It’s so easy to play the religious game

This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.

Michael Commane

I have been causally watching what the commentators are saying about new Pope Leo; from my perspective most of it is leaning towards the right and being silly at the same time. Maybe right-wing thinking and silliness go together, especially in church matters. 

Sunday was the feast of the Ascension, some weeks earlier we had Easter Sunday, the feast of the Resurrection, next Sunday Christians celebrate the feast of Pentecost and then the following Sunday we celebrate the great feast of the Holy Trinity.

Outside of the clerical bubble and a small number of regular Mass goers I wonder what all those feasts, indeed, what all those words mean? The Ascension might remind people of an elderly man with a long beard living above the clouds and we call him ‘God’.

In 1984 Anglican priest David Jenkins was appointed Bishop of Durham. He had taught theology at Leeds University. He was a controversial figure and questioned the interpretation of many of the stories in the Bible. On the Ascension he said that at the time had he been there with a video camera he doubted he would have captured on film Jesus rising above the clouds. 

What do you think of that? Do you believe that Jesus headed upwards above the clouds on into blue skies? And dare I ask where are you with all that?

These Easter feasts all have a thread going through them. The feast of the Resurrection is about Jesus overcoming human death, the Ascension is the idea of Jesus returning to the Father, Pentecost is the Spirit of God living in our presence and then the feast of the Trinity is a reminder to us that this God we believe in is made up of three persons but three persons so perfectly united with each other that it is One. It is love gone mad, love so perfect that it is one. 

These Christian feasts are shouting at us that we who are made in God’s image are at our best when we are living in love, harmony and kindness with one another, a reality that has no hatred or wrong doing; respect is writ loud and clear.

Look at our world; the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan, the divisions there are in every corner of the planet. 

How can there be billionaires living side by side with people who have nothing.

These Easter feasts are telling us of other possibilities. But of course we are not listening, so what do we do; we cliche them out of existence and turn them into some sort of pious games we use to satisfy and justify our own styles of living.

When I hear right-wing commentators spout that ‘Pope Leo is no Pope Francis II. Viva il Papa’ I laugh but really want to scream.

Why have so many in established religions placed such emphasis on aspects of the Christian faith that are simply not at the core of what it means to be Christian? I can’t help thinking so many have walked away because they know in their hearts that, that man with the beard above the clouds has nothing to do with the merciful God that Jesus Christ preached.

Michael Kelly and the Arab, Robert Barron and the ego

This appears on Michael Kelly’s Facebook page. Note how the reader is told what language the passenger is speaking.

Every day Mr Kelly publishes his views, thoughts, opinions on social media:

"On a journey, my phone often cuts in and out of coverage. In front of me on the bus, a man has managed to conduct a call in very loud Arabic on loudspeaker all the way from Dublin to Emyvale (2.5 hours) and is still going! I’m seriously questioning the value of WiFi on buses.”

Bishop Robert Barron on his X account writes: “Friends, it was a pleasure to join Tucker Carlson on his podcast. He goes on to say: There’s a revival going on. It’s unmistakable. Yous see it everywhere.”

Robert Barron talks about how you get lost when you deify your own ego.

An interesting comment from the bishop. And what exactly is the revival that Robert Barron is observing?

Worrying.

The Irish Times is now making its own grammar rules

 This in the newspaper of record:

"Your Money

My mother’s plan to leave her house to my sister and I[sic] could create more problems than solutions.”

I doubt they would have written: My mother’s plan to leave her house to I.

Poor logic and awful grammar from The Irish Times.

The great feast of the Ascension of the Lord

Apologies for the nonappearance of today’s blogpost. Due to a technical issue the posting simply disappeared.

Maybe it was the work of the gods or an angel protecting the writer. The piece was about comments the late Bishop David Jenkins made about today’s feast. He said that had he had a video camera at the time of the Ascension he did not believe he would have captured the event on his machine.

Today’s feast has to be taken in the context of the Resurrection, next Sunday’s feast of Pentecost and the following Sunday, which is the feast of the Holy Trinity.

All these feasts are linked to the idea of a loving community.

Remembering German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder

German filmmaker, actor and dramatist Rainer Werner Fassbinder was  born on this day, May 31, 1945 in Bad Wörishofen in Bavaria.

He was a major figure of the New German Cinema movement. Fassbinder was critical of the post war German class system.

He was steeped in the turmoil of the results of Hitler’s war and nervous of Germany’s ‘Economic Miracle’.

