Oilithreachta

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my first sestina. My apologies if it's a bit abstruse... the form took over, and I could only try to keep up with it.

The Summer breathes in rain and limestone crumbs
And nestles in the nettles for a rest
Beneath wool blankets of her heavy peace.
I sought her once, but found my eyes were blind
And feet too young to tread her ancient stones,
The incarnations of the stuff of Time.

But Summer’s chief possession is her time,
The time it takes for sprouts to grow from crumbs
Or walls to churn the weight of their own stones.
So in the pilgrimage that she calls “rest”
I rubbed my muddy eyes that lingered blind
And let her redefine the Irish “peace.”

And on the way I met a man, a piece
Of tender paper passing like the time
Between his brittle fingers with his blind
Routine of ritual tobacco crumbs.
He grinned a “Tóg go bóg é”—take a rest—
And perched to smoke his sculpture on the stones.

And as a child I might have cast some stones
Or at the least recited off a piece
Of dime-store jargon hoarded with the rest
Of my resourcefulness I lost in time.
Yet now I sat a spell to cull his crumbs,
Just old enough at least to know I’m blind.

For if there’s grace enough to heal the blind,
It tumbles down like execution stones
Beneath the slab where dogs can gather crumbs.
And on the coast of Inis Oírr there’s Peace
That soaks the rain of Irish summer-time
And trembles in the wind just like the rest

Of us. And we who take the yoke of rest
And find that mud and spittle leave us blind
May learn to see trees walking over time
(If trees could grow in Cheathrú Rua stones),
Or pass the sacramental sign of Peace
As if the dust were Eucharistic crumbs.

For here time passes like the pilgrim’s rest
And falls like sandwich crumbs that tumble blind
On stones that catch as many grains of peace.

Caoineadh Phádraig Shéamais

The story is told of a father and son in a small village outside of Galway who were crossing a channel late at night to get barley to make poitín, Irish moonshine. When they loaded the small boat and prepared to return home, a storm started to gather and they decided that the boat, laden with the barley, would not make it to the other side with both passengers. The father told the son to cross in the boat and walked several miles alone to a place he could walk across. When he reached the place the boat would have landed, he saw neither son or boat. The next day they found the shattered pieces of the boat and the dead body of his son.

For the next week as his wife and daughter sang keenings over the body of the young man, the father was entirely silent, eating nothing and talking to no one. His friends and family worried that he would follow his son to the grave in sorrow, but they could do nothing to ease his pain. Then one day as the daughter was walking by the river, she heard her father singing this song:

An chéad Mháirt de fhomhar ba bhrónach turseach mo scéal.
Lámh thapa a bhí cróga ag gabháil romham ar leaba na n-éag.
Ar charraig na nDeor is dó gur chaill mé mo radharc
Is go dté mé faoi fhód is ní thógfad m’aigne i do dhéidh.

Tá do mháthair is Niall faoi chian ‘s is fada leo an lá.
D’fhág tú osna ina gcliabh nach leigheasann dochtúir nó lia.
Ar sholáthair mé riamh is bíodh sé ‘lig cruinn i mo láimh,
go dtabharfainn é uaim ach fuascledh—Paidí bheith slán.

The first Tuesday of September sad and sorrowful was my plight:
The brave able hand going before me to the bed of death
On the Rock of Tears I lost my sight.
Till I go to my grave I’ll not lift my spirit after you.

Your mother and Niall are sorrowing and the day is long for them.
You left them a heavy heart that no doctor or physician can cure.
All that I ever earned, were it all gathered in my hand,
I would give it in ransom—that Paddy be safe.*

Never having heard her father sing before, the girl worried that his grief was driving him further from his sanity. She went to a friend of his and related the tale.

“Oh, don’t you worry,” the old man assured the girl. “If he’s singing, he’ll get better.” The father’s song, painful and agonizing though it might have been, was a sign of life in him, evidence of healing.

“When I heard that story,” the Irishman told me, “the pain of the father was so fresh in the words that I assumed it was a recent incident. I asked the storyteller if he had known Pádraig Shéamais or his father. The man shook his head, and I later learned that the incident had happened in 1811.”



