The power of example

The power of example

Ciaran was a good man. He was a very good man. In fact, he was so possessed of the ideal of goodness that, in the latter years of his teen-hood, he decided to become a priest. His goodness unsullied by the world, he made his unremarkable way through the priest-making factory until he eventually lost his name and became, to all but the initiated few, simply ‘Father’. He was protected from emotional upheaval by a gruff exterior; a shell from under which the soft-belly of his sensitive personality seldom emerged. He clothed himself in the spirit of the age and in the sartorial conventions of the time; black suit, black shoes; clerical stock or waistcoat and white, or in later years yellowing collar, around his bullish neck. It was as if he had been poured into his priestly outfit. He seldom emerged into public gaze without this protective scaffold. It was as if it kept him together. Even when he attended football matches, he kept protocol from under the sweaty, sometimes displaced, dog-collar that, in times of high excitement, swivelled under his swarthy chin and out of line with his Adam’s apple.

He was a good priest. An obedient priest. The people whom he served did not rave about how lovable he was but they recognised integrity and high standards. His manner was forthright and occasionally blunt. This was marked up to his credit when he confronted the British Army during his long tenancy in one of the North’s many cauldrons of conflict during the drawn-out and under-named ‘Troubles’.

Ciaran was never burdened with the clichéd label of ‘popular local curate’. He lived in the shadow of another who enjoyed such enthronement in the hearts of the people. He endured the domestic chaos and confusion that often accompany such a gift or charism and kept the parochial ship afloat at local level; balancing the deficiencies of a chaotic junior curate and an increasingly senile parish priest. His life became the living proof of the old adage that all professions are a conspiracy against the laity. If only they knew the human limitations with which he lived. His inner life and the domestic realities of his own existence often grated, but he allowed the friction to polish rather than to corrode.

Ciaran was a stiff character, after the mould of the age in which he was set. He did not allow alcohol to dissolve his reserve, but he mellowed in the warm glow of friendship. His holidays were taken with annual regularity among his class-fellows but the occasional lay-person was taken into his confidence, only if they had signed up, inadvertently or otherwise, to a set of Northern Catholic, middle-class values. He was self-deprecatory in humour but none the less insightful.

His clerical progress was snail-like but there was some evidence of a luminous trail. He endured the financial strain with the help of his ever-supporting family in the far North, while he hacked his way through the thickets of a more Southerly Ulster terrain.

He was a model of priestly life for me in my most impressionable years. The ‘youth priest’ or the ‘Father Trendies’ of those turbulent times meant little to me. I had skipped the usual teenage experience; going from junior seminary or boarding-school straight into the frenetic and multi-tasking world of commerce. Later as a student-priest I used to visit him in his new parish. He had acquired the requisite number of years of service and had been appointed, in late middle-age, to a part of the locality in which he had long worked and to which history had bequeathed the term ‘Lower’ during a division of parishes in the political past.

Ciaran was never of robust health, though he looked and sounded solid. He was given to a persistent chest complaint that shook him like an erupting volcano at times. He died as a relatively young man. The Bishop visited and preached at his funeral, referring to him as ‘Father Ciaran’ throughout. This struck me as somewhat false. He was not a first-name priest. Parishioners knew him and respected him as ‘Father Surname’ rather than by the first-name conventions of a later, more intimate age, into which he would not have fitted.

Before he died, he attended my ordination, little appreciating, and sadly less informed of the impact he had had on my slowly-emerging sense of self. He was invited to the post-ordination hooley and to the top-table, from which he gave a short and characteristically blunt, humorous and piercing speech. He told me simply, in the full gaze and hearing of an expectedly adoring public at an ordination that, if I lived long enough and behaved myself, that one day, like him, I might be considered worthy enough to be Parish Priest of that part of the once-united parish now known as ‘Lower’.

