(This thought came to me after another raucous St Patrick’s Day in the streets around my Church in Belfast’s so called Holy Lands (given the name as a result of the street names). Students celebrate St. Patrick in Belfast by getting drunk from very early morning and street partying all day long. It can be loud, vulgar, sometimes violent and certainly uncomfortable for the ordinary residents of those streets. We spend our time trying to maintain and control events which are anything from inconvenient to frightening for some. It is sadly a symptom of a drinking culture rampant in the nation that seems to get highlighted in the media around the festivities of our patron Saint. When I heard that the angry residents had gone to the Vice Chancellor of the University to seek a curtailing of these events it made me smile; as if the Vice Chancellor could reverse the cultural changes of the past fifty years! It made me surmise that the cosmic decisions we make as a society have their consequences. Dropping the foolish old fashioned nature of God and his guidelines for a peaceful society might give you freedom to do what you like but it doesn’t give you the right to then demand godliness from those around you. It led to another bit of rhyming surmising...)
It’s St. Patrick Day, in the Holy Lands
Students falling and crawling out of bars
Urinating in people’s doorways
Playing hurly on the top of their cars
Is this the evolution of the species
Have the fittest ones ended up here
Marinating in their own selfish preserves
And a culture of alco-pops and beer.
Christmas Day in the evening
She brings a blade to her wrist
To see the blood the baby bled
And find some kind of feeling in this
It’s the end of the nuclear family
We’ve broken it into a million pieces
Like the children caught in its convenience
As their anorexia and suicide increases.
A shopping mall on Easter Sunday
Another madman murder rampage
People enjoying a holy day off
Are the carnage of tomorrow’s front page
And the killer gets a tribute on Facebook
That’s the internet’s anarchic nerve
The expert on the late night news
Says we get the heroes we deserve.
There are some who still speak of religion
But we say that we couldn’t care less
We’ve long discarded those old fashioned notions
But we still seem to want godliness
We still seem to want godliness.
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