Let it go!
Well some of them saw a Sundance in Knock but no mention of Butch Cassidy or indeed one of my own personal muses from that film, Katharine Ross. Years ago I thought a lot about the same Katharine before I got arthritis in both me hands. No sign in Knock either of the woman herself. Sure didn’t I tell ye last week that she wasn’t coming.
A lot of the aul ones here in the village were scandalised that our own Fr Fiachra didn’t bother going to Knock on Sunday, Maggie Murphy and Beatrice Brady were expectin’ a lift from him. Fr Fiachra was busy preparing himself for a big group retreat the priests do have every year. Isn’t it well for him and the rest of us here doing our best to get on with things? When do hard workin’ people like ourselves get the chance to drop everything and spend the guts of a week being wined and dined in a nice hotel and go around thinking about our lives. No doubt we’ll get the benefit of all his relaxation on Sunday with a long-winded sermon on something new he has learned, something the rest of us learned years ago. He told us in the sermon last Sunday that they were going to be lookin’ into the future of the church on this group retreat. Lookin’ into the abyss more like, at a load of derelict structures across the country that will only be providing good nesting place for crows and shelter for badgers. Sure what do ordinary people like us want with the church anymore. The church is for the priests and sure when we have no more priests what will we need the churches for. It’s the priests that need the church - otherwise they’d be out of a job and a workplace.
Signs on it Fr Fiachra and the rest of them are trying their best to get the numbers back and keep the show on the road. The government won’t let the banks fail and the priests won’t let the church fail. Sure if the priests and the church go we’ll find something else to get us going and the clergy needn’t be worrying their balding heads about it. They’re always talkin’ about faith but the one group they have no faith in is you or me or as they call us ‘lay people’, whatever that means.
Look lads let ye rest assured we’ll give the church a decent burial when ye hand it over to us. Embrace it lads that’s the future, a burial for a dying church and from the ashes there might come something worth working for. It’s only nostalgia that makes people try to flog dead horses back to life. Relax lads, let it go, as the numbers go down further in the coming months get your keys and lock up the churches. Leave them locked until people are banging the doors down to get into them. A rest from religion would do us all good. Continuity is not everything and as Wally the Wart Walsh put it during the week: “the Church’s preoccupation with continuity is preventing real discernment happening, it is preventing the impetus towards change. Change can only happen when people abandon old ways.”
He’s no eejit Wally. Anyway sure poor aul Fr Fiachra is doing his best God love him. He was away on a course there last month to learn about givin’ good sermons. He could have saved himself the trouble sure all he had to do was ask us and we’d have told him: keep it short, do a bit of givin’ out, tell a decent joke and keep us guessin’ who you’re talkin’ about.
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