(The Nationalist, 11 June 2004)
My days as a student of theology were spent in a friary on the north coast of Donegal, in a place called Sheephaven Bay. It is a place of wild beauty, a new vista of delightful scenery unfolding at almost every turn of the road. I sometimes think that, if you brought an atheist there, you wouldn’t need to say anything, but just let nature speak for itself.
In winter, though, it is a cold place, made colder still when the wind blows in from the North Atlantic all the way from the Arctic or detouring by way of Iceland. The friary was a converted landlord’s mansion, though ‘mansion’ is a grandiose title for a draughty, rattly building that was cold throughout the winter. The small chapel had been a drawing room and opened onto the front hall. It held only about forty people, and many more came for Mass each Sunday. The overflow spilled out into the hall. There, people knelt on flag-stones and got a strong blast of wind at their back every time a latecomer opened the door.
If the tide was out, people would take a short cut across the strand from the area around Doe Castle. To save their shoes from getting wet, they would take them off and walk barefoot, only putting them back on when they reached dry land. Walking barefoot on wet sand in winter for fifteen minutes or so is enough to dampen and cool anyone’s enthusiasm. But people did it, even though the chapel would not be very much warmer.
It seems light years away from our world of centrally heated and double-glazed buildings, where everyone has a car and is watching the clock, where missing Sunday Mass passes unnoticed, and where personal convenience, making money and buying things are a priority.
A willingness to sacrifice oneself for the sake of another, for an ideal or a commitment seems to have taken a back seat. I don’t think we are the better for it. The people who really live are those who live for another, who commit themselves to someone or something outside of and beyond themselves. The self is too small a world for the soul created in the likeness of God. The Mass is a call to reach out to the other and to the Other – and the first to benefit from that is ourselves.