Some of his extraordinary films include: The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lili Marleen and probably his masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz.

He died of a drug overdose on June 19, 1982 at the  age of 37.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a genius, who made powerful, extraordinary films. 

Arrroyo’s sneering and Kelly’s cutlery

Below is video and comment

of Raymond Arroyo on his X page. Mr Arroyo works for EWTN. It is a US television station, which purports to be a Catholic media outlet. It is akin to Fox News. It is everything that has forced so many people feel alienated from the Catholic Church.

Arroyo’s obsequiousness towards Donald Trump and then his jeering of Emmanuel Macron is simply pathetic. What has it to do with the mission of the Catholic Church; sneering at people was never the message of Jesus Christ.

And then there is Michael Kelly’s social media posting about ‘A beautiful dinner tonight to mark the election of Pope Leo XIV’.

It seems the dinner took place some time after the pope’s inauguration. Maybe  the nonsense in it all is given away by the incorrect positioning of the cutlery.

Sycophancy gone wild.

It’s difficult to take this view of Christianity but it’s the ‘style’ that is in the ascendance these days and it is this movement that is attracting many priestly vocations.

Worrying times.

RaymondArroyo (@Raymond Arroyo) posted: “She mauled him like an aged bear!” My take on Brigitte Macron’s swipe at her husband and what it means- from this week’s ARROYO GRANDE. And don’t miss my interview with Tom Dreesen on the lessons Sinatra taught him. Subscribe and watch/ hear the full episode here:

📺 https://x.com/raymondarroyo/status/1928105131662528890?s=51&t=UgcVh3PPqPDgrCZ5Ux8O1Q

Rees-Mogg confuses nominative and accusative case

How the mighty have fallen.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who presents an evening programme on the GBNews every weekday evening, introduced his show on Tuesday saying: “It’s me,[sic] Jacob Rees-Mogg”.

And that from the man who considers himself an expert in many areas, especially in the King’s English.

Or maybe it was he felt little point in getting grammar correct with GBNews viewers.

These Lidl boots ended up on the other foot

This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.

Michael Commane

Is it time we put computers in their place? It’s a question I asked myself over the last few days.

I returned a faulty pair of hiking boots to a Lidl store. There  was no problem changing them but because they were faulty I had to pay for the new pair and was told that the money would be refunded to my account between three and five working days. The boots cost €19.99 and were great value for money. 

Eight/10 years earlier I had bought a similar pair, that had served me well. I was waiting to replace them with a similar pair, so was delighted when I saw them on sale.

The delight was short lived.

It was two weeks before I realised the money had not been credited to my account.

The shop was not able to help and told me to contact Lidl via its WhatApp number. I think I contacted them via their website, gave all the necessary details, ticked every box and pressed the send button. Within minutes I received an automated reply thanking me. 

But again I was asked to perform the operation, giving them all the information. The following day I called Lidl HQ and eventually got speaking to a human voice. What a privilege that was in the wonderful era of our technological progress. The agent was most helpful, she had my report in front of her and after a few minutes’ conversation told me that Lidl personnel had inputted an incorrect date in my file. Instead of writing 17.04.2025, 17.04.2024 was typed. 

The agent assured me the error would be corrected and my account might even be credited that same day.

Guess what happens? The following day I receive an email from Lidl requesting that I give them details of my purchase.

A WhatsApp message from Lidl begins: ‘Hi(followed with an emoji) my name is LiA[sic], the digital Assistant! (another emoji), I have been trained to resolve the majority of our customer’s[sic] queries, so 

I hope I will be able to help you today.’ Such blather and all digitally generated.

I was at the end of my tether repeatedly filling out forms and reading pretend real human letters. I can’t help thinking we are being treated like morons. If I make a single mistake it invalidates the entire process and I have to start all over again. But in this case with Lidl it is they who have erred and all the time they have my money. I well know it is a pittance and why bother, indeed, it may not be a pittance for a homeless person. 

It’s that sense of powerlessness, sitting at a computer screen or the end of a phone line listening to a recorded voice. How often does the phone simply drop and you have to start all over again. Have you noticed how many websites don’t give a telephone number. It’s clear companies/organisations don’t want people calling them.

Imagine what it is going to be like as AI develops. Good luck to Pope Leo who has his sights on the world of Artificial Intelligence. In his first days he has spoken about its dangers. Lidl, listen.

The Lidl issue is not yet fully resolved. I’ll keep you informed.

