My favourite Christmas toy, given to me as a child, was a kaleidoscope.
Apart from it being the first big word I could say, I was fascinated by the ease and the variety of images that could be created and changed with such little effort while using only one eye to look down the same small scope.
This kaleidoscopic memory returned during a strange and weird weekend.
It is not often that a Bloody Sunday commemoration, St Brigid of Kildare’s feast day, a Derry/Kerry match (under new rules devised to free the game from stultifying conformity), and a pent-up desire to respond to the awfulness of Gaza all come together. But that was Derry last weekend.
Political oratory intersecting and sometimes competing with prayer.
Marching bands thumping out rebel songs and church choirs softly rendering evocative hymns.
Men (I didn’t see any women, but I am not saying they weren’t there too) dressed in militaristic black khaki, stamping the highway, holding aloft and vigorously shaking their banners, while a few streets away men cloaked in golden vestments (certainly no women) processing a monstrance containing a sacred host.
Walking from the church of St Columba, the patron saint of Derry, to the Guildhall Square, the civic centre of the city, to recite the rosary.
Media reports claimed that there were four thousand people following the procession.
In the midst of the thumping and the processing, the Kerry and Derry fans made their way to and from the football match, where the commentator for TnaG television used the word ‘dochreidte’ so often that even the monoglots understood that it was an incredible game that Derry had won twice in the last five minutes, and threw away in the last 30 seconds.
During the last 50 years, people have gathered at the Bloody Sunday memorial at 11am to pray for and remember the dead and the injured of that awful day.
On this, the 52nd commemoration, Donal McKeown, the Catholic Bishop of Derry, said a powerful prayer, gathering in the peoples of Sudan, Congo, Ukraine, Gaza and our own history to describe the awfulness and the futility of violence.
That was followed by a Protestant clergyman reading from the Sermon on the Mount, the central Christian covenant between man and God.
A Muslim clergyman wished peace upon us all who had gathered there and in rightfully condemning the unconscionable violence being used by Israel on the people of Gaza, failed to mention the belief in violence as embraced and used by Hamas.
He would not have known that he was standing close to where John Hume would have consistently quoted Martin Luther King saying that “non-violence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time; the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence”.
And where Eamonn McCann, later that same afternoon, delivering the speech at the Bloody Sunday march, described that area of Derry city as sacred ground.
It is not so certain that we are on sacred ground when it comes to St Brigid.
There is a debate over whether Brigid was a real person. Many historians say she was a Christianisation of the Celtic goddess, Brigid.
But either way, some see her as an icon for women’s liberation and others as an exemplar for the ordination of women into the religious life.
The legend of Brigid tells that, as abbess, she held rank and authority over the male monks who shared the monastic settlement she founded.
Interestingly, at around the same time as the religious procession was happening in Derry, Michael Router, the Auxiliary Bishop of Armagh, was favourably comparing Brigid with Marianne Budde, the woman bishop who faced down Donal Trump and his family, at a religious ceremony in Washington, challenging the new President to be compassionate to immigrants.
Bursting with images. Kaleidoscopic Derry last weekend.