A little self-indulgence on my pandemic birthday

Arrival of the Queen of Sheba

by George Frideric Handel, conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner

Handel's Arrival of the Queen of Sheba is a favourite of mine, one of the most exuberant pieces of music I know. Here it is conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner who, as it happens, is a 'twin' of mine. We both turned 77 today, having been born on Tuesday of Holy Week, 20 April 1943, when Easter fell on the latest day possible, 25 April. It had not fallen on that date since 1886, has not since and will occur again in 2038. After that not till 2190. It happens only once in a century.

Handel, who was German, lived in England for many years but has a significant connection with my native city, Dublin, since his Messiah  was first performed there, on 13 April 1742.

There were no fireworks in Dublin on the day I was born. But below is Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks, conducted by Sir John.

Please remember in your prayers my parents John and Mary (née Collins) without whose love I would not be posting this. My mother's 50th death anniversary occurs on 29 April and my father's 33rd on 11 August. They both stimulated my interest in music. Solas na bhFlaitheas orthu - The Light of Heaven upon them.

Tempus fugit - time flies: a postscript to turning 70 (and just about hanging on!)

My mother, with a smile, often mentioned Harold Lloyd, one of the biggest comedy stars in the era of silent movies. But I don't think she knew that her elder son came into the world the day that Harold Lloyd turned 50, 20 April 1943.

Above is an extract from what is perhaps his most famous scene where, in a sense, time almost does fly. 'Stewballmaxify', who posted this on YouTube,  cleverly added Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets, which was a huge hit in 1956, when I became a teenager. Though it sounds very tame now, it was part of the beginnings of a new era in popular music and of adolescents becoming a special niche in the market, not only for music but for other commodities. Sometimes I think that this was when genuine popular music was 'mortally wounded'.

Fr George Hunt SJ, former editor of the North American Jesuit magazine, America, in an editorial on the 50th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War in August 1945 - World War II had ended in Europe in May - noted that in those days everyone listened to the same popular music, parents, children, grandparents. Whether or not they all liked a particular currently popular song they were all familiar with it. That's the way that it was when I was a child in the years after the War and Sister Stanislaus, principal of the boys' kindergarten I went to, would sometimes speak disapprovingly of certain 'adult songs'. That common experience of popular music has long ceased to be and there is a fragmentation in popular culture as a result.

The day my mother delivered me my mother delivered me Lionel Hampton was celebrating his 35th birthday. On this video he is with the Benny Goodman Quartet, playing the vibraphone, with Goodman himself on the clarinet, Teddy Wilson on the piano and Gene Krupa on the drums as they perform Avalon. [Since there is also a bass player, George Duvivier, I guess the group should be properly called the Benny Goodman Quintet.]

Whatever! Enjoy!

'Our span is seventy years . . .' Turning 70 today

On this date in 1943 my mother, born Mary Collins, delivered me to her husband and my father, John Coyle. It was Tuesday of Holy Week the last time Easter fell on its latest possible date, 25 April.  A few days later - it must have been Holy Saturday - I was baptised in St Joseph's Church, Berkeley Road, Dublin, just across the road from the small nursing home where I was born. Though my parents were living at the time on the south side of the River Liffey that runs through Dublin they had the good sense to let me be born north of the river and we moved to the north side three years later. So, like my father, and my mother for most of her life, I am a genuinely certified Northsider!

St Joseph's Church, Berkeley Road, Dublin

The next time that Eastert will fall on 25 April is 2038. If God spares me, I will then be 95 + five days. 

And if God spares him, so too will noted conductor, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, born in Dorset, England, on the same day. So I 'invited' him to do a 'gig' on our joint 70th Birthday. Handel's delightful Arrival of the Queen of Sheba is a great favourite of mine and quite suitable for a birthday celebration. And Handel has connections with my native city, Dublin, as hisMessiah was first performed there.

The Bells of St Paul's Cathedral, London

I remember reading that on 20 April 1943 Prime Minister Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom announced in the House of Commons in London that church bells could be rung again in the UK. Their ringing had been forbidden for security reasons earlier in World War II. However, there was no such ban in the part of Ireland that I'm from as we were no longer in the United Kingdom. 

Main studio of EWTN, Irondale, Alabama, USA

Turning 90 today is Mother Angelica, Mother Mary Angelica of the Annunciation PCPA, born  Rita Antoinette Rizzo, who founded EWTN, which now broadcasts around the world. May God continue to bless her and the work she began, with great vision and trust in God.

