Tag: Catholic

What are you afraid of?

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This article was published in the Scottish Catholic Observer on Friday 2nd November 2018.

Are you afraid of the dark? Lots of people need a little nightlight in their bedroom in order to get to sleep. Are you afraid of dogs, birds or even clowns? Yes, fear of clowns; there is a word for it, ‘coulrophobia’. Fear is natural. Fear alerts us to danger and sets the body to deal with the danger. It can prompt the body to produce adrenaline, enhancing the ability to fight or flee. Fear can be a lifesaver.

I’ve always had a fear of snakes. I always thought I’d be able to get away from a snake as snakes slither about fairly slowly. That idea was destroyed one day on a dusty road in the bush when a six foot long snake shot across in front of the truck I was in. I was shocked at how fast it could move. I’m even more afraid of snakes now.

Fear can be used to control others. Fear of strangers can turn people against incomers. If the incomers look different, a different colour or unfamiliar dress they are easy to recognise. Those who use a different language or practice a different religion are often rejected by the indigenous communities. This has been exploited by politicians who play on people’s fear of strangers to whip up support.

Fear doesn’t always help. You hear of people being frozen in fear when finding themselves in a very dangerous situation. Fear sometimes stops us doing what we know we should be doing. Sometimes we are afraid of appearing to be different. We don’t want to stand out from the crowd. Being seen to be different can result in us being left out or even ostracised. We all, naturally, want to belong to the society we live in. Sometimes we accept norms and behaviours that don’t really fit in with our views.

In today’s world it can be difficult to recognise what is a generally accepted view and what is an idea that is made to look like the normal view. Pressure groups use the press, social media and public demonstrations to promote ideas. For example we can promote sexual equality and demand that men and women have equal rights. We can go further and say that equality is the basic human right. Not many will argue with that. Then we can claim that those who are uncertain about their gender should be treated equally. Finally we can claim that everyone has the right to choose their gender.

We might find these arguments confusing but difficult to dispute. They can sound reasonable. Official bodies and political parties accept them; nobody wants to alienate potential voters. The pressure is on us to accept this new norm and conform. Who wants to stand out from the crowd?

Of course we must stand out from the crowd if the crowd is wrong. Now I have no doubt that there are people with genuine gender problems. These may be rooted in their biology, physiology or psychology. The appropriate professionals can bring them the help they need and assist in the decisions they take. That is a far cry from declaring that anyone can choose the gender they wish to have. It’s an idea that is not only misguided but can be dangerous.

A friend of mine was telling me recently about being taken to task by a pupil because he referred to her as a girl. She refused to be regarded as either male or female. Realising he was dealing with a delicate situation he asked her how she wished to be addressed. She replied that she should be referred to as ‘it’. The teenage years can be difficult enough coming to terms with one’s sexuality without confusing the issue.

I’ve heard of parents of new-born babies taking a gender neutral approach to child rearing, allowing the child to choose their gender at some later stage. It seems to me that we are taking away any certainties in our lives for no good reason. It is the result of muddled thinking. Thinking that equality is the basic right was the first mistake; it is not. The basis of any society is truth. Society cannot work effectively if it is not based in absolute truth.

This gender issue is not the only one where ignoring the truth is causing problems. We recently saw an occasion where a government minister was forced to apologise to Parliament for misleading the house (you can’t say lying in the House of Commons) about the results of an investigation into her department. We have an American President who appears on television in the morning saying one thing and later in the evening says the opposite.

In international negotiations we have the British Government signing an agreement and months later telling us that that agreement is no longer valid. Without certainty nobody can trust us. Life becomes impossible without the truth.

Where can we find this certainty? How do we deal with the fear of rejection if we stand out from the crowd? As Christians we must expect to be at odds with the world. We take our lead from Jesus. How did Jesus react to rejection? In John’s gospel we read that Jesus told the people something that disturbed them.

“I am the living bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.”

John 6:51

Now many of the people who heard this could not accept it and walked away. Jesus was not put off by this. He made no attempt to bring them back. He didn’t change anything he said to win them over. The truth is the truth and you either accept it or reject it.

If we find ourselves being rejected because we believe in the truth and that does not comply with the accepted norm how do we react? How do we deal with the fear of rejection? Again we look to Jesus as our guide.

Jesus warned his disciples that they would face rejection and even persecution.

