A question of riches

A question of riches

It was my first Halloween break from college. I had survived the first six weeks of term and now I was homebound. I fell into my previous routine and spent some of my time helping out in the family bar. It was a nervous time. The regulars did not know quite what to make of me. Could they curse in front of me like they used to do in such an unthinking way? Would I be the same person that they had known for the past six years as I served them drinks at all hours of the day and night? There was a lot of mutual sussing out to do.

At the end of a busy night my parents and I cleaned up the ‘shop’ as my late father insisted on calling it and we sat back to relax and discuss the day’s happenings. Eventually we got around to the subject of my new life as a seminarian in Maynooth. ‘So what are you learning’, I was asked. ‘Well’, I replied, “it’s a bit hard to explain”.

I told them that we were studying philosophy and by way of immediate explanation I said that one part of the course was called metaphysics. That required further explanation. ‘It’s the science of being as being’, I answered, repeating the stock, text-book definition. ‘What else do you study’, my father asked, hoping to move me off what was clearly incomprehensible to him. ‘We do history of philosophy as well,’ I added. On being questioned further as to the content of that, I told my parents that we were currently studying communism. ‘And I thought you went to Maynooth to learn how to say Mass,’ my father said, clearly confused by the strange ‘ologies’ that I was trying to explain to him and their relevance to my prospective life as a priest.

I had a bit of adjusting to do myself during that first term in Maynooth. Though I was clearly enjoying the experience of being at college and living away from home again, it had all been something of a surprise to me as it unfolded. I was astounded at first by the opportunities and the privileges that attending college brought. The amount of free time available to me as a student seemed outrageously generous at first. I had been used to working all hours and all seasons. In student life as I knew it then, I had a mere eighteen forty-minute lectures each week to attend and about six month’s holiday time throughout the year. I could not believe that people lived such charmed lives.

The philosophy that we studied as a prelude to the more religion-oriented theology of later years was certainly abstract at times but we had a very gifted teacher whose stated aim in life was to get us to think. He opened up our minds to questions and to possibilities that we had never entertained before. We were taught to ask questions and to think deeply about life as it manifested itself in the detail of our daily lives. After a few years of philosophy we graduated to theology. We began to study the scriptures and the laws of the church and the history of from where it had all emanated. It could be interesting, depending greatly on the particular teacher or lecturer, but it did not have the explosive power of the initial encounter with people and with theories that questioned everything to the point of absurdity and stripped life back to its bare meaning.

One of the effects of the current upheaval in the economic world is a return to questioning among the most affected. If securities can be so insecure and if banks, once considered solid and safe, are crashing like dominoes, then fundamental questions arise. Even religious ideas like the seven deadly sins get a mention occasionally as the effects of greed, corporate and individual, kick in. The uncertainty of life and of the material world has been highlighted by the sudden change from high economic growth to virtual stagnation. We appear to have gone from boom to bust in record time. The insecurity of it all has sent some people looking for answers to their questions and seeking security elsewhere.

The English poet Philip Larkin wrote a poem called ‘Church-going’. It tells of a visit he makes to a country church. He asks the question, ‘What remains when disbelief has gone?’ He speaks of a hunger within, for meaning and for purpose, that sometimes surfaces in times of crisis like this. The church, he says, is a serious place for serious subjects. It may even be considered, once again, as an alternative source of riches, not of the material kind. Meantime, Larkin writes, ‘It pleases me to stand in silence here; A serious house on serious earth it is,/ In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,/ Are recognised, and robed as destinies./ And that much never can be obsolete,/ Since someone will forever be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious,/ And gravitating with it to this ground,/ Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,/
If only that so many dead lie round’.