New Year’s Day Homily

Bishop Denis Nulty—Cathedral of the Assumption Carlow

 

“I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year

‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown’.

And he replied,

‘Go into the darkness and put your hand

Into the hand of God.

That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way!”

 

The early lines from Minnie Louise Haskins poem ‘The Gate of the Year’ used by King George VI in his 1939 Christmas Day Broadcast.

 

My aunt Mary, Mamma’s sister, was a nurse who served on duty during the Second World War. It was never talked about at home. She became ill while on duty and I recently stumbled across the ‘Casualty List No. 1925 relating to Officers’. It

contained all the casualties reported to the War Office Casualty Branch for 24 hours, ending 9am, dated 1^st December 1945. Her’s is included on that list. That’s eighty years and one month ago. Auntie Mary died in the 1970’s, never speaking of her days involved in someone else’s war.

 

The same ‘Casualty List’ is full of abbreviations and war rhetoric that becomes a language of its own, an echo chamber, best understood and probably only understood by those serving on the frontline. The reference to my Aunt Mary reads:

 

Italy: Dangerously Ill

Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service

BALFE Sister BE  Previous List Number: 2573751 

Date of Casualty: 26.11.45

 

Mary Balfe was one of many Irish who went to the First and Second World Wars. It could be said they were indeed fighting someone else’s war, someone else’s battle, but they had that sense of duty, a belief that this was the right and only thing to do. In Mary’s case she was a trained nurse, who I think did her nursing training in

England and from there went to bandage the wounded, to soothe the fallen.

 

War never leaves clean records, just destruction. And despite our advancement in knowledge and our capacity for dialogue, there never has been so many wars, battles, disputes raging at the one time. We see the nightly attacks on the Donbas region of Ukraine in urban areas such as Donetsk and Luhansk. We don’t always see or tend to put to the back of our memory the ongoing suffering and plight in Gaza, on the West Bank, in East Africa, in Syria, in Yemen and in Myanmar to mention just a few.

 

Pope Leo in his message for today invites us “to open ourselves to peace! Let us

welcome it and recognise it, rather than believing it to be impossible and beyond our reach”. A powerful line later in his message “even in places where only rubble

remains, and despair seems inevitable, we still find people who have not forgotten peace”. He reminds us of the Easter story and while we are still very much in

Christmas, today the eighth day of the Octave, the Prince of Peace, the vulnerable child, who has the ability to disturb, to unsettle, to unnerve the most powerful

political caste of his time, not with armour but with a message of peace. It’s never too late for us, for any of us. Pope Leo reminds us “goodness is disarming”, a

goodness revealed in the manger at Bethlehem. He tells us “when we treat peace as a distant ideal, we cease to be scandalised when it is denied, or even when war is raged in its name”.

We deserve peace in our homes, the scourge of domestic abuse, the silent ongoing pandemic of our time; in our estates, the plight of drug abuse; in our cemeteries, the desecration of sacred ground; on our streets, the destruction of private

property. We deserve peace, full stop. I commend all our guardians of the peace and all who work constructively for peace this day.

 

The last verse of Minnie Louise Haskins poem goes:

“So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod

gladly into the night. And He led me towards the hills

and the breaking of day in the lone East”.

May we find the hand of God in 2026 and allow Him to guide and direct our every effort at peace and justice in a world, in a community, so badly in need of both.