President Donald Trump is a snatch-and-grab artist.

Maureen Dowd’s take on President Donald Trump in The Irish Times yesterday. If it were not all so scary it would be hilarious.

When Donald Trump was headed for the Republican nomination in the summer of 2016, I took Carl Hulse, our chief Washington correspondent, to Trump Tower to meet him.

Trump didn’t know anything about the inner workings of Washington. He proudly showed us his “Wall of Shame” with pictures of Republican candidates he had bested. His campaign office had few staffers, but it overflowed with cheesy portraits of him sent by fans: one of him playing poker with Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Teddy Roosevelt, and a cardboard cut-out of him giving a thumbs-up, flanked by Reagan and John Wayne.

As we were leaving, Hulse warned Trump drily, “If you ever get a call from our colleague Eric Lipton, you’ll know you’re in trouble.”

“Eric Lipton?” Trump murmured.

The president probably knows who Lipton is now, because the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter is tracking Trump on issues of corruption as closely as the relentless lawman in the white straw hat tracked Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Lipton and the Times’s David Yaffe-Bellany were on the scene at Trump’s Virginia golf club on Thursday night as the president held his gala dinner to promote sales of $TRUMP, the meme coin he launched on the cusp of his inauguration. (Melania Trump debuted hers two days later.)

Trump has been hawking himself in an absurdly grandiose way his whole life. But this time, he isn’t grandstanding as a flamboyant New York business-person. He’s selling himself as the president of the United States, staining his office with a blithe display of turpitude.

Protesters at the golf club shouted, “Shame, shame, shame,” but there is no shame in Trumpworld. Trump asked guests, who were whooping with joy at the president who allowed them to purchase such primo access by essentially lining the pockets of Trump and his family, if they had seen his helicopter.

“Yeah, super cool,” gushed a guest.

Buyers flew in from China and around the world, scarfing up a fortune in $TRUMP – some had millions of dollars worth – to procure the 220 seats at the dinner.

“It was a spectacle that could only have happened in the era of Donald J Trump,” Lipton and Yaffe-Bellany wrote. “Several of the dinner guests, in interviews with the Times, said that they attended the event with the explicit intent of influencing Trump and US financial regulations.”

Pan-seared influence peddling with a citrus reduction. The prez is a pro at quid pro quo.

Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, rebutted criticism on Thursday, saying, “The president is attending it in his personal time. It is not a White House dinner.”

But he flew to Virginia on Marine One. He gave his remarks from a lectern with the presidential seal. And some of the crypto crowd got a tour of the White House on Friday (Lipton took his post outside the fence).

With more than a dozen lucrative deals for his family and partners, the Times article said, “Mr Trump is estimated to have added billions to his personal fortune, at least on paper, since the start of his new term, much of it through crypto.”

The corruption is seeping across the Potomac.

Donald Trump jnr and investors are opening a pricey private club in Georgetown called Executive Branch, where business and tech moguls can cosy up to administration big shots.

The notorious $400 million (€351 million) gift for the president from the Qataris, a luxury jumbo jet, has arrived in San Antonio. This alluring “pre-bribe”, as Saturday Night Live dubbed it, instantly wiped out Trump’s old concerns that “the nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level”. (Accepting the plane was sort of like a terrorist fist-bump, the same kind a Fox News host bizarrely accused the Obamas of making with each other.)

Other foreign leaders got the message that emoluments were welcome. In an Oval Office meeting where Trump continued to relish his role as protector of the white patriarchy, the South African president jokingly told the American president, “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.” (This might be the line that best sums up the Trump presidency in the history books.)

Trump replied breezily, “I wish you did. I’d take it.”

Trump Inc’s money grabs were taking place against the background of the president pushing through his “big, beautiful Bill” extending his obscene tax cut for the rich while slicing billions from programmes that help poor people stay alive.

“The guy promised to make American families more prosperous,” Barack Obama’s former chief strategist David Axelrod said. “He just decided to start with his own.”

In a galaxy long ago and far away, there was shame attached to selling your office. Sherman Adams, president Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff, lost his job and ruined his reputation after he accepted a vicuña coat from a Boston textile manufacturer doing business with the federal government.

Trump has no reputable reputation to ruin. He’s a snatch-and-grab artist.

