the waiting

grey light upon sleeping fields
the stillness i have come to love
time and tide cease surcease
peace sits like a glove
shadow sifts like memory

the dog stirs on his chain
and whines and lifts his eyes
for the walk he knows we'll take
though storm clouds steal the skies
and grey light curtains into rain

so waits the world tonight
in darkness and in pain

the world waits for christ

irish election cliches explained

The Hospitals Crisis: Too many bitchy nurses in the hospitals.

The Housing Crisis: Government policy to turn Ireland into one giant County Council sink estate.

Climate Change: A new voodoo based religion which involves sublimating real issues to a quasi mystical quest to control the weather.

Transgender Bill: The Fine Gael political party is standing on a policy platform which includes forcing everyone in the country called William to have a sex change operation.

Public Service Broadcasting: The keynote propaganda term of a lobbying strategy being pursued by bankrupt atheistic abortionist euthanasist viewerless readerless media groups Independent Newspapers, RTE and the Irish Times who want the government to continue financing their culture war against the Catholic Church in perpetuity with public money.

Shit Fein: Proxy political party run by the drug dealing, bank robbing, people trafficking child abusing IRA mafia.

The Revolution Of Rising Expectations: Cultural dysfunct, orchestrated by the media, whereby every individual citizen of the Republic Of Ireland has effectively become an independent political party endlessly demanding State resources for his or her own personal bailiwick.

Bailiwick: Whim.

T-Shock: Nickname for the Prime Minister who is a rapper of some repute and a prime minister of none.

Gagging Order: Requirement for citizens to read nonsensical generic party political manifestos until they throw up.

election eve in eireann

"How are you going to vote?" quoth me.
"I don't know, they're all the same," says Rowena.
"If you say they're all the same, they will be," quoth me.
"I can't pick between them," sez she.
"Well what are the main issues for you?" wonders me.
"Funding for social services," answereth she.
I ruminate briefly under a rising pression.
The little vein down my forehead pulses.
"Is everyone just looking for money for their own little bailiwick?" I burst out finally. "Is that Irish politics? Is it all about more money for nursies, more money for soldiers, more money for bus drivers, more money for anyone in an IRA run trade union, money, money, money? Is that the only issue? Is anyone capable of advocating something on any other issue in the interests of the broader community that is not an excuse to demand limitless sums of money? Is no one concerned about the gangs taking over our towns and cities? The mafia owned Judges letting murderers off with pattycake sentences and the mafia infiltrated prison service letting murderers out at weekends or quietly truncating their sentences to half nothing? Does anyone care about the collapse of immigration law? Sex change operations which don't work being carried out on kids at Crumlin Children's Hospital by Frankenstein British doctors that the Health Services Executive has imported from England with funding from the debased and debasing European Union because no Irish doctor would violate children in this way? Does no one care about the legalisation of abortion? Are you all just worrying about gouging a few last sad extra pennies out of these kleptocrats while Ireland falls down around you? Do people care about nothing except demanding more money for themselves?"
"Actually you might have a point there," said Rowena.

