Aidan Mathews gives us a series of reflective radio scripts on the Gospel of Mark over twelve months from the RTÉ programme of the same name. He reflects on his faith in a way that is both faithful to his tradition and hopeful that it still provides inspiration twenty-first century Dublin.
224 pp. Veritas Publications. To purchase this book online, go to www.veritas.ie
CONTENTS
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
I was working as part of the radio team on the broadcast of the Midnight Mass (Luke 2:1-20) on Christmas Eve in the Jesuit church in Gardiner Street, Dublin. My dad used to bring me to confession there in the 1960s, when women wore headscarves to protect their hairstyles from the wind and men wore bicycle-clips to protect their trousers from the chain. That was before the present structure of the sacrament of penance died a death because it had ceased to be useful to the community it was intended to serve (the rite of reconciliation, after all, is made for man and not man for the rite of reconciliation). I imagine my father chose Gardiner Street instead of the transept in his own parish out of subliminal spiritual snobbishness, as if an SJ from the Milltown Institute would be more urbanely dialectical than a CC from the Styx. Like most of his generation, Dad combined religiosity with a slight sardonic anticlericalism. Me, I always found Saint Francis Xavier church a warm and welcoming venue in which to whisper my trespasses.
It was warm and welcoming again the night of Christmas Eve, as I climbed the spiral staircase to the choir in the gallery over the West door. In the headphones of my Walkman set, ‘Adeste Fideles’, the recessional hymn that has the ring of a boisterous drinking song, was fading for the bulletin at 1 a.m., and the tension that goes with a live transmission was easing in quick lockstep with it. But the first item in the news hadn’t to do with papal greetings or stranded airplane passengers. Instead, it reported the tragic death of a person who had, it appeared, driven a car into the water at a harbour within walking distance of the city’s brash festivity. Foul play was not suspected. And I suddenly remembered anecdotal word in the late summer of a disabled individual propelling himself in broad daylight off the pier in Dun Laoghaire, for the strongest arms in the world belong to the wheelchair user. ‘Happy Christmas’, I said to the soprano line, shaking hands but thinking of hands shaking, and the sopranos said it back: ‘Happy Christmas to you too.’
It’s almost forty years, that strange, estranging biblical passage of time, since tow American Jews, Paul and Art, sang a definitive rendition of the Christmas carol ‘Silent Night’ from corduroy grooves of an old vinyl LP in my bedroom, a lamenting, lullaby-like rendition against a background of radio break-through, a blend of wireless static and sad soundbites from Vietnam and the rioting ghettoes of the 1960s. The glorious ‘Adeste’ and the sorrowful newscast, up there in the gallery of Gardiner Street church, seemed almost the same for a moment as the Simon and Garfunkel cover from the years of the counter-culture, a contrast amounting to counterpoint: rhe glas versus the grim, life versus death, just as the hymn sheets for the midnight Eucharist had been printed on the back of a parish funeral form.
But to think so may be to mistake, if not altogether to miss, the paschal nature of the birth of Jesus – ‘paschal’, that is, from the Greek verb pascho with its ancient Attic root-work in strickenness and suffering – just as we can miss the incarnational grandeur of the Passion narratives by confusing another Greek term agonia, an athlete’s work-out, with our later English ‘agony’. We call the solstice holy day the Feast of the Incarnation because for those with a high Christology the history of that happening fills and fulfils the heart. The Word has assumed flesh and, in the Greek idiom of Saint John, has pitched his tent among a travelling people. Then again, for those who fear belief lest it turn out in the end to be make-believe, the birth of a baby, even without the legendary apparatus of angels, still calls for a knees-up if not for a genuflection; while for those who risk the peril of mystification in the exploration of mystery, the story of the stable is a creature comfort. In short, the accent has always been on euphoria. Humanists and Hindus join in the song and dance. It’s the season of goodwill because the season itself, the sterile butt of the dead year, is pure spite – which is why, I suppose, we colonised the ancient Roman Saturnalia of late December in the first place, making it, from the fourth century or so, a modern midwinter service-cum-shindig, in much the way that Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, itself a modest encampment in the religious calendar of the house of Jacob, has grown in cultural stature in modern America as a liturgical parallel to Esau’s gentile fiesta.