Servant of God, Fr Emil Kapaun (20 April 1916 - 23 May 1951

I've posted a number of times about Fr Emil Kapaun, who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor on 11 April by President Obama. I featured this great priest most recently inSunday Reflections for last Sunday. Easter was very late the year he was born and he arrived in the world on Holy Thursday.

St Rose of Lima Before the Madonna, José Antolinez [Web Gallery of Art]

I am also blessed to share my birthday with St Rose of Lima, who was born in 1586 and died on 24 August 1617.

The year my father was born, 1913, Easter was very early, 23 March. He was born on Thursday of Easter Week. He loved a 'good tune', especially from Italian Grand Opera. I grew up with the radio and the only station in the Republic of Ireland during my childhood was Radio Éireann. Every Wednesday at lunch time I used to listen to the first part of Hospitals' Requests before going back to school. Very often there was a request for Va' pensiero, from Giuseppe Verdi's opera Nabucco. The announcers usually used an English title for it, Go thoughts on Golden Wings or The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. Though my Dad was never home for lunch on working days he was very familiar with it and it certainly came into his 'good tune' category.

So my co-70th Birthday celebrant Sir John Eliot Gardiner agreed to conduct it for the occasion.

Please join me in praying with gratitude to God for my parents, John Coyle and Mary Collins, and for the repose of their souls. Without their cooperation with our loving Father this blog would not have been possible. And remember too their parents, Nicholas Coyle and Jane Hoare, both from Rush, County Dublin, a village by the sea north of the city where my paternal ancestors first arrived before 1800, and William Patrick Collins, from Dublin city, and Annie Dowd, born in Navan, County Meath, down the road from the Columban seminary where I spent seven happy years.

Collect from the Mass for Giving Thanks to God (B)

O God, the Father of every gift, 
we confess that all we have and are comes down from you; 
teach us to recognise the effects of your boundless care 
and to love you with a sincere heart and with all our strength.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, 
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, 
one God, for ever and ever.

Our life is over like a sigh.

Our span is seventy years 

or eighty for those who are strong (Psalm 89[90], Grail translation, used in the Breviary).

100th anniversary of the birth of my Dad

John Coyle, my Dad, about a week before his sudden death on 11 August 1987.

Please remember in your prayers the soul of my father, John, who was born on 27 March 1913, a hundred years ago today, in Dublin, Ireland, to Nicholas and Jane Coyle. Easter fell on 23 March that year and so he came into the world on Easter Thursday.

I blogged about Dad on his 25th death anniversary, 11 August 1987, and on his 95th birth anniversary. And I posted about my parents on the 70th anniversary of their wedding.

A photo I took of my parents, Mary and John, in Ireland in the summer of 1968, when my mother was 53 and my father 55. My mother died less than two years later.

Collect from the Mass for the Priest's Parents

O God, who commanded us to honour father and mother, 

have mercy in your compassion 

on my father and mother, 

forgive them their sins, 

and bring me to see them one day 

in the gladness of eternal glory.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, 

who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, 

one God, for ever and ever.

My parents' wedding photo, taken in a studio some weeks after their wedding, which took place on 6 July 1942.

Lala and Queen Elizabeth II

This column, updated 29 September 2011, appeared in the short-lived Negros Times 13-14 October 2008. The above was the picture that appeared with my weekly column. Last Tuesday, 28 September, the feast of St Vincent de Paul, was Lala's 'Official Birthday'. I only remembered that yesterday and thought of posting my three-year-old article here.

Both Lala and Queen Elizabeth II have have two birthdays, the real one and the official one. Lala’s official birthday is 27 September and she turned 32 two days ago. Queen Elizabeth’s official birthday is celebrated in 53 Commonwealth countries, but not on the same date. Only the Falkland Island observes her official birthday on her real one, 21 April. In the United Kingdom the Queen’s official birthday can be on the first, second or third Saturday in June. She turned 85 on her last birthday.

While there’s no confusion about the date of birth of Queen Elizabeth, there is about that of Lala. The young Princess Elizabeth was born in a palace in London. Lala was found shortly after birth in a trashcan in Cebu city in the central Philippines. Those who found her took her to the Asilo De La Milagrosa, the orphanage of the Daughters of Charity there. The Sisters noticed that the little girl had Trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome) and took her in and raised her. Since they didn’t know who her parents were they had to choose a name for her.

