(The Nationalist, 23 June 2000)
About ten years ago I saw an Australian TV serial in twelve parts called Land of Hope. It told a fictional story of an Irish family who emigrated to Australia in the years after the Great Famine. The central character was the mother who appeared first as a young, single woman uncertain of herself, sometimes frightened, in a new country and unfamiliar surroundings.
Gradually, after many difficulties, she married and began a family. Gradually they were able to find their feet and get a good start in life. The episodes which follow were not only the story of a family but also, interwoven with it at another level, the story of the labour movement in Australia, the story of the Australian Labour Party and also the story of the Catholic Church there.
As the story unfolds the young woman grows older, sees her children grow up and leave. She becomes a grand-mother and, in the closing episodes, a great grandmother. She becomes the matriarch of the clan, a woman who has fought many battles, winning some and losing others, but unbowed in her devotion to family, to faith and to the Labour Party.
Then she hears that one of her grandchildren, a young woman of about twenty years of age, is living with her boy-friend. She confronts her and challenges her about it. ‘But I love him, Gran’, says the young woman, pleadingly. This was too much altogether for Granny. ‘Love?’, she exclaimed in outrage, ‘You don’t know what love is. Love is about giving and giving and giving. You go on giving until you have nothing left to give, and when you come to that point, you still go on giving because then you’re not giving of yourself but from God. He’s the one who giving through you’. This was like a foreign language to the young woman and she retired from the fray, bruised and bewildered. Granny, for her part, felt that there are things that are worth fighting for, even if it means that a person gets hurt in the process. As she saw it, she said what she said for the good of the young woman.
It was an episode which illustrated the generation gap between the old and the young. They differed fundamentally. Each one could defend their position. Each one loved the other. It’s that kind of powerful human challenge that makes life worth living.