SACRIFICE AND service are always incumbent on those who can walk or drive away from any situation, Archbishop of Dublin Dr Michael Jackson told the annual Church of Ireland service marking the opening of the new law term.
President Mary McAleese, Chief Justice Mrs Justice Susan Denham, Ceann Comhairle Seán Barrett, members of the Irish and British judiciaries, as well as members of the Defence Forces, were among the congregation in St Michan’s in Dublin.
Dr Jackson said it was the idea of “for the good of all” that bound together all present at the service. This had never been, nor could it be, the preserve of any one religious tradition, yet it was an ideal which bound together people of principle and practice.
It also bound those present to the communities in this ancient part of Dublin, who “either look to us or away from us for the continuity of integrity in a wildly confusing world,” he said.
Referring to the issue of policing privacy, he asked: “Does not morality constantly ask of legality the following question: Ought I not to be able to tell in the light what I am doing in the dark?”
He said we had become so accustomed to the vocabulary of economic downturn that we rarely imagined how frightening it was to those who had no sense of engagement with our society.
“Getting people spending once more, flipping the pancake of consumerism at home in another round of Celtic Tiger-ism, will not create society or indeed community out of the fragments of alienation which careless privilege and self-regulating speculation have bequeathed to the young people who are the engine-house of new life for tomorrow,” he said.
“The abuse of globalisation, the debasing of convenience and the commodification of value have brought us to where we are,” he said. “Commodification is turning beauty into a thing for sale and purchase and turning you and me and everyone else into functionaries of that same thing.
“Society needs a shared, collaborative, generous understanding of living community, with all of the concessions to one another which that entails. A society such as ours which is searching with an ever-more frantic frenzy for a moral compass looks to those who have privilege to share generously.
“Carefulness and attention to people who hold deep feelings of alienation and exclusion, along with enabling them to emerge from the reality of pointlessness as a matter of urgency, will contribute to the new creation which is always the goal and the expectation of those who see the face of Jesus Christ in the face of other people,” she said.