Now that Easter is over and the last term of the School Year has begun – many assume that it’ll be ‘business as usual’ for the final furlong until June 2012! Not so this year! For the next number of weeks of this term, we’ll have the backdrop of the Eucharistic Congress to reflect upon as well.
This reflection on the Eucharist is going to come naturally this year again for the families of the boys and girls who are preparing to receive the Promise of the Eucharist for the first time this May (12th/13th/27th). Being a part of the preparation of the Holy Communion Programme helps all not to slip too easily into taking this extraordinary offer into the realm of what is ‘ordinary’. The publicity build-up to the Eucharistic Congress (10th-17th June), is intended to achieve the same result; reflection.
As the Catholic Christian community on the Island where this year’s Congress is taking place we’ll all, hopefully, find ourselves challenged more by the ‘why’ of such an extraordinary concept of the Eucharist, rather than the ‘how’ of how it could actually be. Better still if we could appreciate the ‘Wow’ of it, as the Apostles did that we have a reference to in today’s Gospel. The ‘how’ we’ll never figure out – the ‘why’ we hope will be self-evident, in the same way as we can never really figure out the ‘how’ of Love either, but when did that ever prevent any of us from experiencing the ‘wow’ that it offers!!!
We forget too often that the revelation of God (as we come to ‘know’ him) fits into the realm of Love far more comfortably than it does into the realm of reason.
It is particularly relevant for those of us who have an openness of mind to wrestle with something greater than just reason alone. It is also relevant for those whose mindset is so decidedly closed and set within the limits of human reason exclusively. For the latter group you’d have to wonder from what identifiable source do they draw their ideals of Love – or could it be just a case of; ‘whatever you’re having yourself’, or ‘the flavour of the month’ principle!
Certainly a number of recent utterances about Faith by certain Public Representatives would appear to be more the fruit of reaction as opposed to reflection. At a political party gathering in Galway last weekend. a number of motions were aired. One bright spark of a T.D. was aligned with the suggestion that “Religious Education has no place in a school in a 21st century Irish republic”!!! and also that Senior Civil Servants should be ‘screened for Catholic tendencies’!! How’s about that then as an example of the Liberal Left?! And some still wonder why I hold fast to the real definition of a “Liberal” as being;
“a Facist with a smile” – for the cameras!!
I have to admit I did smile myself though, when I saw them end their conference with the gusto rendition of ”We’ll keep the Red Flag flying”!! Well it’s a change from the “wrap the green flag round me boys” I suppose! Wouldn’t it be a lot more helpful and hopeful if minds were unfurled more often than flags! Red, green or even Yellow/White! A O’N