WELCOME TO WEST & MID KERRY LIVE

Okay, right so, in the spirit of St. Patrick, whose day it was just prior to me sitting down to write this article, I feel I should engage in my own confession. This is also because I feel that I have learned something very important from the great saint’s life.
If there is something out there that people might accuse you of, get your apology in first and then you’ll wrong foot them and won’t have to write big long apologies or explanations to your ecclesiastical superiors. So here goes. Having recently been in print extolling the virtues of going without, or having less, I feel that I should come clean and admit that I have not always really done Lent properly. Often I think that my giving up something was tokenistic or that the thing I took up was something that I should really be doing all the time anyway. There have even been years where I don’t think I gave up or took on anything. Now maybe that is because there is a more ‘All can, some do, nobody has to,’ attitude to everything in the Church of Ireland. However, I suspect that the truth is a little more sinister. I think that some years I was too busy to think of something and then it just passed me by, but some years I probably thought to myself,  ‘I do enough as it is, I’m not doing any more.’  Now to start with it might be said that that is not necessarily a wrong statement. If I am doing all I can for God and society, well then no one should expect me to do more. The problem is that often I suspect that the underlying thought in my head was something like,  ‘I give that Jesus fellow nearly all of my time, his not going to have my chocolate biscuits as well!’. This line of thought is of course based on the idea that if I give X amount of my time to God that I should be entitled to A, B or C. I think that this type of thinking is quite common in the Western World. We look around ourselves at all the wonders of life and start pointing at bits and saying ‘I’m entitled to that bit of that’. Even in our giving up for Lent, there is often the subtext of what a fine fellow I am for forgoing my entitlement to a cream bun for 40 days.
There was one Lent where I did actually give up something substantial, only to substitute it for something else, so I could have something nice because everyone deserves something nice, don’t they? Well, not this Lent. This time I have done a bit of serious giving up and not just so I can gloat.
The reason I have done it properly is because I don’t like the idea of a culture of entitlement running rampage while we sit in the midst of a garden of Eden failing to appreciate all that we do have, and all that comes to us for free. In giving up my chocolate biscuits I’m trying to remind myself that being alive is some thing that I want to thank God for and at the end of the day, that chocolate biscuit, and all chocolate biscuits, are God’s anyway. So, God can have this one so that after Easter when I do have one of His biscuits, I will be truely thankful and hopefully appreciate the effort that went into getting that biscuit to me.
Rev. Máirt has one wife, two Irish victories celebrated ( one in Cricket, one in Rugby), three children and four more Sundays till Easter.