Are you a believer? Or simply stressed out and snowed in? No matter – now is the time to extend goodwill to all, writes PATSY McGARRY
SO THIS is Christmas . . .
In honour of the day that’s in it, this will be a conflict-free, critique-free column. Just for one day.
It will become a no man’s land similar to that occupied by those young British and German soldiers on the Western Front in December 1915.
Over there in yonder trench is a Government Minister singing Silent Night. Should we join in? Even in this season of goodwill that would be a bit of an effort. But, hey...!
Some can do it. I got a Christmas card the other day from the Catholic primate Cardinal Sean Brady. Now there’s a Christian gentleman. Since March I’ve been saying he should resign and I’m still on his Christmas card list.
But when it comes to reaching out at this time of year, I would have to say a most impressive card I got in recent weeks was from Imam Ahmed of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Association Ireland. They have a lovely new Masjid Maryam (Mary Mosque) in Galway. Imam Ahmed not only sent me a card but it was one headed “Beannachtaí na Féile” wishing me “a year full of goodness”, “love for all, hatred for none” and “in the name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful”.
Now I thought that a very welcome greeting in the season that’s in it, even if he never once used the word Christmas.
It’s the spirit that matters.
“Wishing you a very happy, prosperous and peaceful year ahead,” too Imam Ahmed.
And all your co-religionists.
However, it can be a strain, all this sweet goodwill and sentimentality. Few in Ireland, for instance, are ever going to allow themselves dream of a white Christmas again.
The past weeks of snow, snow, snow have proven to be just another example of that healthy warning about being careful what you wish for. In the green innocence of our Christmases past, we really hadn’t a clue what a real white Christmas would be like.
Is it not indeed another illustration of the unpalatable truth that behind every silver lining there’s a cloud?
And don’t be too surprised if beloved relatives are that little bit more tetchy this Christmas, what with the combination of cabin fever and its opposite – hours and hours of slipsliding and shopping on a street with no grit.
At the best of times, it is a season when nearest and dearest can bring out our darker side. Even for the very young.
There was my niece Róisín. How she hates this story, but it has entered family folklore. She was about four at the time and all that particular Christmas she was teased unmercifully by her slightly older cousin, Seán.
On one of those afternoons, she and my mother visited the crib in the cathedral at home where they “ooed” and “aaed” over the donkey and the sheep and the baby Jesus, not to mention the shepherds, and Mary and Joseph.
All very well, but Róisín was still seething at her cousin. So what happened next wasn’t so surprising. Afterwards, as she and my mother walked down the cathedral towards the doors, they passed the particularly graphic pieta in that august building.
Its lavishly bloodied Christ pours rivers of scarlet down his face from a head crowned with lovingly detailed thorns, as well as from dark, gaping wounds in his hands, his feet and his chest, as he lies there draped for eternity across his grieving mother’s knees. Róisín stood opposite this bloody scene deep in thought, looked at my mother, pointed at the Christ, and pronounced, “Seán did that!”
Truly, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, whatever her age. It even applies in my family.
Now, I am keenly aware that so many references to Christ, even to Christmas, in this column so far will upset those people who like to see it, this newspaper and not least its Religious Affairs Correspondent, as nothing more than the thin end of the Satanic wedge of the onward march of aggressive secularism in Ireland.
So, being the season that’s in it, and to reassure as well as bring comfort and joy to those people in their prejudices, I repeat here a message sent to me by a Galway friend yesterday. Apparently it’s been doing the rounds of late.
“Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced with the most enjoyable traditions of religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all . . .
“I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted Gregorian calendar year 2011, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures . . .”
A happy Christmas to you all.
John Waters is on leave