The Van Gogh experience

When the infant child of Theodorus Van Gogh was born in the Netherlands in 1853, he was given the name Vincent. It was a name that had been used in the family for several generations. His grandfather was called Vincent and he had an uncle called Vincent. As was traditional in Irish society at the time, the first-born son was called after his paternal grandfather. The name Vincent had, however, been given to a child that had been still-born, exactly a year before. It was not uncommon then, in Ireland, or apparently in the Netherlands, to re-use the names of children who had died as infants. Vincent’s family had a long tradition of artists and clergymen. His father was a Minister in the Dutch Reformed Church and he himself was to spend a period as a Church Minister in a poor mining district.

It has been told that Vincent’s still-born older brother was buried near to his father’s church and given a memorial stone. It read simply that here had been laid the body of Vincent Van Gogh. The story relates how Vincent used to pass by and read the stone with these or similar words carved on it every time he attended his father’s church. It apparently had a profoundly unsettling effect on the youthful Vincent. He inwardly shuddered as he read the stone-carved words that appeared to announce his fate. The experience of seeing one’s own name in such a context is sometimes called the ‘Van Gogh experience’.

I inherited my now late uncle’s name and I have only to go to Kilcurry graveyard to have my own Van Gogh experience and see my name on a gravestone. Recently, however, I had the pleasant experience of blessing a new extension to one of our local Primary Schools and part of the celebrations included the unveiling of a marble stone into which my name had been carved as having blessed the building. It was not an unsettling experience but I found it thought-provoking to think that someone had carved my name in such a permanent manner, and that I would see, each time I pass by it in the future.

These broody thoughts were perhaps provoked by the themes of the season. My priestly preoccupations this time of year revolve around the celebration of All Saints and All Souls Days and the celebration of Hallow-E’en that precedes them. November is remembrance time in the rhythm of the Church Year. Our festivals and rituals are not a morbid remembering but rather a wholesome way of dealing with the realities of transient life so that we can return to life with greater depth and intensity.

The turning back of the clock to ‘winter-time’ and the resulting darker evenings provide their own cue to such thoughts of transience. Outside, the first sting of frost and the drift of fallen leaves into sheltered corners are nature’s way of reminding us of the perennial cycle of life and death. The decay of another year is signalled by the dropping of nature-polished chestnuts, the frenetic acorn gathering of shy squirrels and the artistry of a leaf canopy painted from nature’s palette in shades of yellow, rust and ginger. At night, the spirits of Hallow E’en are chased away by the whistle and the sharp explosive sounds of fireworks.

Back inside the school building there were few such thoughts. The students went through their well-practiced paces with the exuberant joy of the very young. The most junior pupils looked on with a mixture of puzzlement and joy, even as they joined wholeheartedly in the singing, stopping occasionally to yawn or to throw themselves into some gesture of uninhibited participation. They were burdened neither with the weight of years nor with heavy thoughts as to what the future might hold for them. An invited guest confided in me that she found the scene deeply moving, making her want to cry both for joy in the present moment and in tearful anticipation of the realities of life that lay ahead of the children.

As we congregated around the tea and sticky-buns afterwards, the talk was of Recession and of re-structuring our expectations, individually and collectively. In the world of economics it seems that nothing is written in stone but rather in sand. A high tide can erase the carefully-constructed castles that we built in our summer days. A storm can wipe the slate clean of all traces of our plans and projections. It seemed as if we were imaginatively walking by a representation of our future prominently placed before our eyes in a manner that we could not avoid. We had our collective ‘Van Gogh experience’ and we too shuddered inwardly.

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’.

A County Louth Harvest morning

A County Louth Harvest morning

Driving across the harvest-shaved plains of Louth early one morning recently, my memories re-wound to another place and time when impressions of Autumn were first burnt on to the uncluttered tablet of my mind. The early-day mists were slowly lifting their veil, leaving beaded traces of their presence behind. A shock of whin-bushes on an uncultivated ditch wore white mantillas of finely-weaved cobwebs threaded with dew-drops. I was told at school by my fellow students that these morning dews were very powerful. One of their effects was that they could wash away freckles. I cupped my hands and caught a web-full of magic and smeared it all over my spotted face. The only thing that was washed away was my innocence. The morning vista, seen from the security of my car, appeared as an apparition of October past, a lost play-ground through which I once walked in rapt wonder.

