Being 64 next birthday, there is little to be spending money on.  A rather battered thirteen year old Peugeot required €1,000 of expenditure in recent weeks, but otherwise a modest income is sufficient for modest expenditures.

The greatest anomaly in the budget is probably the £369  (£1 a day) it costs for the online annual subscription to the Financial Times, the world it describes is so far removed from life in west Dublin that it is sometimes like reading a fairy tale.  Occasionally, though, world’s touch.  Janan Ganesh writes in this weekend’s edition of the ‘myth of the second chance’.  The column is profound in its understanding of the world as it is.

Ganesh draws particularly upon the novels of Ian McEwan.  One novel particularly seems to outline the myth in stark clarity, Atonement. There is no possibilty of atonement for what has been done, so the guilty protagonist rewrites the story of the characters in the tale: a second chance is only possible through deliberate revisionism, through lying about what has happened.

In 2017, after a period of deepening depression, guilt and desire brought an end to a former life. Guilt at the three decades of neglect of elderly parents living across the Irish Sea, desire for someone whose presence had been significant in teenage years.

Guilt and desire had a thoroughly destructive impact, a destruction of family, a betrayal of loved ones, an abandonment of vocation, a desertion of faithful people, a dereliction of duty, a failure to be even a decent human being.

Of course, in the stories, there is a possibility of repentance and forgiveness, a chance to return and to say sorry and to be reconciled.  Teaching the story of the Prodigal Son to uncomprehending students in secondary schools, the line from Saint Luke, ‘I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee’ would echo within.  The students never understood the story, why would anyone forgive such a wastrel?

Returning to Ireland in 2021, there was a realization that the second chance was indeed a mythical concept.  There would be no prospect of a return to the church, the bishop said that people would find it difficult to trust someone who had behaved thus.  Only after many letters came the realisation that the acknowledgement of one’s own vile and loathsome behaviour would not be sufficient to achieve any reconcilation with family members not seen in seven years. Certainly, there would be no hope of seeing a grandchild never yet seen.

Ganesh suggests that the ‘second chance’ is a myth created by the self-help industry.  Indeed, it seems a piece of nonsense that goes along with all the other nonsense one might find in the mind, body and spirit sections of bookshops. Perhaps that’s why Jesus chose to tell that story of the wastrel son, to suggest that God shows a grace that is beyond the capacity of humans.