*Text and translation by Breandán Ó Madagáin, author of Caointe agus Seancheolta Eile: Keening and other Old Irish Musics

Notes from the Gaeltacht

If anyone has been wondering about the recent lack of posts, be aware that I’ve been in the middle of another summer language course, again in Ireland, this time for a living language that actually makes sense to study here: Irish. Oh yeah.

When my brain settles down a bit I might write something more interesting. For now I’ll just throw out some brief anecdotes from the Gaeltacht:

The Irish for “I’m sorry” is Tá brón orm, which literally translates as “There is sadness upon me.” I find it a lovely image.

The Irish for “Hello” is Dia dhuit, which means “God be with you.” As the Irish never like to be shown up in anything, even a greeting, the proper response is Dia ‘s Muire dhuit, “God and Mary be with you.” If more greetings are required afterwards, it continues Dia ‘s Muire dhuit is Pádraig, Dia ‘s Muire dhuit is Pádraig is Bríd, and Dia ‘s Muire dhuit is Pádraig is Bríd is Colmcille. I’m not sure what you do after using up the major Irish saints.

As the weather is generally terrible (a dhiabhail! – “Oh the devil!), one cannot comment on the rare beautiful day without inserting a buíochas le Dia! (“Thanks be to God!”) for good measure to avoid jinxing it. I imagine this involves a good healthy combination of devotion, superstition, and thoughtless convention, but it’s fun for a stranger to the language for sure.

A person with dark hair (like me) is called a dubh (“black”) person. To describe a person of African ancestry, on the other hand, they would use the word gorm (“blue”). Having always found the terms “black,” “white,” “red,” and “yellow” to describe skin color to be a bit ludicrous, I find this extremity almost delightful.

And, most illuminating for my fourth summer in Ireland, the Irish language does not have the words “yes” or “no.” The general rule seems to be: Ask a simple question, get a long-winded response. This also seems to explain the almost universal difficulty the Irish seem to have for committing to or refusing anything.

That’s all for tonight, but until next time always remember, Is minic a gheibhean beal oscailt diog dunta! (“An open mouth often catches a closed fist!”), a good reminder for people of any culture!

To Patrick

You wear obscurity like Joseph’s coat,
Meandering your way from history into myth
As if they were the same, as if you wrote
It on the wind and dared us probe its width.
For what is harder: banishing the snakes
From where they never were, or gathering them
Like sheep on Slemish, ‘til our memory wakes
Embedded in your verdant clover stems?
Walk on, as if it were the same to light
A fire on Slane as in our hearts or from
Your fingertips, and carve your crosses right
Where we would wrap our arms around the sun.
And where we can't sift form from matter, smile
Like a schoolboy, besting us in guile.

St. Patrick's breastplate

For my birthday, my parents' gave me a weekend of spring back down South to remind me of what will eventually (I hope!) arrive in the Midwest.

I'd love to write a lovely, inspirational anecdote to celebrate some obscure aspect of Irish culture. But it is my birthday, and my family calls, and the trees are budding under the warmth of the March sunshine. I'll have to settle for the tried-and-true, well-known "St. Patrick's Breastplate" that any ol' google search will assure you was "most certainly not" written by Patrick as if it matters, as if a possibly 8th-century hymn is not connected to the life of its 4th-century generator in this living body we call the Church.

And now I must arise in the light of sun...

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through the belief in the threeness,
Through confession of the oneness
Of the Creator of Creation.

I arise today
Through the strength of Christ's birth with his baptism,
Through the strength of his crucifixion with his burial,
Through the strength of his resurrection with his ascension,
Through the strength of his descent for the judgment of Doom.

I arise today
Through the strength of the love of Cherubim,
In obedience of angels,
In the service of archangels,
In hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In prayers of patriarchs,
In predictions of prophets,
In preaching of apostles,
In faith of confessors,
In innocence of holy virgins,
In deeds of righteous men.

I arise today
Through the strength of heaven:
Light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.