Patrick Kavanagh was born in October 1904 and the month featured in some of his most finely-wrought images. In the epic poem called ‘The Great Hunger’, he spoke of October winds, ‘playing a symphony on a slack wire paling’. He associated the month with his father. What he wonderfully called ‘October-coloured weather’ seemed to remind him of the autumn of life as he had seen it unfold in the life of his late father. He wrote, ‘Every old man I see/ Reminds me of my father/ When he had fallen in love with death/ One time when sheaves were gathered./ That man I saw in Gardiner Street/ Stumble on the kerb was one,/ He stared at me half-eyed,/ I might have been his son./ And I remember the musician/ Faltering over his fiddle/ In Bayswater, London./ He too set me the riddle./ Every old man I see/ In October-coloured weather/ Seems to say to me/ I was once your father’.

As late as 1883, Pope Leo XIII started the practice of devoting the month of October to the Rosary. ‘The October Devotions’ became a fixture in the spiritual calendar especially for the rural Irish. For a few years, while we were still young and while my father was concentrating on farming rather than on life behind the bar, we used to say the Rosary in the evening time. We knelt on the oil-cloth covered floor with our elbows propped on about-turned, hard wooden chair-seats while our rosaries dangled underneath, teasing the kittens and amusing ourselves between ‘decades’. My father called the prayers with great speed, leaving no interval between the two stanzas of the Hail Mary/Holy Mary. It was the audio equivalent of a dog chasing its tail.

The prayer-baton was passed on from one to another with seamless contact as we took our turn, hoping that we would not forget the name of the ‘Mystery’; the number of prayers said and the text of the prayer. The beginning of the end was signalled by the recitation of the Litany of Loreto. This is a list of finely-crafted, poetic praise-names, titles and invocations to Our Lady. My father knew it off by heart. I was puzzled by the meaning of two of these invocations that happened to come one after the other. In my father’s verbal haste, ‘Mother most chaste’ sounded like ‘mother was chased’ and my childish, enquiring and shocked mind wondered why. ‘Mother inviolate’, the following invocation, was interpreted in the concrete imagery of childhood as ‘mother in violet’. Maybe, I thought, that’s why she was chased! Then there was the tail-end prayers or ‘trimmings’ as they were affectionately known. These were a set of ‘One Our Father and Three Hail Marys’, mostly for deceased relatives or for the contemporary concerns of the household. The ‘Hail Holy Queen’ wrapped up the prayer-package for the night.

What we lose in flowers during autumn, we gain in fruits and harvest. H. W. Beecher wrote, ‘October is nature’s funeral month. Nature glories in death more than in life. The month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming – October more than May. Every green thing loves to die in bright colours’. It was a month of conkers and sycamore seeds as I remember it. There was a belt of sycamore trees sheltering our farmhouse from the wind that blew in over the lake. We threw the winged seeds into the air and watched them fall, whirring like a helicopter with only one blade. Chestnut trees were uncommon so we valued them greatly and travelled to collect their polished fruit. With boyish bravado we notched up conquests until a beloved conker finally split and fell from its knotted cord. Nature’s spray of berries and seeds, fruits and nuts could afford to be generous.

All seeds cannot fall on fertile ground. Mellow autumn allows us to stock-take and to prepare. This is what autumn teaches as its flaming trees light up our way into darkness and winter cold.

When a bank goes burst

When a bank goes burst

On a cold Sunday morning, 16^th February, 1856, people passing along Hampstead Heath in London noticed a ‘well-dressed gentleman’ lying on a mound, as if asleep. This unusual sight in such a cold month excited curiosity in some of those passing by. Some people who moved closer noticed a small silver tankard that had fallen from his hand and lay nearby. A crowd soon gathered and the police were called as it became obvious that the ‘gentleman’ was quite dead. The police soon ascertained that he was an Irish Banker, John Sadlier. He had committed suicide. This was to prove not only a personal tragedy for the forty-something banker and his family but also for many thousands of Irish people as well.

John Sadlier was born near Tipperary Town in 1814. His family were wealthy by the standards of the time and place. He was apprenticed to a solicitor as a youth. He qualified and moved on to work in Dublin. Later, he moved to London and began a career as a parliamentary agent. Soon he began to try his luck in financial speculation. His initial success led him away from his chosen profession and he became a full-time banker. He returned to Tipperary and with his brother, he ran their highly successful ‘Joint-Stock Bank’. He appeared to have the Midas touch so farmers and smallholders from all over the area left their savings and dowries in the keeping of the trustworthy Sadlier’s Bank.