The pursuit of happiness

The pursuit of happiness

Money does not buy happiness, we are told, but as someone once added, ‘it helps finance the illusion’. Saint Paul reminded us in one of the most misquoted phrases of all time, that ‘love of money is the root of all evil’. The ‘pursuit of happiness’ as it has been phrased in the American constitution has always exercised the minds of humanity and lack of money and all that money can make available to us has commonly been seen as the chief barrier to happiness of life. The illusion is persistent. Money is equated with happiness. The message is that life is a lottery in which it ‘could be you’ and money could make you happy. People glibly speak of having, ‘a right to happiness’ often to cover up their own selfishness and the pain they cause to so many others in pursuing this bogus ‘right’. “As long as you’re happy” has become the mantra of justification for questionable behaviour of all kinds, even when that happiness is bought at the expense of so many others, especially fragile little ones.

We all know stories of individuals and families for whom money did not bring happiness. We have heard the stories of the ‘nouveau riche’, the recently wealthy, who make fools of themselves and bring only ridicule on themselves by their flashiness, shallowness and vulgarity. We have seen the effects of the ‘loads of money’ culture in the night-time faces of local lager louts and in the grainy footage of the security cameras that now necessarily sweep our streets for evidence of crime. The question of how we have been changed as a society by affluence or relative wealth remains to be properly investigated and adequately answered.

The Ireland of the middle decades of the last century has long been held up to ridicule. These social conditions from which we have so recently emerged have provided much fuel for critics, novelists, poets and playwrights. The society of that time has been held up to cruel scrutiny by a generation high on the righteousness that comes with hindsight. There is another side to the story of those times as a look at the crime statistics then and now reveals. Among other things, there existed a richness in the quality of community life back then which is conspicuously missing now. I wonder what judgement will history pass on our time of affluence, our biblical ‘seven years of plenty’ when it is held up to the light of judgement. These times of relative affluence, even as they appear to wane, are certainly preferable to times of poverty. As well as material benefits, many people now have a rich choice of work and career options. Nobody wants to go back to times of restriction and scarcity yet affluence often exacts a price and brings a poverty of a different kind in its wake.

Robert Service in his well known monologue, ‘Dangerous Dan Mc Grew’ has the hero speak of, ‘hunger not of the belly kind that’s banished by bacon and beans,/ but the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means’. The homeless of our own time and place are less likely to be those who do not have houses to live in but rather those who have lost a sense of what ‘home’ once meant. They are people whose lives have disintegrated because they have lost their families or whose families have lost them to the imprisonment of addictions of many kinds. Indeed, they may have the largest of houses or even a choice of houses and locations but no real sense of home.

We have been building and buying houses and neglecting to build homes. We are in pursuit of a happiness that remains elusive as a butterfly and find that we have captured a net full of stresses, anxieties and depression. Children often feel neglected by their busy parents, abandoned by their absent fathers, caught in the emotional crossfire of warring parents. ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Neighbours’ are more likely to be encountered on the television screen than at home or on the street. The luxury of innocence is missing from their upbringing. The symbolic and emotional richness of religious traditions that have been abandoned has not been substituted by anything meaningful, leaving a poverty of meaning and hope, a lack of direction or common purpose that sometimes leads to self-annihilation in suicide, a pollution by pornography and a crisis of identity which leads to fads and aberrations of many kinds.

Any society needs common beliefs, images and stories so as to hold together. Where each person insists on doing his or her own thing; claims everything as their right and nothing as their duty and blames everyone else for their failures, then society suffers. If the sickness which affects communities and society were diagnosed and tackled with the same vigour as the epidemic of Hospital bugs, for example, the results and the causes of the sick society might startle us. We can not continue to shift the responsibility for all that goes wrong in society on to government agencies, to teachers, social workers, nurses or others whose function it has become to pick up the pieces of our often crumbling communities. If we want the right to choose, then we ought to pay for our choices by taking personal responsibility for the effects of bad behaviour and for the fall-out from a consumer culture that ironically may result in eating us up.

Richness and poverty are not only measured in Euro or Dollars. Oscar Wilde defined the cynic as one who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Nothing grows forever and as the economic growth of our time comes to a slow-down we may have only our cultural, community and spiritual resources to fall back on. Like business, we need to diversify to survive; to cultivate wealth that is not of a monetary kind if we are to find an approximation of happiness; a society that holds together and an affluence that is truly sustainable. We often say that our health is our wealth. A healthy community is a not inconsiderable form of wealth too.