“I think social media and Donald Trump’s persona have numbed people to the idea that certain forms of behaviour are off-limits,” said Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer. “No institution has been able to rein in Donald Trump. He got impeached twice. Didn’t matter, so Congress couldn’t rein him in. He had all sorts of federal and state prosecutions that ended up going nowhere, so law enforcement couldn’t rein him in. The media has been covering him as close as anyone could ever be covered, and the media couldn’t rein him in. I think it makes people just sort of turn away and accept it as inevitable.”

Before he did his YMCA dance and scrammed early, the scamming Trump told the crypto enthusiasts at his golf club that he wasn’t pushing crypto and bitcoin for himself.

“I really do it because I think it’s the right thing to do,” he said.

In Trump’s moral universe, the right thing to do is always the thing that makes him richer. – New York Times

“If we don’t speak up it’s going to get worse"

Columnist Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times last Tuesday

Democracies don’t turn into autocracies easily or overnight. There has to be a critical mass of true believers – but more important is the critical mass of appeasers. These are the people and institutions who imagine that if they capitulate early they will avoid the worst of it. They cede their own power in the deluded hope that, if they don’t fight back, the bullies will leave them alone. And, if they are intellectuals, they smother their humiliation in upbeat, high-flown language.

A case in point is one of the world’s great universities, Columbia in New York. It is an American institution, but also a global one: nearly 14,000 international students and more than 3,000 faculty members and researchers at Columbia depend on US government-issued visas and green cards. It also runs joint academic programmes with European universities – among them Trinity College Dublin.

Which makes it a hugely important test case. If a rich and famous institution doesn’t stand up for itself, what chance have millions of ordinary people or vulnerable communities with few resources?

I’ve been looking at the internal messages Columbia’s leadership has sent to its staff in recent months to explain – or, more accurately, explain away – its attempts to appease the Trump administration. They exemplify the deterioration of language that is the inevitable side effect of servility.Bringing American universities to heel is an important part of Trump’s authoritarian agenda. They are centres of independent thought and producers of evidence-based research, neither of which is compatible with the imperial presidency he is creating. In addition, Columbia was in Trump’s sights because it has been one of the largest centres of protest against Israel’s mass killing in Gaza.

This has provided the very thin semblance of justification for taking over the universities – it is being done, allegedly, to protect students from anti-Semitism. As Simon Schama put it in The Financial Times: “Coming to the aid of campus Jews was always a pretext. Forgive us if we doubt that presenting the subjection of higher education’s independence to an ideological purge, labelled ‘defence of the Jews’, will work as an antidote to anti-Semitism.”

On March 7th, the Trump administration announced that it was withholding $400 million of federal grants to Columbia while warning that this was the “first round of action”. Instead of making clear that it would defend its independence, Columbia responded by saying it “pledged to work with the federal government to restore the funding”.

The administration then demanded that Columbia concede on the most important principle of any university – academic freedom – before it would even negotiate on the funds. And the university capitulated. It agreed to “expand intellectual diversity” – code for hiring more Trump-friendly faculty – while “reinforcing the University’s commitment to excellence and fairness in Middle East studies”.

It would also hire a new senior vice provost (implicitly one acceptable to Trump) to “review” the university’s “Center for Palestine Studies; the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies; Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies; the Middle East Institute; the Tel Aviv and Amman global hubs; the School of International and Public Affairs Middle East Policy major; and other University programs focused on the Middle East”.

Snakeskin of emollient evasion

This is bad enough. Worse, though, is the way it was presented to the Columbia faculty wrapped in a snakeskin of emollient evasion. The university’s president said that, “both within and beyond our campuses, we need to understand the sources of discontent with Columbia and identify what we can do to rebuild credibility and confidence with different stakeholders”.

In this Orwellian language, the inevitably messy life of an institution committed to intellectual freedom becomes “sources of discontent”. An authoritarian government becomes a “stakeholder” with whom the supposed upholders of that freedom have to “rebuild credibility”.

And once you start down this road, it’s all good news. Instead of saying “we have, under duress, appointed a new vice provost to comply with the Trump administration’s demands to supervise our Middle East-related programmes”, Columbia management announced that the person in question had been appointed to “focus on cross-school academic excellence” – adding, as though it were an afterthought, “starting with a comprehensive review of Regional Studies programs. This work will begin with a faculty committee review of Middle East programs”.

And then on April 16th, in a cheery email beginning with “Happy Weekend!” the faculty was told that the university had established a special portal in which they could “share with leadership as they navigate the challenges of the moment”. The kicker is that “the portal is totally anonymous”.