“Do not be afraid of them therefore. For everything that is now covered be uncovered, and everything now hidden will be made clear. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the daylight; what you hear in whispers, proclaim from the housetops.

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; fear him rather who can destroy both body and soul in hell.”

Matthew 10: 26, 28

The message is clear. Don’t be afraid. You can choose to be rejected by the world and be accepted by the God who created everything or give in to the world and face a far greater rejection in the future. We have recently seen Christians in the Middle East willingly give up life itself rather than deny the truth. I’m not suggesting we should seek martyrdom but we must be strong in the Faith and proclaim the message of the Gospel by our behaviour and in how we deal with our fellow man. Or as my mother used to say, ‘Tell the truth and shame the Devil.’

Joseph McGrath

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Scandals in the Church

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This article was published in the Scottish Catholic Observer on Friday 5th October 2018

Reading the newspapers and watching the news on television recently has become a painful experience for Catholics. Every day seems to bring more stories of child abuse perpetrated by priests, nuns and bishops. Priests have been sentenced; bishops have been accused of covering up abuse and we have looked on, aghast, wondering how this could have happened.

Child abuse has been exposed in other churches as well. Politicians and others in power, staff in children’s homes and youth groups have all stood accused of abuse. That’s bad enough but surely it should not happen in our Church. After all, we are supposed to be the good guys. The world that was brought up on priests played by Bing Crosby and Pat O’Brien who turned youngsters away from crime and brought them back to the fold in those old films is shocked to find abuse in the Catholic Church. I’m shocked too.

My idea of the good guys was fashioned in my Saturday afternoon visits to the Greens Cinema with all the other boys in our street. Every week we were treated to cowboy films. We recognised the good guys by their white hats and the bad guys by their black hats. Life was simple then. Sometimes the plot would take a different turn and one of the good guys would fail to live up to expectations, a bad goodie. Then one of the bad guys would do something honourable, a good baddie. That sometimes prompted arguments about whether one character was a good baddie or a bad goodie. It can be hard to tell in real life too.

I was brought up to respect all clergymen, priests, ministers or whatever. We expected these people to be above anything bad. It comes as a shock to find that they might just be bad goodies or even good baddies. What we have failed to recognise is that they are just human beings like the rest of us. Being good does not come with the collar, it is the same struggle we all have, worse because so much more is expected.

The most recent trend has become the finger pointing in the hierarchy. Even Pope Francis has been blamed for not having dealt with these problems, even those that occurred well before he became pope. Now this idea that someone out there should have dealt with this and it must be all their fault doesn’t seem to fit well with what I think the Church is. The Catholic Church is not a large corporation where the board of management decide everything and tell the rest of us what we should do.

The Church is the Body of Christ, alive and working in the world. We are all parts of that body. Just as problems with my foot affect the rest of my body (especially in the mornings) problems with any one of us affect the whole body of the Church. It seems to me that we all bear some responsibility for the health of the Church. The revelations of abuse, while painful, are vital for the health of this body. When I read of the abuse of children in homes run by the Church it reminded me of the violence that was meted out to children in our schools. It is only in recent years that corporal punishment was banned in our school system. Before that it was acceptable to belt pupils for getting an answer wrong. That was the norm in Scotland. The Church’s failure, our failure,

to oppose this attitude is the disgrace. We all accepted this as normal behaviour. Abusing children was OK. This was not a problem with priests and bishops. This was a problem with the whole of society.

How can it be that people who repeatedly heard Christ’s teaching about how to cherish children accepted cruelty? It makes me wonder about the real depth of our belief in the Gospel. Have we been going through life paying lip service to Christ’s teaching while accepting the moral values of the world? Is it any wonder then that young people accept the world’s views on sexuality, abortion and materialism, rejecting the Church’s teaching?

I was brought up with the view that the priests were the spiritual descendants of the apostles. They had to carry on the work of evangelisation in the world. I’m now beginning to realise that this is too simplistic. We are all the spiritual descendants of the apostles and it is our job to bring the Gospel to the world. The priests and bishops have a special role in that as they bring us the sacraments but we are the main bringers of the Gospel. In my daily life I have contact with people who will never meet a priest. Who else will bring Christ into their lives?