It’s a funny old world

It’s a funny old world

The English writer G. K. Chesterton is often credited with the insight that people who stop believing in God do not cease to believe. Take away the supernatural and what you get is the unnatural. He wrote to the effect that those who no longer believe in something usually end up believing in anything and tolerating just about everything. He was speaking from experience as he had dabbled in the occult as a young man before settling into orthodox Christianity. Tolerance, he claimed, is the virtue of those who do not believe anything.

On browsing the bookshelves marked Self-Help in local bookstores, any observer can get a sample of the latest, most faddish therapies or the most popular gurus of the moment. It is curious that as some people have abandoned regular church-going and the practice of pious devotions, sales of candles have increased. As churches abandoned real wax candles for the fake, push-button, electrical variety, many people have turned their window-sills and shelves into veritable candle-racks. The use of candles, incense sticks and aromatic oils has made some homes look and smell like the local chapel following Sunday evening Benediction.

A glance through the columns of a local newspaper will assure you that superstitions of all kinds and magic incantations that are to be said ritually, are still alive, thriving in the spiritual vacuum. Some gullible people put their trust in lucky numbers to win the Lotto for them, just as others pay out good money to fortune tellers in a bid to put shape on their uncertain future. Even the ghosts of darker days have not quite gone away. Priests are regularly called to ‘bless the house for me sometime’ because the occupants are experiencing some kind of uncomfortable presence. It reminds me of the Connemara woman who replied to an anthropologist interviewer that she did not believe in fairies. She went on to add that just because she did not believe in them did not mean that ‘they aren’t there’.

Though heaven and hell have largely disappeared from the public consciousness, beginning way back in the 1960s, according to another English writer, David Lodge, the convicted criminals that tabloid newspapers love to parade are often consigned to ‘rot in hell’ by irate and presumably largely unbelieving readers. We have ‘neighbours from hell’ to remind us that hell can begin on earth and ‘holidays from hell’ to remind us that expectations of ‘paradise’ do not always live up to their glossy-brochured promises. The inheritance of Paradise as a reward for a life well lived has been replaced by the prospect of an expensive fortnight in Paradise Hotel or on Paradise Island in the present, as soon as the holidays can be lined up. The all-knowing Internet offers no less than twenty million ‘hits’ or pages of information that link the words paradise and holiday in their promotional material. The really virtuous, the supremely talented or the super-rich can perhaps look forward to a holiday home there or to retirement in such an earthly Eden. The reality seldom lives up to the promotional hype and the nearest we get to an earthly paradise is often found nearer home.

The drama of final judgement or saving one’s soul no longer troubles even the most sensitive of minds yet our society has never been more condemnatory or judgemental. We have high-cost tribunals that run for decades and investigative journalists shining the glaring light of judgement on every aspect of an offender’s life. We are encouraged to be non-judgemental in our approach to the trials and difficulties of life, even as so many people slump in front of ‘Reality Television’ and use their mobile telephones to pass sentence and judgement on the self-worshipping participants. The thumb signal that once determined the fate of Roman gladiators now determines the fate of those who take to the public stage, not with a traditional thumbs-down sign but with the button-depressing mechanics of text messaging.

Relics of the saints have been replaced by show business or football memorabilia as contact is sought with the alternative gods of celebrity culture. There is no shortage of adoring followers who are willing to paint, pierce or parade themselves in the team colours or with the logo of the sect. If you get tired of offering adulation to others, then you will be counselled to believe in yourself and all things will become possible. As Margaret, Lady Thatcher said wistfully on her unwilling way out of Downing Street and high office, “It’s a funny old world”.