Banks make profits from taking in money and then lending it out at a greater interest than it pays out. Sadlier’s Bank took in lots of money but instead of lending it out to customers to finance the development of the farming industry, the bank found more exotic outlets for its loans. It invested in Italian, Swiss, Spanish and American railways and in many other ventures. On the reputation of the family bank and through his English contacts, John Sadlier was appointed Chairman of the London and County Joint-Stock Bank. Like many successful business and legal people, he set his eye on politics and was elected M.P. for Carlow in 1847. He later served as M.P. for Sligo. In 1852 he was one of more than fifty Irish Members who had been elected to the British Parliament, pledged to independent opposition, on a platform of support for the Tenant League. He also established a newspaper, ‘The Telegraph’, in Dublin in 1851 to put across his views to the public.

John Sadlier was a speculator and opportunist and when the prospect of a prestigious job as Junior Lord of the Treasury was offered to him, he defected to his political enemies along with a colleague called William Keogh and promptly made enemies of his erstwhile friends. In 1853 he lost a Court action taken against him by a Carlow elector who claimed that Sadlier had prevented him from recording his vote. Sadlier denied the charge but the jury gave the verdict to his accuser. He was forced to resign his post as Junior Lord of the Treasury. This was to be the turning point of his career.

He spent the next two years covering up from his former colleagues and acquaintances the trauma he was experiencing. It was during this time that he lost everything as his financial speculations went wrong and his political career hit the dust. Sadlier had been educated by the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College. He was a solicitor, a politician, a newspaper proprietor and a defender of the Catholic Faith but above all he became a speculator in votes, land, railways and banks. He was, it seemed, a man of all talents. Ambition outweighed ability however, and Sadlier's disgrace as a politician and his failure as a speculator brought misery and shame to a great number of innocent people.

He tried to cover his tracks by forging shares in a Swedish Railway Company. He forged deeds of land that he was supposed to have acquired in Ireland. He forged cheques and other financial documents so successfully that no suspicion arose, yet, as to his true financial state. The end-game began when one wise investor checked out the deed of a supposed Irish property that had been given as security for a loan of ten thousand pounds. The house of cards began to collapse. Drafts from the Tipperary Joint-Stock Bank were initially not honoured in London but later they were again accepted. A troubled Sadlier brother, running the Bank back in Tipperary, telegrammed, ‘All right at all the branches. Only a few small things refused there. If from twenty to thirty thousand over here on Monday morning, all is safe.’ John Sadlier visited a Mr. Wilkinson in the City asking for help in his predicament. His financial friend had helped him before but this time the answer was in the negative. Sadlier’s reaction was to stride up and down the office pondering out loud on how, if the Tipperary Bank should fall, it would be his fault and it would be the ruination of thousands of people.

That night a distressed John Sadlier left his London home at midnight, telling his butler not to wait up for him. He took with him the small tankard that was found beside him the next morning, some knives and a phial of Prussic Acid. On Monday the news of his death reached Ireland. Country people stormed in to the towns, some armed with crowbars, picks and spades, thinking that if they could get in to the Branch Offices, they could recover their investments and hard-earned savings. Elderly people were confused and distressed. Some wept hysterically or prayed. The rich lost out too as Sadlier’s debts were revealed to be of the order of one and a quarter million pounds Sterling.

Though Sadlier had left intensely remorseful suicide notes reproaching himself for the ruin of others, he became notorious as the ‘prince of swindlers’. In his book, Manias, Panics and Crashes – a History of Financial Crises, Charles Kindleberger refers to John Sadlier as, ‘one of the greatest, if not the greatest, and at the same time the most successful swindler that any country has produced’. Sadlier’s story was to provide inspiration for Charles Dickens’ character, Mr Merdle in the novel called Little Dorrit.

This extraordinary story of the rise and fall of John Sadlier has its parallels in our own time of course. Its lessons on the fickleness of finance and of reputation and its commentary on the consequences and prevalence of corruption, greed and betrayal are remarkably contemporary, though it all came to head in Victorian Britain one hundred and fifty two years ago.

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”.