efficacy of prayer

Prayer is true living.
There are various sorts of prayers.
Petitions, incantations, invocations, acts of faith, acts of hope, acts of love, calling on the creator desperately, speaking the holy name with reverence, going on pilgrimage to a holy place, community praise in church, sitting in silence before a holy image, celebrating friendship, thinking of God while working, rejoicing in the countryside or in the cities, giving thanks for all your gifts, renouncing the world as a sacrifice, offering something to God, visiting someone, minding loved ones, tending the sick, being still and knowing that he is God.
A wag has stated (I think it was Saint Augustine of Hippo) that when you sing, you pray twice.
Prayer gets things done.
It has been claimed that Ugo Festa was cured of multiple sclerosis while looking on an image of the divine mercy.
Many thousands in our time say they have been healed during pilgrimages to Lourdes.
My own greatest ever experience of peace, a really sensational experience, came as I finished praying what was then a full rosary, joyful, sorrowful and glorious mysteries, in Italy in September 1992.
Shortly afterwards Pope John Paul the Second decided the rosary was too short and added five mysteries of light.
They're worth the candle.
If one accepts the gospels as being true, Jesus as described in them, clearly sets an example.
He prays over the sick.
He prays for hours alone.
He prays for healings.
After he raises someone from the dead, he says: "I thank you Father that you have heard my prayer."
He teaches us how to pray by giving us the Our Father prayer itself.
When his disciples ask him why they couldn't cast out a particular demon from someone, having previously cast out any number of them, he answers: "This kind can only be cast out by prayer and fasting."
He also says: "If you have faith, you will do greater things than I have done... Ask and you will receive... Seek and you will find... Knock and the door will be opened to you."
In the Acts of the Apostles, Saint John and Saint Peter are seen praying for the sick and healing them.
If we accept these accounts, we might also accept that they imply we are being told to pray for each other.
It is what God wants us to do.
It is who God wants us to be.
It is one of the ways in which God acts in the world.
God wants us to care about each other and about everyone else.
That is the mandate for prayer.
That is why God answers prayers.
When we pray for others, we become in some measure the sort of people he wants us to be.
When we pray in order to praise God, ditto.
Ditto when we pray any and all prayers in the spirit of truth.
The Catholic understanding maintains that God continues to allow souls that have gone to him to pray for people still living a mortal life on earth.
The capacity to pray does not end with this life but continues into eternal life.
The use of relics, items associated with a saint, to pray over people, is also recorded in the New Testament.
If we accept the New Testament we needn't be too snooty about prayers accompanied by the touching of relics.
If you don't accept the New Testament, you might consider contemporary testimonies about the power of prayer.
I am constantly astonished by the number of people using anti depressants or undergoing invasive medical procedures, or dealing with appalling criminality in the world, who have never even once in their life prayed the full rosary.
Before you put drug poisons in your body, at least give the rosary a chance.
Visit a church.
Go to Lourdes.
Faith can move mountains.
Prayer is the energising voice of faith.
He gave us life.
Talk to him.
That's a prayer.

on the nature of truth

A cafe amidst the hubbub of the world.
"There are no absolute truths," said Rowena.
"Is what you've just said an absolute truth?" I replied.
"Maybe we mean different things by truth," she mused.
"There are two sausages on my plate, no more, and no less," I said.
"I might argue that the white pudding is a type of sausage or I could call your egg a sausage," she said.
"Every proposition may be disputed but it is a rational dysfunction to say that no proposition is true," I averred.
"How do you know?" quoth she.
"When you say there's no truth, you don't believe it yourself, it's not how you live your life," I said.
"Oh I don't know," she said.
I pondered.
"Okay," I said. "remember that communist guy Ron Baines from Athy. He deals in antiques. He showed me the shed out his back where he artificially ages items to make them appear a hundred years old. Now the fact that there are fake antiques, which is a true fact, does not alter the truth of the fact that there are genuine antiques. The existence of fake antiques clearly does not mean there are no genuine antiques. The fact that there are lies does not alter the fact that there is truth."

the story of my argument with prime minister leo varadkar

Leo Varadkar: "We have modernised Ireland."

James Healy: "I take your point. You legalised abortion overnight making the Irish people who acceded to you into a nation of murderers. You managed this barbarisaton of us with just fifty seats in a parliament of 158 seats. That is a sort of achievement. You also looked the other way as the IRA and associated mafias took control of our towns, villages and cities. You moved to legalise the IRA's drug trade through your proposals for the decriminalisation of drugs. You accorded the status of marriage to mutal masturbation activities between people of the same gender. You caused and permitted Irish Health Boards to perform mutilating sex change operations on children and adults, even though those operations don't work. You kept half the population from knowing they were living in a hell you had created by liberally dosing them with anti depressant poisons. You caused autism in many thousands of Irish children through mass vaccination campaigns which are in the interests of no one except the pharmaceutical companies from whom you purchase the vaccines. You permitted the collapse of immigration law. You price gouged your way through the recession by inventing an array of new taxes, rack renting the peasantry while using the moneys raised to bribe the trade union movement with ridiculous pay rises, terms and conditions. You acquiesced to the Green Party's idolotrous new Climate Change religion and signed the rest of us up to your acquiescence with taxes on cow farts and the banning of the motor car. You've modernised Ireland alright. But it's not to your credit."

when the revolution was expected in china

in the garden of my father
i first heard the gunshots from tiananmen square
i will never drink again of beauty
without hearing first the crying of the dying there

we will pray sometimes in the evenings
as the shadows lengthen into years
for there are prayers much softer than silence
and silences softer than tears