A random meeting reminds me of Sharon Corr’s lightness of being
STEVE Jobs said he believed that life is an intelligent thing: that things aren’t random. I met someone for dinner in the InterContinental hotel last Thursday night and Sharon Corr, staying in the hotel ahead of The Corrs’ performance on the Late Late Show, randomly joined us. She even ran up to her room for copies of the new Corrs album, the brilliant Jupiter Calling, for me and the person I was with. They don’t make them like her any more. Her sense of being is immense.
Sharon Corr, like the new T-Bone Burnett-produced Corrs album, is a bit of a revelation. Some people can read Mr Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and come away thinking it’s a simple love story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewinggum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe. Sharon Corr is a bit of the two.
As well as an incredible musician and writer, she is also a fascinating and engagingly existential thinker, as are all her sisters.
Because Christmas was happening all around, and I’d had a glass of wine, my mind was brought to 2000, to Stockholm before Christmas with The Corrs — and a magical conversation with Andrea Corr and her sister Caroline...
Andrea recalled the churches of her youth in Dundalk; places where she found it very hard not to laugh in growing up.
“It wasn’t fear but the fact that I really wasn’t supposed to laugh put me in a situation. Put me in a situation where I can’t laugh and I just roar laughing,” she roared, laughing.
“And that was always a problem with me in church.
“I would get a fit of the giggles because it would be wrong to be laughing in Mass. I was laughing because it was bold and people were tut-tutting me. The more they tut-tutted, the more I laughed. It’s the same with funerals. Some people say it is discomfort. Sometimes the more serious things are the funnier they are, ironically.”
I remember asking Andrea did she think the idea of Mary — mother of one — being a virgin was funny? I pointed out that only in two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, is the word “Virgin” used. In the English Bible they say ‘virgin’ but the Greek word can just as easily mean ‘young woman’. And as for the original Aramaic word can also be translated as: ‘Expecting a happy event.’
“It’s just another thing that’s supposed to send out the message that sex is wrong!” laughed Andrea.
“Right!” laughed her older sister, Caroline.
“Why does she have to be a virgin? It’s strange. It’s kind of baloney really, you take written word as written by man and it has mistakes and truths and that’s how I take it. We have to decipher the truth for ourselves. I always thought about Mary in terms of this Immaculate Conception and I was, like, ‘Wait a minute! How does that work?”
They say women prefer Mary to Jesus, I point out, like some madman. And that they worship God but they’re also a bit afraid of him — whereas with Mary, she’s more like a friend.
It’s as if the Blessed Virgin is a bit of themselves and a bit of their mother at the same time. And men can never understand that. “Yeah,” replied Andrea. “She seems more compassionate. It’s softer. It’s a softer image, but I think Jesus’s image is soft also. God is the image we don’t really know; that was the image you could be scared of.”
“I think women will identify with her because she is a woman and probably because she seems like the kind of person who didn’t say much and got on with things,” added Caroline. They say that when grief is deepest, words are fewest. Irish Hospice Foundation CEO Sharon Foley said it in a few words at a lunch I attended last week: “Grief is painful all year around, but at Christmas time it can be especially hard for those bereaved.”
I always miss my parents more than ever at Christmas. (Not that I was ever a remotely good son, of course. At Christmas I was invariably away suiting myself. A drunk phone call on Christmas Day from a bar in New York was my selfish spirit of Christmas). All the memories of them flood back and hurt in ways you had forgotten you could be hurt emotionally. Dealing with loss and believing that we can grow from our pain is easier said than done at this time of year.
It makes it worse that Ireland at Christmas is acting like it is just taken some vast communal dose of Prozac and has a permanent slightly dazzled Christmas smile on its face, determined at all costs to be happy.
A Prozac Nation once again.
During the Yuletide, Dublin can be a very happy as well as a very sad place to be. I went to see the Coronas play the Olympia on Dame Street last Thursday night — one of the gigs of the year; a joyous and uplifting performance.
Afterwards I walked through town on a freezing night. There was a buzz about the place, with people in the festive spirit out on the town enjoying themselves. What I found upsetting was that there were so many homeless people out on the streets on a freezing night in a so-called modern city like Dublin in 2017.
There was a poor divil, preparing to sleep wrapped in a ragged blanket on George’s Street, and another in a doorway on Wicklow Street as it started to snow. Not an endearing Christmas scene in this day and age.
I gave them a few lousy quid then went home to my warm bed. There but for the grace of God and all that.