In other words, one of the major universities in what used to be called the free world has had to establish a forum in which its teachers can express themselves anonymously for fear of consequences if they do so publicly. This, of course, reinforces the message already sent by the Trump administration’s arrests of students Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi who protested against the killing in Gaza: if tenured faculty members have to resort to anonymity, wouldn’t it be wise for students – especially those on visas – to just shut up?

This is what happens when institutions decide to “work with” incipient dictatorships. They internalise servility, reimagining humiliations as exciting opportunities. They slide from reassuring themselves that they are merely making a few compromises for the greater good to presenting the abandonment of fundamental principles as excellent news.

And, of course, it’s all futile. One of the heroes of this moment is Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan university. He had described himself as “a little neurotic Jewish kid from Long Island – afraid of everything”. But he has had the courage to say: “If we don’t speak up, it’s going to get worse. Much worse, much faster . . . [Appeasement] doesn’t work, because the other side just keeps wanting more and more power.”

A comma brings a pause; a semi colon brings the drama

This is a great read:

https://on.ft.com/3FrnD2d 

A fabulous story about a loyal dog

A fabulous story. Frank McNally’s An Irishman’s Diary in The Irish Times on Wednesday.

An agricultural scientist at Tokyo’s Imperial University, Hidesabur  Ueno (1872–1925) might have been quickly forgotten after his death, from a cerebral haemorrhage during a lecture, 100 years ago this week.

But his dog could not forget him and, thanks to the dog, neither could Japan. A purebred akita, the animal had been in the habit of accompanying his master to Shibuya railway station every morning, then greeting him there on his return each evening.

And after the professor’s sudden death, the habit continued. Hachik , as the dog was known (from Hachi, meaning the number eight, and -k , meaning “little”) was first farmed out to foster carers.

But when he returned to Shibuya, to be minded by Ueno’s former gardener, the dog resumed his evening vigils at the station, scanning the alighting passengers for a face that would never return.

At first, he was considered a pest, ill-treated by station vendors and children. Then in 1932, a Japanese daily newspaper romanticised the dog’s vigil and turned him into a cult.

Even while Hachik  still lived, admirers erected a statue of him, while donations of food poured in.

By the time of his death in 1935, the dog might have been a martyr to yakitori chicken. A postmortem later found the remains of several wooden skewers in his stomach, although it turned out those hadn’t killed him.

His funeral made international headlines. A Reuters report carried in The Irish Times said he had been buried in Tokyo “by sixteen priests, according to the rites of Buddhism, and mourned by the whole nation”.

Promoted as a symbol of devotion and other prized virtues, the dead Hachik  was a nationalist hero, his story featuring in schoolbooks.

In what sounds like a cautionary metaphor, the bronze statue was later melted down for munitions during the second World War. But the cult survived. In 1948, a new statue took the place of the old one. It went on to be a Tokyo version of Clerys clock: a meeting place for generations of Japanese.

Among the other things, Shibuya is known for today is a celebrity road junction. During the Rugby World Cup in 2019, I caught the metro there to partake in one of the city’s rites of passage: the mass, six-way pedestrian crossing, triggered by the appearance of the little green man.

Up to 3,000 people cross the junction simultaneously, many pausing to take iPhone pictures of themselves and each other. The bronze Hachik  looks on, unmoved.

His is probably the most famous (and one of the better documented) examples of a universal legend: the faithful dog pining forever for a dead master.

More typically, the dog keeps a vigil at the owner’s grave: as in the tale of Greyfriars Bobby, a Scottish legend whose popularity almost rivals the Lough Ness monster and may be about equally factual.

A Skye terrier, Bobby, is said to have guarded his master’s grave in Edinburgh for 14 years until his own death in 1872. But the historicity of the story is something of a grey area – or even a Gray one, since two different John Grays, a farmer and a nightwatchman – have been advanced as the dog’s owner.

There may have been more than one Bobby too. It has been suggested that when the first one died, having become a tourist attraction, canny local traders found it imperative to replace him.

Even the dog’s pedigree has been questioned. He could have been a Dandie Dinmont, a popular breed at the time, but perhaps not as easily romanticised as a Skye.

A better-documented case in Europe was Fido (the popular dog name derives from the Latin for “faithful”), whose story made headlines in Italy in the 1940s and 50s.

Of uncertain breeding, he was found injured on a street one day in 1941 and nursed back to health by a local factory worker.

Like Hachik , he then developed the habit of accompanying his master on the commute every morning and greeting him at the bus stop in the evening.