The Sisters chose 'Vicente' as her family name, in honor of St Vincent de Paul, and 'Louilla' as her Christian name, in honor of St Louise de Marillac. The two saints founded the Daughters of Charity in France in 1633. Lala, as all her friends know her, probably has something else in common with St Louise. She was almost certainly born out of wedlock, as the saint was, and, like St Louise, never knew her mother. I suspect that Lala’s mother, probably very young and unmarried, panicked – this possibly added to when she saw that her daughter wasn’t 'normal' - and left her baby where someone could find her and take care of her.

I first met Lala in Cebu in 1992 at a Faith and Light celebration. We had just begun a community there, after a retreat given by the co-founder of the movement, Jean Vanier, a Canadian layman, in Holy Family Retreat House, Cebu City, in October 1991. During the retreat he gave a public talk in the auditorium of St Theresa’s College, as I recall, and a group of interested people got together after that. The gathering at which Lala was present included members of Faith and Light from Manila who had come to tell us more about the movement.

I could see immediately that Lala had a special gift – she’s a natural 'ice-breaker'. Though she seldom says anything, she lights up any group into which she comes, unless she’s in a bad mood, which happens from time to time.

Lala became a member of our Faith and Light community in Cebu but I lost contact with her when I went to Lianga, Surigao del Sur, in 1993 as parish priest and to Manila the following year to become vocation director of the Columbans. But one day when I visited the L’Arche community in Cainta, Rizal, known as 'Ang Arko', I was surprised to see Lala there. L’Arche, the French for 'The Ark' as in Noah’s Ark, was founded by Jean Vanier, in 1964 when he invited two men with learning disabilities, Raphael Simi and Philippe Seux, who had been living in an institution, to join him in a small cottage he had bought and was renovating in the town of Trosly-Breuil, France. Jean had no intention of founding anything, but he realized very quickly that he had made a commitment to these two men. One of them, I forget which, chose to live independently some years later, something he could never have done had he stayed not met Jean. Out of these small beginnings has grown an international movement of about 130 residential communities where those with learning disabilities are enabled to live in a family-type situation and to develop their abilities to the greatest extent possible.

Jordan and Raymon, now young men, were welcomed by Ang Arko when they were very young. Both have physical as well as learning disabilities. The original house was in Manila but the community moved later to Cainta.

In Holy Week 2001 I attended the international pilgrimage of Faith and Light to Lourdes as chaplain to the group from the Philippines. Lala was one of the twelve or so Filipinos.

The Easter Vigil was celebrated in the underground basilica. Some of the Old Testament Vigil readings were dramatized. During the account of creation when the words 'God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him' were read, a spotlight shone on a young man in a wheelchair. But what moved me most was when 'Lala' was part of a group dramatizing the reading of the Exodus.

I simply marveled at the fact that a young woman who should never have been born, according to the 'wisdom' of so many, left after birth among garbage, was on the other side of the world helping to proclaim the Word of God to thousands of people, many like herself, and doing so with the joy that permeates her soul.

Queen Elizabeth has been blessed by God with a long and healthy life, in which she continues to serve her people with dignity. Though Queen Elizabeth is among the richest people in the world, Lala, also with her two birthdays, enjoys even greater riches, because the words of Mary’s prayer, the Magnificat, have been revealed in her life: 'God has lifted up the lowly'.

Rafael Simi (left) and Jean Vanier (right).

You can listen to an interview with Jean here. He turned 83 on 10 September.

This comment was posted when I first posted this three years ago:

Wow..I can't believe Im actually sitting here reading this post about Lala..This is wonderfull..Well, I actually grew up with Lala in the orphanage at Asilo dela Milagrosa..we are the same age..I was there from 1986-1994 until I was sent here in America to be adopted..The first time we were introduce to Lala we were a little nervous, we were very young and we never met someone like her, then she started to sing 'Tomorrow' and for some reason we were all drawn to her..As I remember, I was a little jealous because she was always happy, didnt care what everyone thought of her, she welcomed every visitor we had with a smile, she's very friendly..After I finished high school, I started working as a volunteer camp councelor but I was assigned in the office and there was this girl and she is also my age and I was ask to be her counselor for a couple of months and I was so excited, nobody knew why I was glad to do so and it all because I remembered Lala, it was 8 yrs. ago that i work at the camp, and here I am writing and remembering Lala..

I would like to thank you Fr. Sean for writing this post..