Some thoughts on Tom McMahon's commentary which fit in with all this... (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Wednesday, July 11, 2012, 14:54 (314 days ago) @ Brian Coyne

I was going to write this in a separate string but I think it fits in with the conversation you've started, Enda.

Tom confesses in his commentary today to being "hooked in" to the whole "Fr Peyton Rosary Crusade" sort of spirituality and belief that was once so central to Catholicism. Tom "saw the light" a lot earlier than myself. I still fervently believed it up into the early 1990s I am almost ashamed to say today. I had had hesitations a long time before that, even from when I was back in school in the 1960s. One of my childhood memories is on Sunday nights after my father had closed the bars of his hotel he'd take my brother and myself for a walk around the country town where we lived in the twilight reciting the Rosary. Dad was a firm believer in the slogan "the family that prays together, stays together".

We should have seen it as propaganda way back then as my brother ended up absenting himself from our home as far away on the other side of the planet as he could get in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and I absented myself for 25 years on the other side of the Continent.

This "family that prays together, stays together" became a big element in the life of my (first) wife and myself when we came to raising our own family. We used to say the rosary with them. In the late 1980s early 1990s I was running a couple of businesses in Melbourne and commuting home to Perth ever six weeks or so as we had moved ourselves back there partly because we believed it would be a better environment for our children — and we'd decided to have them educated at our former schools.

By 1992 I was wanting to desperately sell the businesses and move back to Perth also. At one point I had a serious accident in my car and it was in for repairs which took about three months. We were also under pressure because I, perhaps in hindsight foolishly, had gone to the assistance of a cousin who was in deep trouble in a complex defamation case. I lived in a flat in St Kilda and walked home many nights from my office at the Victorian Technology Centre in Port Melbourne. I used to "pray the rosary" on those nightly walks firmly believing that Our Lady would "protect" my family in my absence. The short end of a long tale is that my life ended up in a most diabolical mess that I would never wish on any other person. It cured me of my beliefs in the "efficacy of the Rosary" and any "intercessions of the Blessed Virgin Mary" in looking after our affairs.

Even to this day I do retain a sense of "trust in Providence" taken from that passage inviting us to "look at the birds of the air, do they sweat anxiety"*. I sense though I'm still on a long journey trying to understand the "mystery" in this connection and relationship between ourselves and this "providential spirit" that seem to suffuse creation.

I do think we have been "led up the garden path" though by this "virginal image" of the mother of God which, I suspect, has been motivated alot by the need of the celibate to keep their minds on the job and away from their groins. This picture of womanhood, which largely seems sourced from some idealised picture through the eyes which a child might look at their mother (asexually) ia a long, long way from how most women see themselves, and for that matter how most men see women.

This "culture" has been imposed over centuries, principally by celibate men who have had a massive vested interested in not being distracted by "impure thoughts". We need to re-visit the modelling the "mother of God" and "mother of Jesus" provides as exemplars to women and to society at large. How do we do that? I don't know. Take something like the Rosary out of the equation, or the vision of a "plastic, saccharinely sweet, Mary", and you have to replace it with something that appeals right down in the heart of ordinary human beings without it becoming sentimental superstition and some sort of games that celibate or immature boys play.

*I do have some queries about that insight of Jesus as I watch the birds on my balcony when I feed them. This is a video I made some years ago exploring the anxiety of the birds of the air...

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]