Now I’m no killjoy. I love Christmas, Christ’s Mass, the critical density of the day that’s in it. I love the hibernatory stupor between Christmas and New Year. I love what the Irish poet Michael Longley once called in a marvellous expression the ‘Great Indoors’, the breast and bib of one’s own fireside, turned away from the threatening world just as South Sea Islanders build their houses with their backs to the ocean. I love the happy maudlin of Christmas memories. Some of my most potent and poignant ones are bound up with small children shifting figures in the crib to make room for Smurfs, Sylvanian families and toy Confederate soldiers. But I know well- or at least I know as well – that the Christmas aesthetic softens steadily into an anaesthetic when its pain is prettified. I know that the crèche in my living room is only a kindergarten, a tutorial in pictures, and that the adult business of incarnation is sitting at an ATM on the street with a Styrofoam cup in his lap, round the corner from where I live, and that the woman on his left-hand side silently withdrawing €100 from her current account is every bit as interesting and gifted and necessitous.
In human terms, in paschal terms, the story of Jesus begins with a terrified teenager birthing onto a futon of straw in a rock cavity amid the incense of the breath of livestock. It begins in Taliban territory, a sectarian state that murders single mothers by stoning them. It begins badly and will end worse – in the public execution of her child as a condemned criminal in a rubbish dump outside the city walls and far away from the world of water sprinklers and microwaves where I move and have my lenient, semi-detached being. It begins with Caesar Augustus, a man who had himself declared a god by acclamation of the Roman senate, and it ends with a queer God who has given us his word that he will enter into the mucous membrane of history in the presence and the person of a speechless human being. From first to last and from start to finish it is a story about the margins and not the mainstream, a story about the wayside and not about the way, a story about the periphery and not about the centre. It is the compass of a flukish, drifting, untrustworthy star and not the co-ordinates of a sensibly stationary one by which rational and enlightened sorts might steer safely. It is, in fact, the yellow star of the scapegoat, the sign of the outsider, the outcast, the outlawed in an Aryan state.
Little wonder then that Marc Chagall, the visionary Jewish painter of the mundane and the matter-of-fact universe should choose to represent the affliction of his folk in studies of the crucifixion, the very ‘disaster’ – the Latin word for a ‘bad star’ that Christians have used to demonise Jews over millenia. Little wonder as well that the Nativity narrative of Luke summons an honour guard of sheer desperadoes – the despised shepherds of inter-testamental Palestine – to visit the puking mite who has been born at the wrong time and in the wrong environment. For this place, this unstable shed, is par excellence a scenario for midwives, yet there are no women present. It is an unescorted birth, labour without amenity. In the same manner and for the same reason, men who are stalwarts in a theatre of atrocity will be absent from the vigil at the cross. The God of the gospels, who is the God of Abraham and the Father of Jesus, affirms life in the real world of horrific reversal, in the upside down of actual calamity. Those who seek to bring Jesus into the world should know beforehand from the example of his mother Maryam that it is work done in darkness, bewilderment and breakdown. And it reaches beyond the recitation of hop-along lyrics on a high holiday to the silence and solitariness of death. We can sift the historicity of these texts all we like, the weave of their traditions and theologies, but we shred their essential witness if we forget that they depict a deity deeply complicit with our nakedness.
Just as the angel Gabriel announces the advent of the Word of God in the person of Jesus to the Virgin Mary, so the same emissary brings the word of God to the prophet Mohammed, syllable by syllable, in the verses of the Koran. Its account of the annunciation concatenates many of the elements in Luke’s narrative while resolutely disavowing the divinity – that ‘true God from true God’ – of the high Christian tradition which Islam would largely oust from its North African enclave. But it strengthens the sense of Mary’s unaccompanied travels ‘to the East’ in a way that reminds me a little of the travail of Hagar, mother of Ishmael, in the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, and it expresses well the fearfulness of birthing without matronly help in Mary’s desire for death as the first contractions come. But her compassionate and merciful God, the shared semitic lord of the three faiths of the family of Abraham, strews ripe dates from a palm tree when she shakes its trunk and a freshwater stream glistens beside her. Like the stone recess of Bethlehem that prefigures the Easter tomb, this later labour of the Virgin occurs, beyond the glance of the great and the good, within the gaze of God. When the handmaid returns after the birth of the prophet Jesus to her own people, they reproach her at the first sight of the infant, and it is the baby in the cradle who in turn rebukes them with articulate speech – ‘I was blessed on the day of my birth and I shall be blessed on the day of my death’ – in a manner that calls to the Christian mind both the premature fluency of the bar-mitzvah boy at age twelve in the miracle story of the seminar in Solomon’s Temple and also summons up the wizened face of the geriatric suckling child, already wise beyond years and eras of mortal time, in so many Renaissance treatments of the theme.
