Two More Weeks of Irish Adventure and Faith

This excerpt comes from Father Padriag O’Fiannachta’s book Jesus in Dingle :

This dialogue comes from a remarkable book I received as a gift from Father Padraig O’Fiannachta, a retired priest from the Catholic parish in Dingle, in south-western Ireland, and the founder of the Diseart Center for Celtic Culture . He is in his eighty-second year and says as he gets older in thinks and dreams more and more in the language of his youth, Irish Gaelic. He was a scholar in Irish Language Studies for many years at Maynooth University before returning to his childhood home parish and eventually started this center of Irish culture, language, and spirituality as a way of saving the convent next to the church and preserving a way of life dear to his heart.

If I had a hope of meeting someone who embodied the history and spirit of Celtic Christianity, then Fr. O’Fiannachta is that incarnation. As an academic, he is best known for a translation of the Bible in Irish and a dictionary of the Gaelic in County Kerry, but he seems most proud of a slender volume entitled Jesus in Dingle, his poetic connection of faith and place. In his re-telling of the Jesus story on this Irish peninsula he weaves in the people and places he knew in his childhood. The book is written in both Irish and English and filled with pictures of the hauntingly beautiful Dingle peninsula, which is a narrow spit of land with a spine of mountains down the middle, outlined by a stunning coastline where rugged stone outcroppings alternate with lazy sandy beaches. I am sure much is lost in the translation from the original language, but it is a marvelous story of Christ being in the midst of everyday life and events, which seems to be the heart of the Celtic tradition.

We went to lunch and driving through the narrow, crowded streets of Dingle with this somewhat frail and distracted priest at the wheel was an exercise for my own prayer life, that somehow God would make a way where one was not apparent. Even the parking place appearing felt a little "thin," as the Celts might say. All the restaurants were closed, as it was mid-afternoon, so we ate at the local pub. He was greeted warmly by all. He chatted with a friend in Irish, a beautiful language to eavesdrop upon, and they ended it with the word ‘slan’, which as a parting salutation means "wholeness and health to you." He said one of the descriptions of Christ was as ‘slantheoir’, the one who makes humanity whole and perfect, which expresses the theology of Irish Celtic tradition about the Savoir. The Celtic traditions tend not to think of Christ in the more traditional role of redeemer, whose atonement set things right with God and humanity, but celebrate Christ as the presence with us – light, life, spirit- that helps us as attain the God given possibilities in us. The whole lunch was a lesson in language, place, and people revealing the close, even sensate, experience of God in everyday life.

He talked of the four great festivals of Celtic Christianity – Im Blog, Bealtaine, Lunasa, and Samhain. Im Blog was known also as St. Brigid’s Day and was celebrated on February 1^st. It was a festival with an eye towards the spring and the fertility of the earth and all that draws life from it. A statue of St. Brigid would be carried throughout the community and brought into every house where there were blessings on the dwelling and all its inhabitants, human and animals. A remnant of that celebration is the St. Brigid’s cross, a simple square with four arms, made from hay or straw, and hung over the door of homes and in the barns throughout the year to protect the animals.

The second great festival, Bealtaine, took place on May 1^st and celebrated what they felt to truly be the beginning of summer weather. Flowers were shared among homes and adorned the churches. Fires were lit ad the cattle walked between these beacons of God’s light so that they might bear healthy offspring.

The third feast day was Lunasa, celebrated near the first day of August, when the full harvest was celebrated. In Dingle, it became a time to celebrate St. Brendan, the famous navigator monk, with a pilgrimage up Brandon Mountain on the island which is the second highest mountain in the country. This pilgrimage was a community affair and ended with communion and much feasting.

The fourth celebration was Samhain, celebrated on the last day of October. As Bealtaine marked summer’s beginning, Samhain marked summer’s end. The final fruits of the harvest were brought to communion. There was also a custom of casting the bones of cattle into the fire as a way of honouring their life and their transition to light, and the tradition of bone-fires makes its way into our vocabulary as bonfire. Connection was made with God’s harvest of human life into life beyond as saints and loved ones that had gone before were remembered, which comes down to us now in two divergent forms, All Saints Day and Halloween. Family visits were made to the cemetery and prayers said for those who have departed.

In addition to these four seasonal celebrations, they also had special customs to mark the solstices and the Christian celebrations of Christmas and Easter. The summer solstice was the feast of St. John, who came to bear witness to the greater light of the Son of God, and who understood his luminescence would decrease as Christ’s increased. As to Christmas, it was their very real expectation that Jesus would come to visit each home in some unexpected way. Pathways to their homes were smoothed and strewn with moss as a natural carpet to honor his presence. They would see the Christ in their neighbors and the small events of the day. Such expectation of the Christ in the guise of stranger is a part of the deep hospitality of the tradition.

There was so much I wanted to ask, but our lunch of mutton stew was soon finished, the pints of Guinness drained, and he had appointments to keep. When I asked him what he thought of the task for the church in the modern era, it was is opinion that we needed to once again see our lives in the great sweep of God’s creative and loving embrace. Though we cannot return to the simpler lives of the people he know growing up, but we could be as sensitive as they were to the rhythms of life and to the thin places that are all around us. What a great privilege to meet a person so full of story ,wisdom , and faith.