The pursuit of happiness

The pursuit of happiness

Money does not buy happiness, we are told, but as someone once added, ‘it helps finance the illusion’. Saint Paul reminded us in one of the most misquoted phrases of all time, that ‘love of money is the root of all evil’. The ‘pursuit of happiness’ as it has been phrased in the American constitution has always exercised the minds of humanity and lack of money and all that money can make available to us has commonly been seen as the chief barrier to happiness of life. The illusion is persistent. Money is equated with happiness. The message is that life is a lottery in which it ‘could be you’ and money could make you happy. People glibly speak of having, ‘a right to happiness’ often to cover up their own selfishness and the pain they cause to so many others in pursuing this bogus ‘right’. “As long as you’re happy” has become the mantra of justification for questionable behaviour of all kinds, even when that happiness is bought at the expense of so many others, especially fragile little ones.

We all know stories of individuals and families for whom money did not bring happiness. We have heard the stories of the ‘nouveau riche’, the recently wealthy, who make fools of themselves and bring only ridicule on themselves by their flashiness, shallowness and vulgarity. We have seen the effects of the ‘loads of money’ culture in the night-time faces of local lager louts and in the grainy footage of the security cameras that now necessarily sweep our streets for evidence of crime. The question of how we have been changed as a society by affluence or relative wealth remains to be properly investigated and adequately answered.

The Ireland of the middle decades of the last century has long been held up to ridicule. These social conditions from which we have so recently emerged have provided much fuel for critics, novelists, poets and playwrights. The society of that time has been held up to cruel scrutiny by a generation high on the righteousness that comes with hindsight. There is another side to the story of those times as a look at the crime statistics then and now reveals. Among other things, there existed a richness in the quality of community life back then which is conspicuously missing now. I wonder what judgement will history pass on our time of affluence, our biblical ‘seven years of plenty’ when it is held up to the light of judgement. These times of relative affluence, even as they appear to wane, are certainly preferable to times of poverty. As well as material benefits, many people now have a rich choice of work and career options. Nobody wants to go back to times of restriction and scarcity yet affluence often exacts a price and brings a poverty of a different kind in its wake.

Robert Service in his well known monologue, ‘Dangerous Dan Mc Grew’ has the hero speak of, ‘hunger not of the belly kind that’s banished by bacon and beans,/ but the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means’. The homeless of our own time and place are less likely to be those who do not have houses to live in but rather those who have lost a sense of what ‘home’ once meant. They are people whose lives have disintegrated because they have lost their families or whose families have lost them to the imprisonment of addictions of many kinds. Indeed, they may have the largest of houses or even a choice of houses and locations but no real sense of home.

We have been building and buying houses and neglecting to build homes. We are in pursuit of a happiness that remains elusive as a butterfly and find that we have captured a net full of stresses, anxieties and depression. Children often feel neglected by their busy parents, abandoned by their absent fathers, caught in the emotional crossfire of warring parents. ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Neighbours’ are more likely to be encountered on the television screen than at home or on the street. The luxury of innocence is missing from their upbringing. The symbolic and emotional richness of religious traditions that have been abandoned has not been substituted by anything meaningful, leaving a poverty of meaning and hope, a lack of direction or common purpose that sometimes leads to self-annihilation in suicide, a pollution by pornography and a crisis of identity which leads to fads and aberrations of many kinds.

Any society needs common beliefs, images and stories so as to hold together. Where each person insists on doing his or her own thing; claims everything as their right and nothing as their duty and blames everyone else for their failures, then society suffers. If the sickness which affects communities and society were diagnosed and tackled with the same vigour as the epidemic of Hospital bugs, for example, the results and the causes of the sick society might startle us. We can not continue to shift the responsibility for all that goes wrong in society on to government agencies, to teachers, social workers, nurses or others whose function it has become to pick up the pieces of our often crumbling communities. If we want the right to choose, then we ought to pay for our choices by taking personal responsibility for the effects of bad behaviour and for the fall-out from a consumer culture that ironically may result in eating us up.

Richness and poverty are not only measured in Euro or Dollars. Oscar Wilde defined the cynic as one who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Nothing grows forever and as the economic growth of our time comes to a slow-down we may have only our cultural, community and spiritual resources to fall back on. Like business, we need to diversify to survive; to cultivate wealth that is not of a monetary kind if we are to find an approximation of happiness; a society that holds together and an affluence that is truly sustainable. We often say that our health is our wealth. A healthy community is a not inconsiderable form of wealth too.