Now I hear you saying, “Who are you to bring the Gospel? You are just a sinner like everyone else.” and that’s true. I am a sinner, just like everyone else in the Church is a sinner. That’s the whole point. Christ came to save sinners, us. As an individual I’m not really equipped to go out to the world and convert it to the Gospel. As part of the Body of Christ; as part of a Church strong in faith and committed to convert ourselves into the people God wants us to be, I can have an effect on the world.

Really, these current abuse scandals should make us take a good look at ourselves. Do we just observe the letter of the law or are we imbued with the spirit of the law? Are we obsessed with the minute details of Catholicism and blind to the big view of the ministry we are baptised into? Trotting out to Sunday Mass and sitting there, chatting to our neighbour, while Christ Himself becomes present on the altar seems to be missing the point. Opting for macaroni cheese for dinner on a day of fast and abstinence but ignoring those who have no food is a sign we have lost the plot.

As long as we rely on our own strengths and abilities alone we will fail in our mission of evangelisation. We can only succeed when we allow the Holy Spirit to work through us. We can’t put priests and bishops on a pedestal where we see them as possessing supernatural powers. We are all fallible. On our own we fail to match up to the Gospel. We can only succeed when we allow the Spirit to use us. For that to happen to me I must change the way I look at the world.

I must become more aware of my dependence on the Holy Spirit. I must think of the gifts I have been given as tools. I have eyes to let me see. I must look critically at what I see. I have a brain to let me think and I must think about I see and make a judgement on what is right and wrong. I must act on my judgements and use the gift of speech to speak out against what is wrong and speak up for what is right. Our school motto in Columba High School was ‘Speak out for Justice’. If we all do that there will be fewer scandals in the future.

Church Scandals – Who is at fault?

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My column is published today in the Scottish Catholic Observer. Who is to blame for the recent scandals? Is it the priests, the bishops or even the Pope? Get your copy this weekend for my take on this. It’s sure to be controversial so make sure you get your copy this weekend. If you miss it you’ll have to wait ’till next weekend to get the full text here.

What Do You Covet? The Last Commandments.

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This article was published in the Scottish Catholic Observer on Friday 7th September 2018

This is the last of my articles on the Ten Commandments. I’ve decided to look at the ninth and tenth commandments together because they deal with the same idea, coveting. Coveting is not a word we use so much today so I looked it up. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary it is defined as

“to want to have something very much, especially something that belongs to someone else . ”

That’s fairly straightforward but why is it so important as to require two commandments? Presumably we would want something because it is better than what we have. What is wrong with wanting something better? I think it is a very important part of human nature to want to improve. We are the only species capable of making changes that improve our world.

Take the houses we live in. When I was a wee boy I lived in a tenement building where three homes on each landing shared one toilet. Now I live in a house that has two toilets all to itself. We have a natural desire to want to improve ourselves and we often see that as meaning we need better things.

Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, understood from his uncle’s study of the human mind that we all aspire to better ourselves. He found a way to harness this to persuade people to change their behaviour. At the end of World War I, one hundred years ago, American industry had geared up for war production. Now the war was over they needed people to buy things to replace the demands of the war.

Bernays put his ideas to work and devised a strategy to increase demand for cigarettes. He took up the campaign for emancipation of women and In a parade in New York had women parade smoking cigarettes under the banner of ‘Torches of Freedom’. Women smoking had been frowned upon now this was a campaign to get women to rebel and assert their equality with men. The market for cigarettes virtually doubled. Public relations had come to maturity. We can be persuaded to want something we don’t need.

It seems to me that we all need a positive self-image if we are to be happy. We need to know that we are important, that someone holds us in some regard. The effects of loneliness are corrosive and we can see this in the rise in the suicide rate. We are often persuaded that we can prove our importance by the things we have. For some that means wearing the latest fashion. We discard perfectly good clothes and replace them with something new. For me that usually results in a jacket that I am comfortable in being dumped and a new one purchased because my wife won’t be seen with me in the ‘shabby’ one.

Human relationships suffer the same way. We are constantly shown images of women with ‘perfect’ figures and men with muscular stomachs. We are persuaded that someone else’s wife of husband is better than the one we have and desire to have them. Marriages break up. Families are disrupted. Nobody is really happy.

