Christ is risen! What can the original Easter proclamation possibly and practically mean to us, here in this tortured world? Could it possibly be an adequate response to all the suffering in the world? What do I know about torture, you may ask, any more than of the historic sufferings of Ireland? Here the 1916 affair, that our President and Taoseach are busy commemorating, comes in. After all this Easter Sunday has been a most beautiful day here on Sherkin, where we are privileged to go about our lives in peace, tending our gardens in tranquility as life breaks out on all sides so exuberantly in this season so full of wonders.
So have we the right to proclaim the overthrow of grief? No, but our proclamation is not in our own names, rather in that of Christ crucified and risen. Of all the human beings who have existed, he would seem to be the only one who might be said to have earned such a right. He alone meets our deepest needs, those of our hearts and minds, our imaginations and conscience, our individual and social existence; all that he said and did was just right, and so we believe in him and proclaim his death and resurrection.
There remains the trifling business of working out what this actually means, here and now! I say flippantly 'trifling' because perhaps in a sense this is possibly a lot less important than we like to think, while if we try to proclaim salvation in our own names, we not alone become obnoxious, but absurd. We are here today and gone tomorrow. Nonetheless, to each of us falls the responsibility of passing on The Proclamation, and if indeed it is what it claims to be, there cannot be any greater responsibility.
It may be claimed that the affair of 1916 was a genuine working out of what it might mean for us in practice. 'In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland,... In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms.' Nowadays however, we look around the world and see the grim results of 'nations asserting themselves in arms'. We reflect that even here in Ireland the results were not exactly good, while it was not ultimately violence that achieved a partial national independence, but moral force. It was very hard, though it was tried, for Britain to continue to suppress it, having just allegedly fought the Great War to 'vindicate the rights of small nations'! Nowadays it is authoritively maintained that the taking up of arms 'in the name of God' is a contradiction in terms.
We Catholics like to think that we meet our responsibility to the Easter proclamation by getting along to Mass of a Sunday, albeit along with the kind of example we set for the rest of the week; but this needs the Sunday effort both to give it point and sustenance. Now we are suddenly told we may not do it. We are told how lucky we are to be able to watch it on the internet, but of course it is not a mere matter of private consumption; it is a public proclamation. So how do we work this out? Are we not in a strange position, now that the Irish state, heir to the 1916 effort but alone among the nations of Western Europe, finds itself suppressing our Proclamation, our Sunday Mass?
It will be said that this is different, merely a temporary expedient for the common good. But havn't we heard this before? Must we keep reminding our Government that in the famous text, its claim to authority rests on 'the name of God'? Without that grounding, it will not stand, while the Church has shown that she is well able to exercise the constitutional right to worship with due care and responsibility,- of course she is, and more so than the State, which is heading down a road that is likely to alienate many hearts and minds, while losing real sovereignty to that web of powerful interests which is none the less real for all the difficulties of putting a name on it without descending into the realm of conspiracy theories!
Some kind of a start was made (in finding a name for it) by President Eisenhower when he coined the term 'the military-industrial complex', to which he feared that Americans themelves might lose their sovereignty. Perhaps a much older term. 'the gates of Sheol', comes nearer to the mark! Anyway today we must at least acknowledge that we need a wider frame of reference than Ike's; consider how the current Government in London hands out lucrative contracts to their friends in connection with the pandemic, or that, according to the Guardian, 'Barclays analyst Carter Gould is predicting sales of $21.5bn in 2021' for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, while the Bio/NTech founders 'became multibillionaires last year, when the potential of the vaccine and the deal with Pfizer prompted the shares to surge.' Meanwhile 'the Serum Institute boss Adar Poonawalla has rented a Mayfair mansion for £50,000 a week'. Indeed there is obviously some serious wheeling and dealing going on!
So do we have to speak of the 'military-medical-industrial complex', not to mention other aspects of 'big tech'? How about pesticides? We have been told that they are essential for us to be able to feed the population. How do you fancy our chances, living in a world with no insects, butterflies, birds? After all, even the atom bomb was thought to do good at the time, putting a stop to that nasty war with the Japanese, and still a majority in Britain and America seem to approve. What chance of humanity's survival in a world depending on far bigger bombs for security? But is it remotely fair to associate vaccines with pesticides and bombs?
As a matter of fact, I would not absolutely rule out their use in strictly limited and emergency circumstances, which would also be my own attitude to guns and vaccines alike, - but it would be with extreme regret, and as a matter of policy to be strenuously avoided. Is vaccination to become a permanent feature of our lives, along with all the other horrors of the modern world? Meanwhile what you do not use, you lose, and our own immune system is surely no exception.
As a gardener, let me take the less extreme example of pesticides. In order to avoid their use, one has to look for the flaws in one's set-up, to think organically of soil and plant health and avoid monoculture and over-crowding; remember beauty too, keep flowers and variety in there! Actually Nature is on our side; yes, it comes from God and he loves us, the Almighty One wants us to be healthy; he also wants us to learn how to overcome sickness, put aside greed, embrace justice. He wants all his children to have access to the land, to his gifts for us all. He would surely much prefer us to appreciate and cherish his gifts, in our own experience, than to depend on governments and remote agri-business for our food, or Big Pharma for our health! So might we learn wisdom, how to work with Nature rather than fighting it,- to be a lot healthier, while understanding at last, with all our faculties, and thus proclaiming that Christ is truly risen, Alleluia, Alleluia!
No comments:
Post a Comment
I welcome feedback.... Joe