I arise today
Through God's strength to pilot me:
God's might to uphold me,
God's wisdom to guide me,
God's eye to look before me,
God's ear to hear me,
God's word to speak for me,
God's hand to guard me,
God's way to lie before me,
God's shield to protect me,
God's host to save me
From snares of devils,
From temptations of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
Afar and anear,
Alone and in multitude.

I summon today all these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel merciless power that may oppose my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man's body and soul.

Christ to shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me abundance of reward.

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the threeness,
Through confession of the oneness,
Of the Creator of Creation.

Chosen to Choose

In the first conversation I had with my Irish priest in Cork, Father Padraic mentioned some of the disputes between various parties during the Protestant Reformation dealing with predestination and free will.

“The Catholic Church has never found that a divisive issue,” he told me, “because we have always looked at Mary as the example of what happens to us all when Christ enters us. She was chosen and she said ‘Yes.’ She was predestined and she freely obeyed. The same happens when Christ enters any of us.”

This is not intended to be a Marian post in particular, not one that goes from her being “highly favored” to the Immaculate Conception or from all generations calling her blessed to the role of Mother of the Church. But since the readings from the Book of Common Prayer for today depict her meeting with Elizabeth and her song of rejoicing afterwards, I remembered Father Padraic’s words over two years ago, and found comfort in the paradoxes of the Incarnation: the Creator is created in creation, we are chosen to choose.

Rejoice, my friends: as the Word has been made flesh in the womb of a virgin, he has entered the womb of creation, sanctifying the ground he treads. The Creator is in the womb, and creation will be reborn. As with her, so with us; he enters the world through his people, and we await his bursting forth from us. Blessed are we whom he has chosen; blessed are we who have chosen him.

Sonnet XXVI of Advent

My soul declares his greatness, for he’ll do
What he has done before: yea, he will stir
His might just as he stirs the barren womb,
And look upon the sojourner like her
Who served in lowliness. The Mighty One
Has done his wonders while our hearts were far
Away: He gives the rain and hides the sun,
He spreads abundance as he spread the stars.
Soon Lebanon will be a fruitful field
And fields be forests; we who dwell in night
Will live in light; the nations will be healed,
The hungry fed, the blind receive their sight.
And blessed is the chosen for her choice
To bear the ripened word and to rejoice.

Psalm 80, 147, 148
Isaiah 29:13-24
Revelation 21:22-22:5
Luke 1:39-56

Delightful misery

“Why Padraic, how are you now?” the cheerful Irishman asked as we navigated the isles at Tesco on our work-day at the priory.

“Terrible, terrible,” the priest answered brightly as if he had won the lottery, “but nobody cares now, do they? And how are you?”

“Truthfully about the same, but isn’t that always the case?” came the chipper, polite answer. “But you can’t complain about the weather we have today at any rate. What are you here for?”

“This young lady and myself are getting an apartment ready for some visitors tomorrow,” Fr. Padraic began, and the conversation never returned to their mutual miseries.

The Irish are without a doubt the most delightfully miserable people I have ever met. Their suffering is quite real and never forgotten, but that is somehow not enough to ruin an otherwise lovely day (or even to worsen a rainy one).

As I commented last year, the Irish wear suffering like a well-worn t-shirt. It is unmistakably present, but has become so well-worn over time that it could almost be considered comfortable. After all, there is always tea to greet the morning and beer to greet the night, and perhaps even a few cigarettes to get you from one to the other.

Of course, I don’t mean to minimize their pain and oppression over the centuries, to brush it aside and gloss over the raw evil of it. But they sort of do that for me.

Nothing covered up

Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops.
-Luke 12:2-3

We felt like we were in a war-zone right away. On one side of the river we were welcomed into the city with red, white, and blue and a sign that read “Londonderry – West Bank – Loyalists Still Under Siege – No Surrender.” On the other we were greeted by green, white, and orange and a sign that read “You Are Now Entering Free Derry” to introduce a host of disturbing murals commemorating the victims of Bloody Sunday (1972) and the Troubles. The tension was almost palpable.