Money is the other thing we desire because it can put us up there with the elite. Billionaires can display their wealth with multiple mansions, yachts and even personal planes. How we would love to be like them. The Lottery and the Euro Millions take in vast fortunes each week because we think that a big win would sort out all our problems. A couple of months ago someone I know won the Millionaire raffle on the lottery. He won one million pounds. He gave half of it to his son to buy a house and spread the rest over his nieces and nephews. He virtually gave it all away. He is a very happy man because he has solved problems for other people.

I have come across a few millionaires in my career. They all looked miserable. Rarely a smile crossed their faces. Their money never made them happy. On a flight earlier in the year I watched a film, “All the Money in the World” about John Paul Getty who was the world’s richest man. His grandson had been kidnapped and he refused to pay the ransom. It reminded me of an interview Alan Wicker did with him. He was unhappy living in England. He wanted to be in America but was afraid to fly in case the plane crashed and thought that a boat might sink so he had to stay put. He was thoroughly miserable.

How often do these things we covet actually make us unhappy? Surely we should be happier when we have them? But we don’t. How many people have be caught by the Nigerian scam where they get an email from a woman whose husband hid millions in a bank vault and she needs help to get it out. Send her the money to get access to the money and share in the riches. The money is sent and vanishes for ever.

It seems to me that this all brings unhappiness. I think I’ve spotted the reason. We are all striving for happiness. To be happy we must feel that we are respected and loved by others. We look around to find ways of achieving that. Of course we are looking in the wrong place. Popularity is a fleeting thing. You can be a hero today and be forgotten tomorrow. You are still the same person but the world moves on.

To achieve happiness you need to look at who you really are. You are not the sum of your possessions. You are not the person others see. You are unique. Your existence here is not random; you are here for a reason. Kojak’s catch phrase was “Who loves ya baby?” (If you remember that you are as old as me.) It is the key to happiness.

The answer is simply that you are loved by the only one who can really see you as you really are. You are loved by the God who made the universe and everything in it. If the creator of everything that exists loves you despite all the things you don’t like about yourself why would you worry about what anybody else thinks? You don’t need a private plane, a floating gin palace or Miss World on your arm. That’s why the ninth and tenth commandments tell you not to covet anything. Things make you unhappy. George, who gave away the million, is one happy man. You can be too.

The Seventh Commandment

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The Seventh Commandment – Thou Shalt Not Steal

If the Ten Commandments are God’s guide to human happiness how does ‘Thou Shalt not steal’ fit into it? Does stealing make you unhappy? Certainly we are unhappy if someone steals from us so stealing does spread unhappiness; but people seem to be happy to steal from others. Theft and fraud are on the increase. Why is this and was it always like this?

Perhaps theft is increasing because it is so much easier to do today in the age of the internet? In the past a thief would have to snatch something from you or break into your house. To get at your savings the robber would have to go in and rob the bank. While that still happens, more theft is happening remotely. People can gain access to your savings remotely and rob you without even being in the country. People who relied on the honesty of banks and pension schemes may find that their savings have been taken and they are left with nothing.

In the past you could be hanged for stealing a sheep. Today you might have your knighthood taken away for robbing a pension scheme. So what does the commandment forbid and what does it allow?

The seventh Commandment is really about providence. Everything we have, the Earth and all its resources are provided by God. The Earth’s resources are for the good of all people. We can take the resources we need as personal property, earning them by work or by inheritance or gifts. The commandment forbids us from taking anyone’s property without their permission. It also regards keeping things we borrow, fraud, paying unjust wages and forcing up prices to the detriment of others.

There is no point in me sitting back smugly thinking that I’m ok with the seventh commandment because I don’t steal; it’s not as simple as that. This is about how we share the Earth’s resources, the gifts from God. We are entitled to acquire the resources we need to live. In simpler times this was very straightforward. You could grow the crops you needed and farm your animals. This was limited by the amount of land you could work. When societies became more complicated that changed. When land was enclosed to create more efficient agriculture there were those who owned land and those who had to work for the landowner. That can be a good system that provides more food than we got from individual plots of land. It’s only good if the workers are paid a fair wage that lets them share in the resources provided.

Industrialisation takes this further and allows the owners to acquire vast wealth. It is easy to forget that the resource of the Earth are provided for the common good and believe that we should take as much as we can as our own personal property.  Probably the greatest gift of creation is human life. Our lives are given as a free gift and we have been given free will to allow us how to use this gift. The commandment forbids us to abuse this freedom of our fellow human beings. If we enslave people or see their worth simply as a source of profit then we break the commandment. Slavery may have been abolished but it still exists in practice. People trafficking is now one of the major problems confronting the police.

