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A Few Words from Fr Joe…………………..

During the week a radio interviewer doing a ‘vox pop’ asked people on the street if they could remember a song from the charts that was being played back when they did their Leaving Cert? It’s a good question, at a time when your head was full of information, crammed in, until you almost burst, of course a bit of music was both a distraction and some relief. I remember very well studying and listening to Boney M and their Number 1 hit, ‘By the rivers of Babylon’ over and over again, it’s like an anthem of those exhausting days in June 1978. If you ever saw them on TV they were such an extraordinary group, Afro Caribbean, mad colourful costumes, and catchy repetitive music. I’m not quite sure why they were singing a religious song, straight from the Bible, making a people in exile almost sound cheerful! The line ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land’ sticks in my mind. Was the world of my teenage years a more religious place, that even the music in the charts reflected faith? I’m not so sure, but maybe even then I was becoming attuned to the way that God’s presence can be found everywhere. A few years later, when I entered Clonliffe this song, drawn from Psalm 137, was often sung at evening prayer. In that context it made more sense, talking of a people in exile, hanging their harps on popular trees, because away from their own homeland, with their ‘tongue clinging to the roof of my mouth’ their songs fell silent and they ‘sat and wept.’ Like so many Irish ballads, exile and loss is at the heart of the message, and memory of better times sustains the people, and their hope that God is with them and in time all will be well again. Best of luck to all our students and maybe this week’s No. 1, “The Cure” by Olivia Rodrigo will be a lasting memory for them in years to come.