Second Reading
Fr Kevin Hegarty
Last weekend was graduation weekend in Erris. The Leaving Certificate students of Our Lady’s Secondary School and St Brendan’s College graduated from their respective establishments.
Graduation days are fun. The albatross of Leaving Cert year, the most intense period of study most students will ever endure, has been lifted. The shadows of fear, that thicken as the August results loom, have not yet appeared.
It is a day to dress up. The girls always seem more at ease in their new gear. Suits are alien apparel for the lads. They toy with their ties, wondering how quickly they can shed them. There are things about fashion that men will never know!
For parents, graduation is a proud day, yet tinged with some sadness and foreboding. Childhood is finally over. The new, with all its uncertainties, has not begun.
The graduates look so cool, grown up and confident. parents can’t help recalling when they were little and needed their care constantly. Memories of childhood flit through their minds like a video on fast track. It is the kind of thing that Seamus Heaney evokes in his poem, “Mother of the Groom”. On his wedding day, “What she remembers/is his glistening back/in the bath, his small boots/ in the ring of boots at her feet.”
The killjoys look on askance from the sidelines. They suffer from what the American journalist, H L Mencken, once described as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
To anyone unlucky enough to be cornered by them, they dispense their tablets of sour “wisdom”. Why do the graduates spend good money on expensive clothes for the event? Should they not graduate in their school uniforms? As if you would get married in your working clothes.”
Why should there be a party and dancing late into the night? Should not the graduates go home quietly after the ceremony and prepare grimly for adult life?
Oh, come off it! Or as the pithy Americanism puts it - get a life. What is wrong with some carefree rapture? We need celebrations to mark our rites of passage.
The Irish have a voracious capacity for earnest cliché on public occasions. So on graduation day there are a series of speeches from head teachers, members of the Vocational Education Committee and school chaplains. Okay, I put my hand up. I have been guilty myself. The words float uselessly over the heads of the graduates. They are gloriously immersed in more enticing dreams.
So graduation day is not a time for heavy sermonising. Now that I reflect on it what day is?
I usually say a few words at the graduation ceremony in “Our Lady’s Secondary School”. The main point I like to stress is that it is a day for graduates to give thanks to their parents. They have shaped their lives by the love they have shown them through the years, from the relative serenity of childhood to the more turbulent teenage time. Nuala O’Faoláin once wrote that the most common, yet greatest human adventure was the bringing up of a child.
Of course, the perfect parent has not yet been patented. Parents have their faults and blind spots.
There are often tensions as parents seek to navigate a path between control and individual freedom. An American, Rita Rudner, has written wryly: I was asking a friend who has children, “What if I have a baby and I dedicate my life to it and it grows up to hate me, and it blames everything wrong with its life on me! And she said, ‘What do you mean, if?” Most parents do their best most of the time.
The Irish are an emotionally reticent people. We are not good at expressing our emotions to those closest to us. Seamus Heaney, on once hearing his father’s voice on the phone, later wrote “I nearly said I loved him.” There is a lot for us to reflect on in that word, “nearly”. I sense, however, that we are becoming more open and that is all to the good.
Last weekend also saw the end of the school year. The school corridors which all year have resounded to raucous shouts and happy laughter, and occasionally to the sibilant sound of whispered secrets, are now enshrouded in an eerie silence.
We never re-capture, I believe, the wild abandon we experience as children on getting the school holidays. Desmond Egan, in his poem, “Leaving the Convent School”, puts it well:
“Aroundabout noon the escapees
Would burst in every direction from the one archway
That fell behind along with the
Nuns and sums and high roller blinds
And Black Babies boxes
Out into the revolutionary streets
Chanting in gangs
We got our holidays and
We don’t care
Swinging by their straps those useless school bags
Over the soft tar of summer.”
We all need holidays to refresh and renew our bodies and minds. Take a look at Gordon Brown. Since becoming British Prime Minister in June, 2007 he has not had a holiday and it shows. Last August he interrupted his holiday after four hours to return to Downing Street to deal with a mini political crisis. Now he looks like a tortured zombie wandering through treacherous political minefields. Not good, Gordon.
Happy holidays, everyone.