Now I don’t have any slaves. I don’t have employees. I might feel that this aspect of the commandment does not apply to me. I would be wrong. One of the curious things I have noticed while shopping with my wife is how few items on sale are made in this country. I get the impression that everything is made in the Far East. That is not necessarily a problem but journalists have shown many instances of people in the East working in conditions we would not accept here and for very little money. They have to work long hours and still remain in poverty. That’s not the case for everything we buy but how do we know how the workers who made our clothes are treated? Can I be sure that my cheap trainers were not made by slave labour?

I don’t know what the solution is; even well-known companies have been found to have goods manufactured in conditions that exploit the workers. I must confess that I have never been terribly interested in the trade deals our country has with the Third World. Perhaps it’s something I should be thinking about the next time I use my vote to elect those who make these deals. If I go out to enrich myself by making someone poorer that must be against the seventh commandment; even if the other person is at the other side of the world.

The seventh Commandment goes much further than stealing. The Earth and its contents are a gift from God and we are to use these resources for our good and well-being. These resources are for the use of all mankind, even those who have not been born yet. That makes us responsible for maintaining the ability of the Earth to provide for us. The commandment forbids us from stealing from future generations. If we go about stripping the Earth of its resources to increase our wealth then we are abusing those gifts.

We are responsible for handing on a world that has all that future generations will need. Our use of the Earth’s resources must be sustainable. Now is that what we are doing? It seems to me that we are plundering the Earth’s resources as fast as we can; spending the Earth’s wealth as if there were no tomorrow. Perhaps there won’t be a tomorrow for those coming after us if we keep this up. I was in the Philippines a few years ago and visited a hole in the ground, a really big hole, where there used to be a mountain. They dug the mountain away to extract minerals.

We are also using up the Earth’s animals faster than they are replaced. I don’t mean we are eating all the cattle. We are killing all the elephants to get their ivory tusks. That is only one example of the animal species we are removing from the Earth. Our children’s children may never see some species except in books or films. We are stealing their future wealth.

Now I have never personally dug away a mountain nor shot an elephant but am I in that chain of consumption that is at the root of all this destruction? My home is kept warm by burning natural gas reserves. I have a smartphone that uses some rare metals, supplies of which are running out. This is modern living and I have not given any thought to the damage I might be causing to the Earth. What pollution is caused to the air and the seas just to satisfy my desire to have the latest gadget?

I’m posing myself this question and there is no easy answer. I’ve been smugly satisfied because I’m not a petty thief, shoplifting in ASDA; while I might be a major thief, using up the resources that belong to future generations. The world would be a happier place if we all used less and took positive steps to improve our world. Perhaps I should make a start by sorting out the garden? It’s not much but it would be a start.

The Sixth Commandment – Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery

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The Sixth Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery

In this series I’m trying to show that the Ten Commandments are God’s guide to human happiness. I’m finding the Sixth Commandment a difficult one to do. Readers might ask what my experience of adultery is and I’d have to admit I have none. My critics might say that people commit adultery because it makes them happy so my idea that the commandment is a guide to happiness must be wrong.

Well, I can’t write from personal experience but people do write about death and I’m sure they must be alive to do that so personal experience is not always necessary; observation can suffice. I would think that adultery will cause unhappiness and worse in the long term. Adultery is often the cause of the breakup of a marriage and all the hurt that that involves. Families suffer, especially when children find their world turned upside down.

Adultery can lay one open to blackmail. History shows us examples of how the resulting scandal can wreck a career and ruin a life. The Profumo affair in the early sixties, when John Profumo, Secretary of State for War in the MacMillan government had an affair with Christine Keeler, caused him to end a promising career and contributed to the fall of the Conservative Government. Many people were deeply unhappy.

To understand the nature of adultery we need to look at the nature of marriage. Adultery is committed by a married person. It’s not so much about the sex as about matrimony. Weddings are joyful occasions. The preparations for a wedding are mind-blowing in the detail required. The details about invitations, dresses, hymns, cake etc. are endless and expensive. A wedding today is a major undertaking. Every bride wants their wedding to be spectacular and memorable. Many couples these days decide to go away to exotic locations for a wedding. I’ve even read of couples getting married while skydiving. Given all the effort that goes into it, who could blame us for regarding this as the sacrament of matrimony? It’s not.

