I Am Said I (Huruma)

Brothers and sisters, our time is growing short. ( 1 Corinthians 7:29) This day last week, two women in their 50's living very different lives in different places had no thought of dying and yet by Friday and Saturday I was celebrating their funeral Masses. A very sobering thought! A sobering message from St. Paul! Our time is growing short! My time is growing short and there is wisdom to be discovered, there are lessons to be learned in the shortness of time. Over Christmas I learned two simple and important lessons. On Christmas day my two youngest nieces received lots and lots of presents. Mine were the last to be given them and by then the girls were so saturated with stuff that my gifts to them had little or no impact. I might as well have given them nothing and I think that next year I will give them gifts at a different time. What really had an impact on the girls was the fact that I was sleeping over in their house, an event that excited them more than ...

I dream that I’m travelling on an old ship, something like the Naomh Eanna but bigger. It is night time and very stormy. Making my way through the bar there are lots of people watching rugby on a modern black plasma wide-screen which is suspend high on the wall. At the far end I go through a door onto the deck. The ship is swaying heavily from side to side and the sea is black and foaming. The destination is Hollyhead but suddenly in the middle of the Irish Sea there’s a pier where the ship docks. I think the ship is coming in too fast, that it will crash against the pier but in the end it heaves and rests gently. And then the morning comes. I’m still out on deck in  the calm after the storm. A large bucket of jelly is standing on a table. Susan and I are sitting on  deckchairs. She’s as she was when I met her last Friday and she has a book open in her hands. She’s on my right hand side and I’m eating a bowl of red jelly. She says to me “It’s really very easy”. ...