DESIRE OF THE EVERLASTING HILLS

Heart of Jesus, desire of the everlasting hills, have mercy on us

Those of you who prayed the Litany to the Sacred Heart of Jesus will have saluted the Heart of Jesus, as "desire of the everlasting hills", which is also the title of the short film I wrote about earlier this week which chronicles Augustinian conversions of three souls from "the gay lifestyle" to being chaste Catholics. Paul, Dan and Rilene were formerly sexually active homosexuals and are now leaders in the Courage apostolate, a movement founded by and for same-sex attracted Catholics.

For a few years I have wanted to blog about the film, Desire of the Everlasting Hills, and it may appear that I posted about it this week because the film's title is taken from the Litany to the Sacred Heart and my theme this month is devotion to the Sacred Heart.

But I posted about the film on Wednesday, and at the time I thought that it was a departure from my theme, yet when I prayed the Litany to the Sacred Heart yesterday (something I did for the first time) I discovered that we hail Our Lord's Heart as "desire of the everlasting hills". I got a tiny shock. You see, earlier this week I got it into my head to pray for a dead man who may be in Purgatory because I was presented in my mind's eye with an image of the man in unrelenting flames. So, I prayed reluctantly because I knew him when I grew up in Ireland and I, nor anyone else, have ever had good things to say of him.

He was a self-hating Irishman who hated other Irish people, and so reviled was he that I doubt many have prayed for him. He was one of the old cast of characters who were incubated in the Cork City and I was way too fascinated by him and his family, he was the sort of fellow I was always discovering had unexpected ties to people I rubbed shoulders with everyday. Actually in Ireland, one is always, always finding one has unexpected connections to seemingly random people, but in his case people denied knowing him, until they were found out.  He could put the Mac into Machiavellian, and he held me in snarly contempt til such time as I got my university degree, after which he started to make overtures towards me and thankfully I realized he was schmoozing for some money and I gave him a wide berth. In Ireland, we have an expression for someone who wants cash they have not earned, we say, "That's a bit Irish", and this man who loathed his own people was perhaps more than "a bit Irish".

He wasn't hard-up, and had a job. But there was another young person who did not quite have the same blessed escape from him that I had, and so I decided to use my time to post about Desire of the Everlasting Hills as a good work to be done in the dead Irishman's name.