Content to be solitary

Sir Thomas More, now a canonised Saint, spent the last months of his life imprisoned in the Tower of London. His adult life had been spent immersed in the affairs of the world. It was an affair of a different kind that led him to famously clash with his master, King Henry VIII, on a matter of conscience. As a prisoner, he made good use of his time preparing for the inevitable, for he was other-worldly too. In a ‘Godly Meditation’ written while he was a prisoner in the Tower in 1534, he wrote, ‘Give me the grace, good God, to set the world at naught; to set my mind fast upon thee and not to hang upon the blast of men’s mouths; to be content to be solitary; not to long for worldly company; little and little utterly to cast off the world and rid my mind of all the business thereof; not to hear of any worldly things but that the hearing of worldly phantasies may be to me displeasant’.

With these sentiments in mind I took off recently for my annual retreat from the ‘business’ and ‘phantasies’ of the world. I am generally content to be solitary but it is much easier to enjoy the solitary life when the surroundings are different, pleasant and stimulating. For that reason, I took myself out from under the ever-present blanket of cloud that is the Irish sky this summer and I holed-up on the side of a mountain in Austria. The ‘Sound of Music’ scenery, the long walks and the opportunities for exercise made the likelihood of getting ‘cabin-fever’ a little less. The prospect of even a little sunshine lifted the veil from my heart.

I took a room with a small balcony within which I could try to escape “the blast of men’s mouths”. These quarters became my ‘cell’ for the week. As wise old Abba Moses told his monks, ‘when you remain alone and in quiet, your cell will teach you everything’. My balcony, about two metres by one metre, was carpeted with artificial ‘graveyard’ grass; an unintentional reminder of mortality.

The grass on the slopes of the needle-sharp mountains is the ‘real thing’ and this time of year, it is being harvested as hay for winter fodder. This harvest-time is marked by community celebrations in which even the tractors go in procession, decked out and decorated with garlands and ribbons. The mountains dominate everything in the valley, including, it seems, the architecture and even everyday artefacts. The houses are tall and steep-roofed, and make good use of the wood from the pointed, tall pine trees in the local forests. The church steeple is one of the tallest, finest, thinnest steeples I have ever seen; Even the beer-glasses are tall and fine. The valley is a little like an outdoor Gothic cathedral, drawing the eye ever upward and skyward, if you can take your gaze off the window-boxes and overhanging profusions of flowers.

At ten to nine in the morning, the sun has climbed a mountain-side and makes its triumphant appearance over the summit on the Eastern skyline. The psalm that I am reading from my Breviary describes the sun, in a most memorable image, as, ‘coming forth like a bridegroom coming from his tent’. The clouds give way eventually and the mist patches dissolve. Looking out from the side of the valley, it is possible for a while to see clouds above and below; to live with one’s head in the clouds; to shake hands with a passing cotton-wool cumulus. The bells of the local Catholic Church ring out a rhythm to the day and from its ancient tower, they call attention to its timeless, tabernacled, tenant. In my cell I have established a pattern to the day; a routine that helps one day roll into another. This is a neat and ordered environment, conducive to putting shape on the dis-ordered interior life. Mornings are for matters of the mind; afternoons for exercise and exploration and evenings are for rest and absorption. I have managed to make my usual world ‘go away’ and I remain ‘content to be solitary’ in a strange place.

It is a different world and a long time to that of London Tower in 1534 and the circumstances in which More found himself. The only constant is the struggle of the human heart to replace the phantasies of fallen human nature with something better, something more redeemed. In another meditation, written around the same time called ‘A Devout Prayer’, Sir Thomas used an image that had become ever too familiar to him. He prayed that his ‘lukewarm fashion or rather key-cold manner of meditation’ might be replaced by ‘warmth, delight and quickness’ of spirit. His involuntary retreat from the world and the wisdom of his cell had clarified for him the inner dispositions or ‘minds’ that were most to be desired; ‘more’, he said, ‘to be treasured’ than all ‘the treasure of princes and kings’… ‘were it gathered and laid together all upon one heap’.