Weddings are spectacular, not because of the dresses and the band, but because of who is involved. Matrimony is the only sacrament where the priest does not confer the sacrament. The bride and groom confer the sacrament on each other but someone else is involved. Like any sacrament matrimony is an encounter with Christ. How spectacular would it be to have Prince William at your wedding, the future King? Well in Christ you have the King of Kings and he is not just there for the wedding.

The sacrament of matrimony involves everything you do in every day of your marriage. It’s the marriage that is the sacrament, not the wedding. Taking your wedding vows is only the start, everything after that is sacramental. Everything from having and providing for children down to making the toast in the morning are sacramental and an encounter with Christ. Committing adultery is not just defaulting on a legal agreement as in a civil marriage; it is offending against the sacrament. The positive side of this is that you earn grace for everything you do in that marriage, even taking out the bins. You get that grace from God to help you live out your marriage.

When I got married my wife promised to stick with me for better or worse, in sickness and in health ‘till death do us part. Now that is a big ask. I can’t think of another agreement you are asked to make that is so demanding. What a great profession of love that is.

 

I was a guest at a wedding recently. It’s only one of many weddings I have attended but this one was a bit different. The priest’s homily is usually upbeat and positive about the marriage. This one was slightly different. It was upbeat but came with a caution. He pointed out that the honeymoon will come to an end. The couple will wake up one day and he will discover that she is not an angel and she will find that he is not Prince Charming. The hard reality of living with another human being with human failings will strike. I can only imagine the disappointment (my wife reads this column so I need to be careful here).

That’s when real married life begins and the grace we get from the sacrament kicks in. Once we are away from the dazzle of the wedding and confront all the challenges of normal daily living the love and support we bring to each other in marriage brings us the strength to persevere. Families bring responsibilities and challenges. I’m grateful that there were two of us working together to bring up our children. Surely there should be some support mechanism for those who, as a result of a death or a marriage breakup, have to bring up their children alone.

Critics of religion often describe the commandments as a negative list of don’ts. That’s a bit like describing the “Stop, Look and Listen” advice on crossing the road as negative. The Sixth Commandment is not negative it is urging us to be faithful to each other and the sacrament that brings us so much support. How does the Church support marriages in difficulty?

The aftermath of the Second World War saw a big increase in marriage difficulties. Men were returning from the war after almost six years of absence to families who had grown used to life without them. Many things had changed in the interval and the relationships had not been able to grow with the changes. Marriages were in difficulty and the Church responded by creating a counselling service to help. The Catholic Marriage Advisory Council was staffed by married people who had come through a rigorous selection procedure and were given continuous training.

Their training enabled the counsellors to help the couple identify the core problems in their relationship and work towards a solution. Problems tend to grow over a long period and so the counselling is no quick fix. The counsellors work with the couple over a protracted period to repair their relationship. The name was always a bit strange because it wasn’t a council, they didn’t advise and it didn’t limit the help to Catholics. It’s now known as Scottish Marriage Care.

I see this as the Church’s practical work in support of the Sixth Commandment. It’s not a list of don’ts but a positive step in helping people facing the realities of life. Human beings are very good at seeing what they want to see and missing the obvious. The counsellors are trained to peel away all the layers of misperception and reveal the true causes of conflict. Once you know the true cause of your problem you can find a solution. That’s how to find real happiness.

You might not think that applies to you but just how good are you at following events? If you would like to find out just how good you are you will find a video test below Try it out for a simple measure of how good you are at seeing what is there rather than what you want to see. I’d be interested in your findings.

How many passes do the white team make?

Keeping the Sabbath Holy? – My January Column – Full Text

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Over the last couple of months I’ve been examining the Ten Commandments to see if they are really God’s guide to happiness. This month I’ve been looking at the third Commandment – remember to keep holy the Sabbath day. So what’s the Sabbath day and how do we keep it holy?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives us more detail.

“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work.”

The Jewish Sabbath is a Saturday but the early Church made our day of rest a Sunday to mark the day of Christ’s resurrection. Now I would imagine that having a day when you don’t have to go to work would make most of us happy but why the ban on work and just how practical is that?

