“Everything was still with that hush that comes so often with the dawn and everything was veiled and yet revealed, and I think intensified by the most delicate of opalescent mists” Second Reading 
Fr Kevin Hegarty An old priest once told me of his visit to a terminally ill man. He had been away from the church for several years and now, on his death bed, he wanted to be reconciled. As the priest was leaving, the man gave him a £50 note, then a considerable sum of money, and asked him to remember him at Mass.
The priest, flummoxed by the size of the donation, promised to offer a number of masses for his intentions. “Father,” came the reply, “Say wan and put your oul heart in it.”
I think the man had a point. I reckon priests in Ireland are inclined to say too many masses. Mass seems to be an inevitable adjunct of most community occasions, where a short prayer service would be adequate. The decline in clerical numbers has meant that priests come under pressure to maintain traditional timetables. Rationalisation of masses is difficult to achieve.
The problem for a priest, confronted with a heavy Mass schedule, is that this great celebration can become casual and mechanical.
I realise, in saying this, I speak only for myself. Other priests may see it differently or have reached a state of transcendent piety, unknown to me, that protects them from liturgical boredom.
What I like is when some meaningful word or action at Mass causes me to reflect afterwards. On the last Sunday of July, as I led the celebration of the Eucharist in Carne Church, the sunlight dappling through the stained-glass windows, the words of the opening prayer of the Mass came alive for me: “God our Father, open our eyes to see your hand at work in the splendour of creation, in the beauty of human life. Touched by your hand our world is holy.”
Those words have stayed with me all week. They are a reminder for anyone who seeks to believe, that behind the darkness, pain and tragedy that sometimes disfigure our experiences of life, the world is a picture book or a DVD of the divine.
Czeslaw Milosz, the modern Polish poet, had a sense of God in the goodness of ordinary things. In ‘In Common’, he wrote:
“What is good? Garlic, A leg of lamb on a spit.
Wine with a view of boats rocking in a cove.
A starry sky in August. A rest on a mountain peak.
What is good? After a long drive, water in a pool and a sauna.
Love-making and falling asleep, embraced,
Your legs touching hers.
Mist in the morning, translucent, announcing a sunny day.”
My reflection on that opening prayer led me to return to an article in ‘The Bell’, a magazine which had a profound cultural influence in Ireland in the 1940s. In November, 1940, the editor, Seán Ó Faoláin, asked a number of Irish artists to describe the loveliest thing they had seen.
For Norah McGuinness, the loveliest thing was “the colour of Ireland. No other country has such rich vibrant tones, from the deep purples and blues of the hills, and the greens and yellows of the fields, to the silver greys of sea and sky.”
Seamus Murphy, the Cork sculptor, recalled “the face of a woman. In a city church. She seemed very, very beautiful, and held me spell-bound with her delicacy and poise – breathing a prayer – a study in intensity.”
Frances Kelly remembered “sheets of bluebells on the banks of the Blackwater in spring. Mirrored in the placid waters of that most beautiful river.”
Paul Henry, the Belfast painter, who spent much time in the west of Ireland, waxed ecstatically about day break on Killary bay: “I really think one of the loveliest things I ever saw was at daybreak on Killary bay from a height above Salruck (the most beautiful place in Ireland). Everything was still with that hush that comes so often with the dawn and everything was veiled and yet revealed, and I think intensified by the most delicate of opalescent mists. Far below me a little flotilla of currachs was putting out from the white village by the edge of the sea to the herring shoals. The tiny currachs – they seemed no bigger than water beetles – the only sounds; the minute creak of their paddles coming from far away.”
Artists and poets have a way of seeing beyond the ordinary and the obvious into the depths. I believe we all have that capacity in some sense; the capacity to see that, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the world ‘is charged with the grandeur of God’.
So what are the loveliest things I have seen. Some I can’t find adequate words for. Others are too personal for public revelation.
For what they are worth, the following have come to my mind over the past week: a magnificent autumn moon shining on Cross Lake on a cloudless October night; a young couple in a crowded room exchanging glances that conveyed a shared world of love, mirth and joy; a man, celebrating his 90th birthday with his wife, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, his face wreathed in a smile that recalled the mischievous vitality of his youth, whispering to her, ‘we started all this’.
Have you any lovely experiences you would like to share? Why not write to the Editor? Letters to the Editor need not only be about the state of the health service, the Lisbon Treaty and how the world is going to hell in a handcart!
The loveliest things in life are often the simplest, while some are too personal to reveal.