I had come to Derry to deliver a gift to a Franciscan friar, and had failed to connect the city I was visiting with the news of the previous week: 38 years after the shootings in Derry that had served as an iconic representation of the Troubles, the Saville Report had just been published a week earlier, and the British government officially recognized the killings as atrocities.

The killings had become burned in the Irish memory, a travesty of justice white-washed by the perpetrators which, even if extreme, was certainly an iconic example of what they suffered throughout the centuries. Over lunch on Sunday I was struck by two things: how present the pain still is (an Irish couple described the sheer terror they had experienced whenever they had to drive through the North and stood the risk of being shot if they failed to notice a road blockade), and how much an apology makes a difference nonetheless. Present pain not withstanding, there were seeds of hope and goodwill.

Though there is nothing pragmatic about it, no tangible removal of consequence, confession is nevertheless powerful. When a party can strip its pride and dignity to say “I was absolutely wrong,” can expose hidden (in this case, quite ineffectively) wrongs to the light, can do so even when they are decades old and even if the admission is not forced, there is a place for healing. Some wrongs cannot be “made right”; they can only be admitted to be wrong. And no wrongs are private wrongs; all are public, and can only be healed publicly.

This past weekend, I was given hope for that healing in Northern Ireland, and it was beautiful indeed.

* * *

A few recommended articles:

• BBC - for the raw facts of the Saville Report
• The Irish Independent - for reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants
• The Irish Catholic - for talk of healing from one of the survivors
  

The Irish work ethic

“Is this a good time?” I asked when I arrived at the priory. It was indeed the time we had arranged for me to come help preparing the apartment upstairs for the arrival of guests the next day, but I’m always a bit self-conscious about being on time in Ireland.

“Yes, it’s a perfect time,” Fr Padraic said as he welcomed me inside. “I was just about to smoke a cigarette; would you like to join me in the back?” Since he had been a bit overwhelmed with the amount of work that needed to happen that day (thus my offer to help), I assumed it would be a quick break.

I had yet to learn about the Irish work ethic.

Fr Padraic smoked a cigarette as he checked on the plumbing work being done out back. Then he invited me back inside for tea.

Ready for the mountain of tasks for the day, he went to the office to put some finishing touches on his dissertation he was about to get bound. Then he smoked another cigarette.

Dissertation in hand, we walked to the binders, only to discover upon arrival that the title page had a smudge. We returned to the priory to print out another title page. Then he smoked another cigarette.

We returned to the binders with the new page in hand, and stopped at a department store on the way back to pick up a dresser. Tired from carrying the load, he checked on the plumbers again, smoking another cigarette amid his amicable Irish banter with the laborers. Then we went to a cafe for tea and biscuits.

Then he smoked another cigarette, musing over the great amount of work we had already accomplished, and how much help I had been.

Finally, sometime after noon we got to the main task of the day and walked to Tesco to buy dishes and cutlery for the apartment. Now that I finally had a task that felt useful, I began washing the newly purchased dishes and cleaning out the mysterious collection of entirely random objects that had accumulated in the unused kitchen. Before I had got very far, Fr Padraic interrupted me for lunch. It was a light lunch, but included gin-and-tonic and more cigarettes.

Fortunately after lunch I managed to work quickly enough to finish the kitchen and help Fr Padraic select some curtains online for one of the bedrooms. Then it was time for another cigarette.

As the day waned, we walked to the store to buy the curtains. Upon our return, Fr Padraic bumped into some people he knew and invited them in for tea. By the time that was over, thoroughly exhausted from the day’s tasks, Fr Padraic thanked me for my invaluable help and escorted me to the door. “What a lot of work we’ve got done today!” he exclaimed with all sincerity as I left the priory.

Of course, jokes about the work day with Fr Padraic aside, I know that Ireland has had more than its fair share of brutalizing labor inflicted upon it over the years, so I do not actually intend to imply that the Irish are lazy. From what I can tell, the Irish seem to work as hard as they need to (though there are many places where the Irish and Americans would quibble over the definition of “need”), but no more than that. If they don’t need to work as hard, they don’t; and when they can relax (and enjoy a cigarette), they absolutely do.