Prior to my drive back to the south to meet with Father O’Fiannachta, I had spent nearly a week in Northern Ireland, lodged in the warmth of a kindly family about thirty miles northwest of Belfast. The Conlons are friends of Kurt Hellerman and they embody the kind of hospitality famous in Ireland and connected with this Celtic heritage. He had been a priest in Malawi and met a charming nurse from the States also working in the rural communities. They fell in love and were married. He returned to Northern Ireland and worked for the government in community development and she continued her work in nursing, but the real energy of their lives is devoted to creating extended family. In addition to their four daughters, they adopted several foster children along the way. They freely opened their home to anyone who might be on a journey as they, like Father O’Fiannachta, anticipate that Christ is present in every pilgrim who visits their home.

Belfast and the surrounding Northern Ireland countryside is lovely. I visited the unique Giant’s Causeway, a stretch of beach where a columnar basalt strand, an Irish word for beach, juts out into the sea like a crazy jumble of pylons. The northern coast is not quite a wild as the west coast and there is much new housing development, a sign of the economic boom of the last decade. People in the cites are purchasing retirement and second homes on the coast. It is interesting to sense the distinct cultural difference between the more rural, lively lifestyle of the south of Ireland and the more formal, reserved British and Scottish influences in the north.

Belfast was at the epicenter of ‘the troubles’ between Protestants and Catholics from the 1960s. Since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the violence has greatly diminished, but the divide between Protestants and Catholics is still very deep. In Belfast City there are some fifty-three ‘peace walls’ that provide physical barriers between historically Protestant and Catholic communities and to date none of them have been dismantled. In fact, more have e been built since the troubles officially ended. On many buildings throughout Catholic communities one saw painted on the walls an IRA fighter with the slogan, "Prepared for peace; ready for war." This assessment is not to diminish the great accomplishment of the cessation f bombings and killings, but only to recognize there is a long way to go for Northern Ireland to move beyond tenuous co-existence to truly becoming a united people.

I tried to meet with people who have been a part of the church’s efforts to help the country move through the peace process. It was sobering to hear from many involved that the churches as a whole were not as central to the peace effort as they hoped. One thing even a visiting Presbyterian in Northern Ireland has to come to terms with is the legacy of Rev. Ian Paisley, who was a symbol of Protestant intolerance. To my relief, I found out that he created the Free Presbyterian Church to be his political and religious platform, and he was a Baptist pastor previously. There never was any connection between the Free Presbyterians and the historic Presbyterian Church and no Presbyterian congregations transferred to his effort. The Presbyterian Church in Ireland is the largest Protestant denomination, numbering nearly 300,000, in a country of about million and a half. As I talked to clergy and other religious leaders, it was clear that in spite of their large presence, almost 20% of the population versus about 1% Presbyterian in America, the church has not wielded that influence in public theology very effectively. I couldn’t help but think how useful community organizing might be in this next period of time to help Protestants and Catholics find a common set of issues they could work on together.

There were powerful exceptions to the overall church’s inaction. In one community the Presbyterian minister and the Catholic priest made a covenant to visit anyone in their area that died in the violence the day they heard of their loss. Sometimes those visits were very hard as anger spilled out at one or the other clergy, but it was a powerful witness to God not being partisan in the issue of human life lost. I also visited the Corymeela Community. It feels a bit like a Ghost Ranch on the Atlantic Ocean. The center started in the 1960s by visionary leaders of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland and provided a safe place for people of different faiths to come together, seek God’s will, deal with their prejudices, and try to envision a different future. The Irish Council of Churches was also an instrument of bringing people together.

I also went to church in Belfast at the Cooke Centenary Presbyterian Church. It was youth Sunday and that had a lively service with drama, music, and dance...though Presbyterians seem to universally struggle with a Conga in worship! I visited with the pastor of the church, Dr. Mark Gray. He had come there about two years ago from a parish in Donegal. He is trying to help them reconnect with the community, one in transition from Protestant to Catholic, but is finding the church a somewhat mired in the past and having trouble moving into a new future. In general, it felt like the Presbyterian Church of Ireland is where our denomination found itself in the 1970s, coming out of a turbulent time and a little unclear where God was leading. I hope to have some more opportunity to reflect on this with La Mesa when I get home.

Prior to getting to Belfast, I had many good days of adventure along the coast including wonderful places like the Cliffs of Moher, the Burren, Galway, Clifden, the Connemara, Westport, Donegal, Achill Peninsula, and many more beautiful places. I will have many striking images when I return, as only a few can be shared in correspondence.

On a personal level, I am so much enjoying this grand adventure and all the doors that open in each place. I am also grateful for the distance away from routines to think about my life and work and compare it with places that are similar, and yet different, from our context. It has been all that I hoped for and more. On Saturday I fly across the Irish Sea to Glasgow and begin the third part of my adventure in Scotland.

As mentioned earlier, my one frustration has been with technology like computers, phones, and the like. It has been revealing to see how dependent I have become on modern technologies and staying connected. When I get home, after hopefully getting the data and photos transferred out of the hard drive of my expired computer, I am thinking it might be interesting to do something along the lines of the Samhain celebration with the old plastic carcass. Somehow throwing the bones of an old computer into the flames feels somehow liberating, and maybe the beginning of a new tradition in the Celtic spirit – the byte-fire!

Slan,

Trey