Modernity’s image of the infant combines the scrunched features of a foetus at full term with the age of our species 200,000 years and counting. Our birthrights beckon in the Christ mystery.
CHAPTER THREE
RELIGION AND/OR SPIRITUALITY
When I was a small schoolboy in the 1960s, the opposite of the adjective ‘religious’ was ‘irreligious’. During my early college years in the East European bleakness of the new university at Belfield, the opposite of ‘religious’ altered gradually to ‘nonreligious’. By the time I became a father in the mid-80s, when the birth of my daughter Laura brought me into the world for the first time, it had changed yet again. Now, if you weren’t religious, you were nonetheless spiritual. In fact, if you weren’t religious, you were deeply spiritual. Your spirituality was in inverse ratio to your religiosity. You had the cultural prestige of having cut your own path through the wilderness without any assistance from those awful ordinary Christians who fill the smelly churches with their body odours and their bawling children, let alone the bronchial geriatrics on their walking frames who pass wind during the Eucharistic prayer. If you were on your own, you were out on your own. If you stood outside, you were outstanding. You were, as Sylvia Plath says somewhere, the only vertical in a world of horizontals. You were your own man or woman: independent, individual, autonomous, and, most of all, original.
This binary soundbite – spirituality versus organised religion – is still more or less the semantic situation as I speak. And it isn’t confined to Christians. When I was a student in the States, I used to hear the same argument from secular Jews who were friends of mine. Utterly erudite in their reading and their critical reflection, these postgrads were quite ignorant of their own traditions and often indifferent to them. They neither studied Torah nor attended the synagogue services. Indeed, there was a time – admittedly in a bar over many Hawaiian Anchor Steam beers – when I recited a psalm to one non-practicing mate of mine who had grown up without his Hebrew Bible, and he asked me where I had got such a beautiful poem from. I told him I got it from him, and he should be ashamed, especially since his name was Cohen, the Hebrew word for ‘priest’, a person consecrated for proclamation.
The irony was that my drinking pal knew much more than I did about Anglo-Irish literature – Synge, Swift and Sheridan which is neither here nor there in one sense, but he knew zilch about his own covenant community. He was too busy looking for God out there in the vibratory universe to have realised that God was looking for him down here in the dust and pollen of time, and had already found him and chosen him. He had forgotten, if he ever knew it, that God is not watching from a distance, as that heretical ditty says. God is not the sound of a gong reverberating remotely in inter-galactic space. God is a God of history and a God of human beings, the God of Abraham and Jesus and Mohammed, a God of relationships, a God who is related to us, a God who includes us, all of us, in his/her self-definition, a God who, as the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel says, made men and women because he adores stories. And God comes to us, as I read recently in an article, not as megaphone dogma but incognito, ‘disguised as weekdays’.
‘God comes to us disguised as weekdays.’ I wish I’d had written that phrase. I wish I’d written it because it’s true and good and beautiful and because my possession of it would, as we say in a revealing expression, ‘reflect credit upon me’. I am, you see, a part of my culture and not apart from it, as I used to fancy and to fantasise; and my culture – which is predatory and proprietorial, the lifestyle-with-attitude of the haves in Europe and North America – valorises originality and despises imitation. None of us wants to be a copycat. Each of us wants to be an original. For a writer to be accused of error or bias or obscenity is fine. It may even be a market advantage, if it’s manipulated by the right sales team. But to be accused of plagiarism, of the concealed influence of others in the construction of the free-standing self, is social and professional disaster.
Yet we all know in our fibrillating heart of hearts that none of us is original, not even in our sins. Original sin itself is only the poor imitation of other people, the sum of our desires and our resentments copied from their desires and resentments, for even those things – our needs and our wants – come to us from without and not from within. It is an axiom of advertising that the lives we allegedly lead are frequently lives that we follow. Whether in a state of conflict or community, whether popular or polarised, we are plural creatures before we are singular creations, we are social before we are solitary. We are born from others and we will be buried by others; and in between, others, whether as role models or as rivals, as mentors or as tormentors (and usually as both at the same time), will be the gauntlet and the honour guard of our being in the world.