It may look lazy to an American entrepreneur, but there is something profoundly healing to me about a work ethic that strives for nothing more than the day’s tasks, that does not try to get 25 hours out of a day nor would work the full 24. Pitfalls of the Irish economy aside for now, there is much for me to learn from it.

“Give us this day our daily bread,” we pray, and ask nothing more. “Give us this day our daily tasks,” the Irish might also pray, and expect nothing more. Fr. Padraic accomplished what his Tuesday demanded, and nothing more. I’m sure he went to bed feeling content... after he smoked another cigarette.

What did the Irish ever give me?

I, Patrick the sinner, am the most rustic and the least of all the faithful, and contemptible in the eyes of very many.
-opening line from the Confessio of Saint Patrick

I was once informed by an Irish medieval historian over a pint of Murphey’s that most of the legends surrounding Saint Patrick were doubtless false. It was politically expedient for any town to claim roots to the saint, his reasoning goes, and it was not humanly possible for one man to have been founding churches in all the towns who trace their roots to him across the island.

I don’t remember how I answered my friend. I do remember feeling almost as sorry for him as he did for me. The atheist felt sorry for the ways I as a naive Christian (or naive American—which is worse?) believed whatever local legends people spouted out, and I felt sorry for a medieval historian who misses the beauty of his field of study because his worldview could not allow for mystery.

And today as we break Lent to celebrate the feast of the man who seemed to spawn churches in his footsteps, who could not be burned or poisoned drowned or stabbed by any king or druid he encountered, who sailed back from the continent on a slab of rock, who lit the way through darkness by his fire on the Hill of Slane or the lights from his fingertips, who beat his drums loudly and quickly enough (and until you’ve heard Irish music, you can’t appreciate that one!) to make all the snakes flee into the sea, I am in no mood to sort between legend and history, whatever that would mean. And as today is my birthday, I am going to excuse myself from the task of explaining the “right” way to read legend or to understand mystery.

The Irish have given me a world (quite literally) soaked in living mystery, an appreciation for the beauty and livability of suffering from their stories and music alike, a life-long love of the colour green, my knowledge (such as it is) of reading Latin and Greek, banter and quirks enough to make a foreigner feel at home, a handful of sonnets I couldn’t help but write while I was there, a push-start in a pinch, faithfulness and foibles that are interwoven like a devotion to the Eucharist and the pint, stories where anger and reconciliation are too closely knit to separate, reminders of the gentleness of God, and a heck of a day to celebrate a birthday. Today, I raise a pint to Patrick and the Irish.

Fingerprints of God

The week that thousands were dying in Haiti from a catastrophic earthquake, my dear friend Seamus in Ireland very nearly died from a weather-related freak accident. In an unusually harsh Irish winter, Seamus was riding into town with his parents when a tree, roots weakened by the severe frost, fell directly on their vehicle and destroyed it. “At the extremest end of statistical unlikelihood,” Seamus called the situation. His crouch-instinct saved his life; the tree crushed past the headrest in the back seat where he was sitting. In the end, Seamus and his parents emerged from the pulverized vehicle without a scratch. “I’ve cut myself worse shaving,” he told me.

Unbeknownst to the three hapless passengers, Seamus’ devout grandmother had awoken at 6am afraid for her son’s life, and spent the next hour praying for him. The tree fell at 6:45.

It’s a bizarre situation that seems to have the intervention of God written all over it, but as I’ve mulled over it in the past week it strikes me that I cannot isolate specific locations for his fingerprints. Does God knock trees down on people to demonstrate his power and protection (by far the most uncanny part of the whole story)? Does God take the initiative to wake old women in order to answer their prayers, as if he could do the former unprompted but required prompting for the latter? Does God simply manufacture the physics of the world such that the tree did not crush the family (reverse entropy yet again?), so that the climax of the story is the most explainable, and the most joyous miracle can be accepted by a Deist?