Getting to know you

In 1992 I began a course of study in Dublin that lasted three years. As with many life-events I did not expect the path of my existence to be changed by it. The course was a challenging one that involved staying and studying in Dublin for three summers and travelling to seminars twice a week there for the three-year duration. It has been said that friendships formed in adversity are strengthened by common experience and struggle. Time takes its toll on all friendships but I have remained in close contact with one of my friends from those days. Out of the dozen or so participants in the course, I became close to one of the group who was introduced to me as Hyacinth.

Hyacinth turned out to be male and African. In the course of our friendship we have discussed many differences and some similarities in our cultures and experiences. As the years went by and we resumed our usual duties as priests in our respective settings, I came to know some of his colleagues and more recently, his family. About ten years ago we began an arrangement that allowed a priest from his group to study in Dublin for a two-year spell and work alongside Irish priests including myself. Over the intervening years, six priests have spent time living and working in an Irish parish setting. We have shared a house; cooperated in pastoral assignments; discussed the ways of the world over many meals and began to see the same world through each other’s eyes.

There were periods of adjustment for both of us. The African ‘brothers’ had to adjust to the Irish weather and to the seasonal and erratic nature of our climate. The ‘rainy season’ in Ireland lasts rather longer than in Africa. Our ways of communicating can often differ considerably. The Nigerians, in this case, are given to up-front, direct statement. The Irish are known historically for giftedness with language, to the point where it is hard to pin down what exactly we are saying - or omitting. There is also the occasional problem of local usage, slang and accent. Hiberno-English is a very different language from the English of the text-book. ‘No bother’ needs translation just as much as the African, ‘no, please, thank-you’. I have had to learn the difference between ‘lettuce’ and ‘letters’ in African pronunciation and to cut out colloquial expressions that could be potentially misleading, like saying ‘this weather’ when I mean ‘now’.

The liturgy and pastoral practice of the Irish are foreign to our visitors despite the genesis of their faith in the work of Irish missionaries. The contemporary Western disdain for religion and embarrassment in its practice is in sharp contrast with the unashamedly religious outlook of other generations of our own and of the present populations of other parts and religions of our world. Gaelic sports need some explanation to nations that have been reared on soccer as does our Irish preoccupation with English League Football and our simultaneous disdain for the English National team. The central place of alcohol in our diet and in our social life is not shared by most Africans. Our villages are often centred on pubs while their social life revolves around the ties of family and community and the mutual obligations that bind them. Mobile telephones could have been invented for Nigerians. The constant need for connectedness and networking leaves them vulnerable to the charms of telecommunications companies.

‘The white man has the watch and the African has time’. Time is elastic for many of the Nigerians that I have worked with. It’s not an unusual trait to find that time and precision are mutual opposites in some people’s minds. It is only noteworthy when it affects everybody in an ethnic group. Our own more senior country relatives thought not in hours or days but in seasons. Contemporary western living has taught us the value of efficiency and productivity and we have collectively become time-conscious to a degree that can be unsettling. There is something of a parting of the ways between the Western mindset and that of the African, or those of developing continents, when it comes to how we use our time. The modern mindset of constant self-critical analysis; the search for excellence and best practice that we associate with the West are often lost on other cultures.

The foreign priests I have worked with see and deplore our waste and extravagance. They decry the growing coarseness of our culture and the neglect of community and family responsibilities. At worst, immigrants from other cultures treat the West as a giant honey-pot from which they can draw at will. This can have the effect of inciting resentment when a people’s hospitality is thought to be abused or when their generosity or credulity is stretched. Overall, however, I found that the non-nationals I met and worked with have been honourable and responsible. As we shared the experiences of growing up in our respective cultures it became apparent to me that many of the same social dynamics occur in all traditional societies. There is obviously much more that unites us than divides us. Issues around immigration, development aid and political malpractice will always be problematic for societies that are affected. The way forward is not one of insult or exclusion but of carefully and respectfully regulated mutual relations.