No wonder Jean Paul Sartre, who wanted all his life to be his own work, could write the bittersweet mantra of the call to individuality: L’enfer, c’est les autres. Hell is other people. Actually, the reverse is the case. There is no human nature outside human culture. Human nature is the product of human culture. Human nature is evolutionary, experimental and ongoing. It is, as Sartre’s sweetheart Simone de Beauvoir remarks in her Second Sex, not a biological process but an historical deed. And just as there is no human nature outside human culture, there is no self outside community. And it’s only when we see this, not from the tragic perspective of a botched shot at personal empowerment, but from the comic or the comical or, best of all, from the comedic point of view, that we realise our real authority begins in the cheerful recognition that all of us, without exception, are karaoke kids.
There was a time when I knew this. Back in my boyhood, I loved being part of a large family. I enjoyed groups as such: gangs, teams, classes, schools, neighbours, relations – the deep, deciduous human ensembles that comprise a life and its little proliferations. At plays and pantomimes I savoured the slow shaping of an audience into a congregation, as the liturgy of the theatre first formed a crowd into a community and then transformed that community into a communion, just as, swaying at the sub-bass speakers of a Grateful Dead concert in the Greek Theatre at Berkeley and staring up at the stub bled face of the late Gerry Garcia, I would later experience a moment of fascistic ecstasy among the counter-cultural disciples of Dionysus.
Mass was another matter. It was a crowd event without the claustrophobia, community without commotion. Between the entrance hymn and the final blessing, between the Come see of the start and the Go tell of the close, I sometimes sensed, although I couldn’t state it, the sanctification of those around me. I had been taught a literalist doctrine of the Eucharist in which the dedicated bread was radioactive with the risen Christ, and it would be decades before I began to understand that what I had loved obscurely in the packed pews of my infancy was the real presence of God in the Body of Christ all around me: in my grandmother who wore dead animals in a stole around her neck; in my sister wiping lipstick from her mouth as she walked to the altar rails for communion; in the kneeling schoolgirls wedging their mini-skirted behinds against the benches in front of me; in the elderly men who were lost to the world in their black missals and white memorial cards; in the pious housekeeper who had clipped a handkerchief to her hair in place of a mislaid mantilla; in the young man at the back of the nave, skipping the sermon for a smoke in the porch and a look at the paper; and in the green, God-given world of the village beyond the bus stop, where the Lord was carried under a canopy among saluting policemen at the summer solstice each year, past Woods’ news agency and Freeney’s sweet shop where a penny coin called a denarius bought a wrapped pellet of bubblegum, and past the Ever Ready garage and Keenan’s haberdashery where my mum bought brown stockings and a girdle, or was it a garter, with hooks and stinging elastic snaps.
That was a long time ago.
The conformist church-going of the 1960s has become the conformist non-church-going of the millennium. I myself abandoned the cult for several years in my early twenties. The telling of stories and the sharing of food, which are the two anthropological aspects of Eucharist, doesn’t always consort with the later teenage years when we want to tell our own story and prepare our own meals. It took time, the endurance and duration of years, to discover slowly that the stories in scripture were an autobiographical archive of my own life, of its fertile swervings and its sterile reversals and of its stricken yet surviving vitality. Besides, my faith had remained infantile while I had become first an adolescent and then an adult. I had not allowed or even encouraged it to grow with me into the mortal complexity of a properly mature existence. Apart from the cultural nostalgia, a homesickness of sorts, which saw me altar serving during a sabbatical in San Francisco in the innocent Indian summer of the years before Aids, when the city was a tent of meeting for men who had been demonized elsewhere and had drifted or been driven there because of its faith in the radiant virtue of tolerance, I went my own way. The glamour of solo flight took over. But it was solo flight from what?
James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins with the magnanimous cadences of the standard mythical recital ‘Once upon a time’ – and it ends in the condensed, clandestine notes of a private diary. But the opposite itinerary – from the isolated ego back to the garrulous capital – is, as we know since the publication of Ulysses in 1922, a more splendidly pedestrian odyssey. For the Holy Ghost descends not as a Palestinian dove but as a Dublin pigeon.
This isn’t to suggest that private prayer is in any sense secondary. Private prayer is as basic to being as are daylight and darkness – or darkness and daylight, to give it the Jewish order. But public worship rests and refreshes our spirituality. It is more than thanksgiving, to God. It is giving thanks that we are a community before we are individuals. We are individuals only because we are a community. In today’s lectionary readings, the Lord calls Samuel through Eli and he calls the disciples through John the Baptist. We are a sodality grounded in tradition and called by it into profound solidarity with our species, in the radical understanding that the New Jerusalem is the ordinary Nazareth of an inexhaustible seven-day wonder: the mundane and modest domain of the seven days of the week.