I do not know. Nor exactly did I know how to pinpoint God’s intervention when my college friend hit a patch of ice in the mountains and found herself upside-down in a freezing river trapped in her seatbelt. Nor when an enormous tree fell where my little brother was playing in our childhood, scratching his arm as it came down. Nor when a car hit my housemate on her bike, or me on foot. Nor can I make sense of it when there seems to be no intervention, and friends get shot or hit by cars or drown.

Perhaps we meet God like any other person, not like a scientific phenomenon that we can test and analyze. Just as I cannot objectively qualify the actions of a friend, determining which are fueled by love and which by self-interest, but can nevertheless assert over time that I know my friend, perhaps in time we can come to know our God who is loving and powerful as we become familiar with the way he runs his world.

I do not know how to qualify God’s actions; all I know is what they say about him. And they seem to say that he is a God near enough for me to love.

Why do you contend against him,
saying, “He will answer none of man’s words”?
For God speaks in one way,
and in two, though man does not perceive it.
Job 33:13-14

The Feast of the Sts. Emers

Today is the feast day of the two Sts. Emers, and, with the name “Emmers” not altogether unfamiliar to me, I can’t help but take note. Not only do these fourth-century saints nearly foreshadow one of my affectionate nicknames(!), they are Irish(!!), the foster-sisters of St. Patrick himself(!!!).

As the story goes, unreliable and erratic as all the best Irish tales are, after Patrick was kidnapped from his home in Great Britain and sold to Maelchu (or Miluic, if you prefer) in northern Ireland where he spent years in slavery tending sheep, he grew up beside Maelchu’s children, St. Guasacht (feast day January 24) and the two Emers. Why history remembers only one name for the two women I do not know, but since it barely remembers anything more I suppose we should be grateful. Beggars can’t be choosy, after all.

Patrick, as we all know, receives a vision while tending sheep on Mt. Slemish, miraculously escapes Ireland, reunites with his homeland, hears the Irish people calling him in his dreams, and returns to the land of his captivity where he proceeds (from what I can tell) to found churches in virtually every town and to convert personally nearly every fourth- and fifth-century Irish saint (and believe you me, there are many!).

But the first priority is the very family who had enslaved him, and, while Maelchu burns himself alive in his home rather than see Patrick again (evidently those are his only two options?), his three children receive the faith, dedicate themselves to mission of bringing the gospel to the druidic people, and became some of the first bishop/nuns. As Patrick puts the veil on his two foster sisters, their feet sink into the stone beneath them, and the marks are visible to this day.

So today from a less fantastical land of parking lots and laborious rearranging of 1s and 0s where nevertheless the scars of bitterness run just as deep and the power of grace trumps them just as conclusively, I thought I would venerate Patrick’s slave-owners-turned-sisters. Pray for us slave-owners, Sts. Emers; pray for us slaves.

Its Damp but where ok

Friday morning my friends in Cork woke at 2am to the sound of running water, and went downstairs to find water pouring through their floor. Two weeks of record-breaking rain had finally overwhelmed the dam upstream, and officials were forced to let out water to avoid a bigger catastrophe if it were to burst. Cork, lying on an island between two channels of the River Lee, had become part of the river. By the morning, the water had reached the top of the kitchen table where I had sat every day over the summer.

People lost businesses. The art museum lost the works that were stored in its basement. Several houses may be irrevocably damaged. The city has been essentially shut down. Who knows what the costs of repair will be.

Immediately upon hearing the news, I wrote to friends in various corners of the devastated city to let them know of my prayers, coveting the scarce pieces of news I could acquire from their facebook information and my own internet searches.

This morning I heard from Finbar, a native Corkonian whose blue-collar upbringing, shady history, warm hospitality, and simple approach to life (not to mention his nearly incomprehensible accent) set him apart as pure Cork, through and through. He responded to my concern with a short note that, both in its brevity and its message (not to mention its diction), well-depict what seems to me to be the Irish approach to suffering:

“Thanks for the prayers but don't worry where fine out. Its Damp but where ok.”

It’s damp.

How Irish. How delightfully Irish.

