There should be some perks to being a Parish Priest and this section is mine. The title is borrowed from a BBC programme of the same name where well-known people introduce listeners to readings that give them "Great Pleasure."

I am taking this opportunity to share with visitors to this site, readings that not only give me pleasure but help to open the Gospel message for me in my personal life and therefore also help me in my work as a priest. 

I'll add items as the spirit moves me and in no particular order. I'd love to hear what you think of my choices and the reasons I give, please.

POSTSCRIPT

By Seanus Heaney


And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.

Useless to think you'll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open


The first thing that struck me about this poem was the "I've been there," feeling it gave me.
Haven't we all known those heart-stopping moments when life caught us by surprise and made us outlandishly grateful for the night (afternoon) our parents conceived us? "It was worth coming just for this."

Heaney gloriously captures such a moment in this brief poem. I hope he and his publishers will forgive any unintentional breach of copyright.

The second thing this poem insisted upon for me was "Resurrection." In fact I used it as the basis for my homily on Easter Suday in 2006.

To believe in a historical event about a previously dead man rousing himself and vacating his burial place is one thing, but to know the transforming effect of this Risen Presence in our lives here and now, that is heaven, or at least the nearest thing we will get to it on this earth.

I read this poem to the church here at Holy Family for the sheer joy of the poem, for the energy it gives and the light it throws on a life that is here and now, and yet is so often beyond us.

At Castle Boterel

by Thomas Hardy


As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
To ease the sturdy pony’s load
When he sighed and slowed.

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
Matters not much, nor to what it led, ―
Something that life will not be balked of
Without rude reason till hope is dead,
And feeling fled.

It filled but a minute. But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill’s story ? To one mind never,
Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth’s long order ;
But what they record in colour and cast
Is—that we two passed.

And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,
In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
Remains on the slope, as when that night
Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love’s domain
Never again.

"The drizzle bedrenches," wonderful words. I've only got to read them and instantly I can feel my shoes squelching and see the drips falling from my umbrella. The whole poem has that feel about it. I sometimes think this is my favourite poem (can there be such a thing?) and the reason is there in verse 5. "But what they record in colour and cast, is - that we two passed" Hardy is makes it sound as if the rock surface is a kind of recording material permanently locking in the moment, keeping it safe  forever. Far fetched? Scientifically perhaps. But science cannot account for everything in life. Reading this poem makes me feel that eternity is not such a strange idea after all, and may well not be that far away either. Go on read it again, and if you don't see what I have been getting at, you will. 

NEXT

Next comes a poet whose very name makes me feel throughly ashamed of myself. Francis Ledwige was a native of Slane a town in my native County Meath and little more than 25 miles from where I was born. Yet truth is I know very little about him beyond a brief outline of his time in the First World War and the place of his burial. [died in the Battle of Ypres in Belgium just weeks before his 30th birthday on July 31st, 1917, and later reinterred in the nearby Artillery Wood Military Cemetery. A stone tablet commemorates Ledwidge in the Island of Ireland Peace Park, Messines, Belgium.]

To make matters worse, the poem I offer here was probably the very first poem I knew, taught me by Mr Melville, Head Teacher at my primary school back in the 1940's.

I love it for its attention to detail and for the way it tmakes me in my turn pay greater attention to the details of own daily surroundings. "F.L. I promise to make amends - honestly I do."

Here's the poem:   

I walk the old frequented ways
That wind around the tangled braes,
I live again the sunny days
Ere I the city knew.

And scenes of old again are born,
The woodbine lassoing the thorn,
And drooping Ruth-like in the corn
The poppies weep the dew.

Above me in their hundred schools
The magpies bend their young to rules,
And like an apron full of jewels
The dewy cobweb swings.

And frisking in the stream below
The troutlets make the circles flow,
And the hungry crane doth watch them grow
As a smoker does his rings.

Above me smokes the little town,
With its whitewashed walls and roofs of brown
And its octagon spire toned smoothly down
As the holy minds within.

And wondrous impudently sweet,
Half of him passion, half conceit,
The blackbird calls adown the street
Like the piper of Hamelin.

I hear him, and I feel the lure
Drawing me back to the homely moor,
I'll go and close the mountain's door
On the city's strife and din.