Then in 1943, the owner died during an Allied bombing. Thereafter, until the dog’s own death in 1958, Fido kept the daily bus stop vigil in vain, garnering several Italian magazine articles in the process, and a 1957 mention in Time. He too earned a statue while still alive. He also enjoyed the affections of the townspeople of Luco, including a butcher who fed him and the bus company which let him wait indoors in cold weather.

The owner’s impoverished widow, however, had to keep renewing his licence every year, at least until 1957, when as Time reported:

“Last week, despite the desperate straits of his own treasury, the mayor of Luco himself decreed that Fido should henceforth live tax-free as the only legally unlicensed dog in Italy. ‘He has set an example of fidelity to our village,’ said his honor, ‘and deserves to be placed on the list of Luco’s honored citizens’.”

It was a populist move, but also a cost-efficient one. Tax-free Fido died a year later, of old age.

What must the farmer think of religious social media?

These days in Ireland are proving a godsend for farmers; hay is a month early, silage too. The strawberries are said to be the best in over 50 years.

Talking and observing farmers at work during these glorious summer days and then reading the religious comments on X and Facebook one can’t help but think what the social media authors are writing is a parallel world to the world of the farmer, indeed, the work of most people inhabit.

The holy/religous material on social media sounds and looks like a giant bubble waiting to be burst. Everything about it seems to be about nothing.

During the election of the pope or immediately after it Bishop Robert Barron said that he hopes the next papacy will be a quiet one. Think of it, these words from a man who never shuts up, who seems to tour the world with great speed.

I was looking at a farmer driving his tractor today pulling a trailer packed with bales of silage and wondering how in heaven’s name could any of the so-called religious stuff on social media mean anything to him. So much of it is about nothing, other than one ego outdoing another. Or maybe looking for money for a meaningless project.

Former Israeli prime minister Olmert criticises Netanyahu

In a radio interview yesterday former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was extremely critical of his country’s tactics in Gaza. 

The interviewer asked him how he felt about current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s criticism of how he had spoken about the behaviour of the Israeli Defence Forces. 

Olmert replied pointing out that Netanyahu’s son is currently studying in the United Sates and far away from fighting IDF soldiers in Gaza.

It was a riveting interview. 

Friendship is a prized gift, something never earned

This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.

Michael Commane

We have had a great stretch of fabulous weather. A West Kerry farmer tells me he has his hay in a month earlier than last year. It’s been a time for the outdoors.

Perfect weather for the bicycle. On one of my cycles I called to someone I know over 30 years. We don’t meet that often but anytime we do I am in awe of her kindness and generosity of spirit. There’s always a great rapport between us. She is in her mid-70s.

We chatted over a cup of tea and a slice or two of homemade brown bread. I’m still thinking of the hour or so we sat talking and laughing. She has that gift of making time stop, and you are all that matters at that moment.

Earlier in the year during lunch in one of our Dominican priories I said that I thought such-and -such a person was great. Someone at table asked me what made someone great in my eyes. For a moment I was stuck and then, half flippantly said that if I thought they liked me then I considered them great. There was a momentary silence at the table. Maybe people were surprised with my reply. I can still remember one man smiling before saying: ‘that’s a new one on me’.

What is it that attracts us to people? There is the whole world of sexuality that plays a large and significant role in how we team up. You would want to be a sublime liar or a total fool to deny the significance and indeed power of sexual attraction. But even with that there is always more to what makes people drawn to one another.

Can you imagine being friendly with someone whom you know does not like you? And then, the smallest of incidences can set a friendship on fire or destroy it dead.

Ever since I heard astrophysicist Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell tell Tommy Tiernan that there are one hundred thousand million galaxies I’m inclined to look at all reality, at least the reality that is in front of my eyes with a grain of salt. And yet, I greatly cherish my friendships. I’d be lost without those who are close to me. But why do I like X and don’t like Y? Why does X or Y like me? 

Surely in so many ways it’s a lottery, then again can’t you say the same about the totality of our lives. Or can you?

Every friendship is different, there is a uniqueness about friendship. But it can also make or break us. It must be close to hell to live in a broken marriage, where there is nothing left between the partners. Living in community too can be tumultuous.

No doubt all friendships require work. Like everything in life, there has to be give and take. But it’s the accidental element about it that is fascinating. 

I remember learning in theology that all being is accidental, except God. It’s what distinguishes God from the rest of creation.

Wise words from Dominican saint, Thomas Aquinas make great sense: 'There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship’.