Genocide with Morning Coffee

Edmund Spenser was the poet who settled me once and for all on Renaissance literature, and in that way at least you could say he changed my life. While I was still living in my intercity commune imagining that higher education was the Isaac I had sacrificed on the alter of service to the poor, I found myself sneaking cantos here and there of the half-finished masterpiece The Faerie Queene, finding the beauty of the poetry, richness of the allegory, and depth of the ideas just the medicine I needed to keep my spirit alive.

After coming to graduate school, I could only fall further in love with his poetry. I wrote a paper on the Amoretti, in which Spenser is instrumental in directing the Petrarchan love tradition toward marriage. I wrote a paper on the Epithalamion, which C. S. Lewis cites as being one of the few successful portrayals of pure joy in English poetry. And of course, I wrote a paper on the breathtaking, masterful Faerie Queene itself.

I decided that if I were to ever have a son, I would name him Edmund.

“I love Spenser!” I said to Seamus last summer in response to a mention of where he had stayed in Cork. As the words spat recklessly out of my mouth, I anticipated my error, and was tempted to look over my shoulder for fear that members of the IRA or their 16th-century equivalent would emerge from the shadows in response to my flippant utterance.

The Irishman looked uncharacteristically soberly at me, his constant smile dropping momentarily as he gained his composure. “Edmund Spenser essentially lobbied for the genocide of the Irish people,” he stated mater-of-factly.

What does one say to that? I remembered that Spenser had written something called A View of the Present State of Ireland when he was secretary to England’s lord deputy of Ireland, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading it. “Oh,” I managed.

“He was a terrible man,” Seamus maintained, adding graciously to lighten the mood, “but he did write some beautiful poetry.”

Maybe so... but after all, isn’t that the way with most evil in the world? Weren’t lynch mobs composed of salt-of-the-earth Southerners who rallied after church on Sunday? Weren’t Nazi death camps run by fathers and mothers who were probably otherwise pleasant Germans? Weren’t Rwandan massacres carried out by joyful, hospitable Africans? Weren’t terrible atrocities committed by people like... me? Weren’t their hearts shaped a lot like mine?

It seems an undeniable fact of history that mostly-lovely people can have shocking blinders that somehow allow them to confuse genocide with morning coffee (oops!). Spenser was not the first to make this kind of error; “the man after God’s own heart” found himself committing murder to cover up his adultery (rape, by most modern definitions), and needed a prophet to come spell it out to him before he realized it had been a bad thing. I know a lot of people who are perturbed at God for thinking so highly of such a scoundrel. I sometimes figure that that very egregiously overlooking nature of his is the only hope most of us have.

Maybe the primary reason we are called to forgive is that we don’t know what genocides we may be casually supporting with our mundane morning coffee. Maybe most of us are likewise terrible people who write some beautiful poetry (or, more gently, beautiful people with some terrible blind spots). Thank God he likes the poetry!

Bagpipes and Beauty

On Tuesday I was driving my two older nephews, five and three, to a nearby lake to do some plant identification with a horticulturalist friend of mine (a.k.a. Plant Guy). In my efforts to expose my godsons to the finer things in life, I played Celtic music in the car, which to my delight had the boys transfixed.

“This is a bagpipe,” I explained to them during one song. “They play them in Scotland, mostly, but I think there is enough sharing of cultures between the two countries that they play them in Ireland as well. At least, I saw them a few times when I was there, though they might have been there just for the benefit of tourists who don’t know the difference between Ireland and Scotland. They are really funny-looking instruments...”

At this point I began my feeble efforts to describe a bagpipe to preschoolers while I drove. The five-year-old who had developed an early love for musical instruments four years earlier listened intently, my description no doubt giving him a strange picture.

“Oh,” he finally sighed dramatically, “I do hope I get to see a bagpipe in real life before I die!”

I was shocked at his entirely appropriate response. “Well Buddy,” I replied, “I hope so too.”

“Actually,” he continued, “I think everyone should get to see a bagpipe in real life before they die!”

Again, I could not agree with him more.

But he was not finished. “But some people never get to see a bagpipe in real life before they die,” he lamented mournfully.