Getting to know you

Getting to know you

In 1992 I began a course of study in Dublin that lasted three years. As with many life-events I did not expect the path of my existence to be changed by it. The course was a challenging one that involved staying and studying in Dublin for three summers and travelling to seminars twice a week there for the three-year duration. It has been said that friendships formed in adversity are strengthened by common experience and struggle. Time takes its toll on all friendships but I have remained in close contact with one of my friends from those days. Out of the dozen or so participants in the course, I became close to one of the group who was introduced to me as Hyacinth.

Hyacinth turned out to be male and African. In the course of our friendship we have discussed many differences and some similarities in our cultures and experiences. As the years went by and we resumed our usual duties as priests in our respective settings, I came to know some of his colleagues and more recently, his family. About ten years ago we began an arrangement that allowed a priest from his group to study in Dublin for a two-year spell and work alongside Irish priests including myself. Over the intervening years, six priests have spent time living and working in an Irish parish setting. We have shared a house; cooperated in pastoral assignments; discussed the ways of the world over many meals and began to see the same world through each other’s eyes.

There were periods of adjustment for both of us. The African ‘brothers’ had to adjust to the Irish weather and to the seasonal and erratic nature of our climate. The ‘rainy season’ in Ireland lasts rather longer than in Africa. Our ways of communicating can often differ considerably. The Nigerians, in this case, are given to up-front, direct statement. The Irish are known historically for giftedness with language, to the point where it is hard to pin down what exactly we are saying - or omitting. There is also the occasional problem of local usage, slang and accent. Hiberno-English is a very different language from the English of the text-book. ‘No bother’ needs translation just as much as the African, ‘no, please, thank-you’. I have had to learn the difference between ‘lettuce’ and ‘letters’ in African pronunciation and to cut out colloquial expressions that could be potentially misleading, like saying ‘this weather’ when I mean ‘now’.

The liturgy and pastoral practice of the Irish are foreign to our visitors despite the genesis of their faith in the work of Irish missionaries. The contemporary Western disdain for religion and embarrassment in its practice is in sharp contrast with the unashamedly religious outlook of other generations of our own and of the present populations of other parts and religions of our world. Gaelic sports need some explanation to nations that have been reared on soccer as does our Irish preoccupation with English League Football and our simultaneous disdain for the English National team. The central place of alcohol in our diet and in our social life is not shared by most Africans. Our villages are often centred on pubs while their social life revolves around the ties of family and community and the mutual obligations that bind them. Mobile telephones could have been invented for Nigerians. The constant need for connectedness and networking leaves them vulnerable to the charms of telecommunications companies.

‘The white man has the watch and the African has time’. Time is elastic for many of the Nigerians that I have worked with. It’s not an unusual trait to find that time and precision are mutual opposites in some people’s minds. It is only noteworthy when it affects everybody in an ethnic group. Our own more senior country relatives thought not in hours or days but in seasons. Contemporary western living has taught us the value of efficiency and productivity and we have collectively become time-conscious to a degree that can be unsettling. There is something of a parting of the ways between the Western mindset and that of the African, or those of developing continents, when it comes to how we use our time. The modern mindset of constant self-critical analysis; the search for excellence and best practice that we associate with the West are often lost on other cultures.

The foreign priests I have worked with see and deplore our waste and extravagance. They decry the growing coarseness of our culture and the neglect of community and family responsibilities. At worst, immigrants from other cultures treat the West as a giant honey-pot from which they can draw at will. This can have the effect of inciting resentment when a people’s hospitality is thought to be abused or when their generosity or credulity is stretched.

Overall, however, I found that the non-nationals I met and worked with have been honourable and responsible. As we shared the experiences of growing up in our respective cultures it became apparent to me that many of the same social dynamics occur in all traditional societies. There is obviously much more that unites us than divides us. Issues around immigration, development aid and political malpractice will always be problematic for societies that are affected. The way forward is not one of insult or exclusion but of carefully and respectfully regulated mutual relations.