In Scotland there are many Christians who believe that no work of any kind should be done on a Sunday, The day should be completely reserved for worshipping God. Even household chores must be completed on the Saturday night and Sunday will see no cooking or cleaning. A day spent in close communion with God should make us happy.

A few years ago some island communities were split over the issue of the ferries sailing on a Sunday. For Catholics and many other denominations Sunday does not mean a complete shutdown of normal life. According to my old ‘penny catechism’ the Church requires that we assist at a public Mass and refrain from servile work on a Sunday. I suppose the difference is about what we mean by holy.

Servile work would be going to work as usual, working for pay. Working in the home, preparing meals, tidying up etc. would not be classed as servile work. Whatever we do for our family, making meals, cleaning the kitchen etc. is part of marriage and because matrimony is a sacrament we actually receive grace for doing these things. I think that means these tasks are making the Sabbath holy.

In our society today we are often expected to work on a Sunday as a normal part of the job. We expect the buses and trains to run on a Sunday. Where would we be if the emergency services didn’t work on Sunday? Doctors and nurses in hospitals must work on Sunday. Some people would not be able to get to Mass otherwise. Even in non-essential jobs Sunday working is seen as normal. The shops are open on Sunday. How many of us leave Mass and go straight to the supermarket or meet friends in a coffee shop to catch up? These things require people to work on Sunday.

It is also permissible to indulge in entertainment like going to a football match (though some of the matches I’ve seen require a great stretch of the imagination to describe them as entertainment) or the cinema or some other entertainment. These things promote bonding among friends and family. But what about the workers; those who have to work so that we can be entertained also have need of family time. They may get time off during the week but that might not allow for family activity.

I noticed that Poland has decided that Sunday shopping should be phased out to allow the workers to have their day of rest as well as everyone else. This may not be too popular with the shoppers but I for one would be delighted to have one day in the week when I can’t be taken shopping.

So what exactly do we mean by holy? This is a question that has got me into arguments in the past. Some would cling to an image of someone kneeling in prayer before a crucifix or a statue of a saint. Hands joined in prayer are a famous image on prayer cards. There is no doubt that being in contemplation of God or in deep prayer would be described as being holy. However I don’t think that is the only context that could be described as holy.

Saint Thomas described holiness as the virtue by which we make all our acts subservient to God. It would follow then that whenever we act in ways that follow Jesus’ example we are being holy. How, then, could we keep the Sabbath holy? If we join with our fellow Catholics in the celebration of the Eucharist we are joining with them in communion with Christ. Jesus spent time withal sorts of people, his disciples, friends and many people he did not know. He shared meals with them and engaged in conversation.

I would consider from his example that we could spend the Sabbath with family and friends, sharing a meal, conversation and entertainment (there is no mention of Jesus going to the football but we can disregard that) and act in a way that is holy. When we are dealing with those we don’t know we should treat them with respect and friendliness.

You might argue that we should always behave in that way and you would be right. Why would we expect to spend Sunday behaving in one way and the rest of the week behaving differently? Really we should try to keep every day holy. We don’t need to walk around with a beatific smile on our face every day but I suspect Jesus didn’t do that either.

Now the question is simply one of whether this approach to holiness would make us happy. Now it seems to me that breaking up the working week so that life is not just one long unbroken trail of working days must be good for the psyche. Whether your work is hard physical labour or some more cerebral occupation you need to stop and rest regularly.

Whatever your station in life, Prime Minister or bin man, it is good to stop and consider the relationship you have with God. You were made by the God who created the universe and all its wonders. In your Sunday Mass you receive the Saviour who died to save you personally. He knows your name and listens to your prayers. God has no favourites; you are just as important to Him as the Bishop or the Pope. In that Mass we are all joined together through Christ. How could that fail to make us happy?

In making our Sabbath day a holy day we can transcend the daily niggles and hurts that can make us unhappy. We stop and remind ourselves that we are passing through all this on a journey to our eternal home. We will leave behind all the worries, all the trivial issues that bother us. We can start a new week ready to face whatever confronts us.

It’s never material things that make us happy. Your new sports car will only make you feel good until you start to hear strange noises or warning lights start blinking on the dashboard. Our happiness depends on our relationships. We need to build good relationships with our friends, family and the people we come into contact with. Our relationship with God is the most important and brings true happiness.

Keeping our Sabbath day holy builds these relationships. So to be truly happy don’t treat the Sabbath as just another day; it’s the most important day of the week.