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| Medal given to me for my 40th by my mum |
My mum is a descendant of the Ó Cinnéide or in the anglicised version Kennedy*.
Mum, and the rest of her family have always been so proud of their name and all things Kennedy. I was very touched when for my 40th birthday, my mother Elizabeth Kennedy, gave me one of her most precious possessions - the Kennedy medal my Dad bought her in Rome in 1978.
Of course I don't remember where I was when Kennedy was shot, I wasn't yet born, but growing up he certainly represented an ideal of leadership. The kind of leadership that uses words and ideas as its most powerful weapon. Like the great prose of Churchill for the children of the 1940 and 50s, our childhood was filled with the great sayings of Kennedy:
"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country". Inauguration address, 1961.
"Do not pray for easy lives, pray to be stronger men". (Quoting Bishop Phillips Brooks)
"Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined let no man put assunder".
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Rice University, 1962.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Rice University, 1962.
The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were and ask "why not?". Speech delivered to the Dail (Parliament of Ireland) (28 June 1963)
"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on." New York, 1962.
He knew what he was doing. He knew the power of well crafted words expressing powerful ideas. And he was torn down in his absolute prime. I am no hagiographer of Kennedy, I suspect he was never destined to be a great American President, but to see a nation's leader, the embodiment of at least shards of nobility, struck down like that was just so tragic. I saw a documentary about it recently and felt like I lived through the experience for the first time.
However macabre it is to say this, it does seems likely that his influence was magnified by his violent end. What he stood for became all the more powerful symbol for having been vanquished.
I just read a counterfactual about the influence Christianity would have had in the world had Pontius Pilate not submitted to the view of the mob and released Christ. As sacrilegious as this enquiry will sound to some, would Christianity itself have taken off as it did to be a profoundly influential philosophy for billions of people over centuries without the Crucifiction? Would Christ have been just Rabbi Ieusus Bin Yosef (Jesus son of Joseph)? Without the Crucifiction, would there have been Christ?
At Easter time, we honour the risen Lord and we believe the Resurrection is the fulfillment of God's plan - through it we are all redeemed. Perhaps even a non-believer could make the case that it was through the destructive horror of the Crucifiction that the story of Christ was magnified.
One of Australia's leading foreign policy specialists, Professor Hugh White has argued that the impact of the vision of the twin towers falling down beamed around the world live, was a profound driver of foreign policy. Not just the act, but the visual. In the absence of the footage, notwithstanding the loss of life, he has said he does not believe the Bush Administration would have won the support to invade Iraq. The vision galvanised. I think White is right.
Without the Crucifiction, would Christ's followers have had the drive, the source of the urgency, to share Jesus' philosophy, the Good News. I am a believer, but even if I were not, I would see that Christian conceptions of human purpose, life, rights and responsibilities, forgiveness, redemption, and at the heart of it all Love in its many splendours, is a profound contribution to humanity.
My assessment is that despite the various darkness and disasters that have been committed in Christ's name, his philosophy has been a truly liberating force in the world. I accept these are contestable claims, but I think the debate is healthy and important to contemporary cultural discussion. Christians have to win this debate with evidence and argument, reason. If Christians did a better case debating the real cultural and historical contribution of Christianity, perhaps at Easter, secular people who believe in the basic ethics of Christianity but not the paraphenalia, could join us in celebrating the Resurrection as the retelling of the story of how a liberating ethics came to be shared with the world.
As I understand it, at the heart of the Christian conviction is the sacredness of each individual human person. This conception began as a corrollary of the monotheism of the Jews, but Christ, like Naomi to Ruth, shared the gift with the gentiles. Flowing from this conception of each individual as sacred and made equal and in the image of God, is the freedom of conscience that flows from "Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's" - this trinity of the need for the individual to be sovereign, the State to be limited through the existence of a counterveiling Church and Civil Society, and for the Church to be limited by temporal authority. It's an unbeatable formula at the heart of Western liberal democracies, and a formula not shared by "Resterners". Combine with this political formula, the a personalised God with whom each of us can have a relationship, which relationship models tenderness, compassion, forgiveness and love, and you have some good ethical software for the "Strong reciprocity" evolutionary biologists and economists claim is at the heart of man's triumph over nature. Now, I've launched into a pretty big argument that probably deserves to be the subject of a separate blog, and is probably a big argument for another day, but the counterfactual took my little brain there......
At Easter time, we honour the risen Lord and we believe the Resurrection is the fulfillment of God's plan - through it we are all redeemed. Perhaps even a non-believer could make the case that it was through the destructive horror of the Crucifiction that the story of Christ was magnified.
One of Australia's leading foreign policy specialists, Professor Hugh White has argued that the impact of the vision of the twin towers falling down beamed around the world live, was a profound driver of foreign policy. Not just the act, but the visual. In the absence of the footage, notwithstanding the loss of life, he has said he does not believe the Bush Administration would have won the support to invade Iraq. The vision galvanised. I think White is right.
Without the Crucifiction, would Christ's followers have had the drive, the source of the urgency, to share Jesus' philosophy, the Good News. I am a believer, but even if I were not, I would see that Christian conceptions of human purpose, life, rights and responsibilities, forgiveness, redemption, and at the heart of it all Love in its many splendours, is a profound contribution to humanity.
My assessment is that despite the various darkness and disasters that have been committed in Christ's name, his philosophy has been a truly liberating force in the world. I accept these are contestable claims, but I think the debate is healthy and important to contemporary cultural discussion. Christians have to win this debate with evidence and argument, reason. If Christians did a better case debating the real cultural and historical contribution of Christianity, perhaps at Easter, secular people who believe in the basic ethics of Christianity but not the paraphenalia, could join us in celebrating the Resurrection as the retelling of the story of how a liberating ethics came to be shared with the world.
As I understand it, at the heart of the Christian conviction is the sacredness of each individual human person. This conception began as a corrollary of the monotheism of the Jews, but Christ, like Naomi to Ruth, shared the gift with the gentiles. Flowing from this conception of each individual as sacred and made equal and in the image of God, is the freedom of conscience that flows from "Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's" - this trinity of the need for the individual to be sovereign, the State to be limited through the existence of a counterveiling Church and Civil Society, and for the Church to be limited by temporal authority. It's an unbeatable formula at the heart of Western liberal democracies, and a formula not shared by "Resterners". Combine with this political formula, the a personalised God with whom each of us can have a relationship, which relationship models tenderness, compassion, forgiveness and love, and you have some good ethical software for the "Strong reciprocity" evolutionary biologists and economists claim is at the heart of man's triumph over nature. Now, I've launched into a pretty big argument that probably deserves to be the subject of a separate blog, and is probably a big argument for another day, but the counterfactual took my little brain there......
Back to my Kennedy medal. In the meantime, we can agree, ideas live on. And Kennedy's tragic death, have served to keep his memory alive and well. I will treasure my Kennedy medal and use it to remind myself of the best in him, the high ideals - service of country, bravery, purposefulness and eloquence (And of course, I'm a sucker for Jacqui's glamour - How good were those Oleg Cassini, and Dior outfits?!!).
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* The family hails from Tipperary and the clan was founded byBrian Boru, High King of Ireland in the 10th Century AD. The Ó Cinnéide descend from the line of Brian's brother. Like those other famous Kennedy brothers, they collaborated to found a dynasty that led Ireland for a generation.
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