the soft lining of a woman’s womb… God inching down the birth canal and entering this world covered in blood, perhaps into the steady, waiting arms of a midwife. God crying out in hunger. God reaching for his mother’s breasts. God totally relaxed, eyes closed, his chubby little arms raised over his head in a posture of complete trust. God resting in his mother’s lap…

I cannot entirely make sense of the storyline: God trusted God’s very self, totally and completely and in full bodily form, to the care of a woman. God needed women for survival. Before Jesus fed us with the bread and the wine, the body and the blood, Jesus himself needed to be fed, by a woman. He needed a woman to say: “This is my body, given for you.”…  

To understand Mary’s humanity and her central role in Jesus’s story is to remind ourselves of the true miracle of the Incarnation—and that is the core Christian conviction that God is with us, plain old ordinary us. God is with us in our fears and in our pain, in our morning sickness and in our ear infections, in our refugee crises and in our endurance of Empire, in smelly barns and unimpressive backwater towns, in the labour pains of a new mother and in the cries of a tiny infant. In all these things, God is with us—and God is for us. And through Mary’s example, God invites us to take the risk of love—even though it undoubtedly opens us up to the possibility of getting hurt, being scared, and feeling disappointed.