“No,” I agreed, surprised at the somber turn in the conversation. “It’s very sad.”

“Some people die when they are little babies, and they never get to see a bagpipe in real life. It is very sad when that happens.”

“You’re right, it is quite sad,” I said, never having thought of that particular aspect of the tragedy of infant mortality.

“And some people lived a long, long time ago before there were any bagpipes, and they never even got to hear a bagpipe.”

Again, what could I do but agree?

“But I am still quite young,” he mused, “so hopefully I have a lot of life left in me. I imagine I’ll get to see a bagpipe before I die.”

Well, Little One, I sure do hope so. In the mean time, thank you for the reminder of what I had felt the first time I had heard the bagpipe, and the reminder to love the beautiful things in the world. What a saturated world of gratuitous beauty we live in, full of mountains and skies and the color green and... as if that were not enough... bagpipes on top of everything!

The Middle Voice of Obedience

During my last week in Ireland, I saw Father Padraic several times: once after mass on Sunday, once for coffee on Monday, once for lunch with the seminarians on Wednesday, and once for gin-and-tonic before I left on Thursday. Over coffee, we talked about (among other things... Fr. Padraic never pushed or even brought up the issue) my interest in the Catholic Church.

“I’m just imagining myself standing next to my little sister on her wedding day,” I tried to illustrate what the thought of being ‘out of communion’ with Protestants looked like for me, “whose diapers I had once changed and who has grown into my best friend, and abstaining from communion just because the Catholic Church wants to make a point that the Protestants’ little crackers and grape juice are not what they never claimed that they were. I understand the issues of Church division that are behind it, but the actual action itself nevertheless feels nasty and divisive. The thought just breaks my heart.”

Fr. Padraic had been listening patiently, every now and then amending my impression of the Catholic view of Protestants with a kinder, gentler (more Irish) view, but at this point he let my difficulty stand.

“Then you’re not ready,” he stated simply and gently.

I was taken aback, and didn’t particularly like the answer. “I’m not ready just because the thought breaks my heart?” I asked dubiously.

“Yes,” he answered confidently, “because God is gentle.”

I chewed over his reasoning a bit. I could never imagine any of the pastors I had known giving this sort of statement to someone knocking at the door of a church wanting to come in.

“God is gentle,” he repeated. “He does not expect all of us to be St. Paul with a dramatic conversion experience that happens all at once. Those exist, but for most of us, conversion—whether that be the conversion from atheist to Christian or from Protestant to Catholic or from Catholic to... Catholic [he chuckled, thinking of his Irish flock]—is a journey. God knows your stamina, and will not ask for more than you are capable of.”

“But Fr. Padraic,” I protested, feeling surprisingly upset at his suggesting I might not be ready to do what he obviously thought was ultimately the right thing to do, “I don’t think the thought could ever not break my heart.”

He shrugged in his happy, Irish way. “Then it might not ever be time.”

I didn’t plan on posting this anecdote (I have no intention of turning my listening-blog into Em’s Catholic Adventures), but it has been stirring deeply in my spirit for the past six weeks since it happened, and applies to the broader scope of how I look at the entire journey of following God. Then last week when I met with the Monsignor of the church back home in the States where I attend, he told me more or less the same thing. Obedience, he insisted, is not enough if it is a mere begrudging obedience; obedience must be coupled with freedom and joy. And, lest I should go out and try to conjure up freedom and joy as if they are the next task on my journey, he insisted that they are the Holy Spirit’s work, and would come at whatever point he wanted. In the mean time, I could only wait.

It’s an entirely foreign picture of obedience for me. I always thought obedience was a matter of seeking out the right thing to do and doing it no matter what at any cost to oneself, believing that even if it was excruciating now it would be the best thing in the end. I never thought to question an action based on anything other than some Platonic notion of whether or not it seemed in keeping with the Good.

But for Fr. Padraic and the Monsignor alike, obedience seems to be something quite different, more passive than I would ever expect something active like obedience to be. Obedience, they seem to say, in my case involves seeking out the right thing to do and waiting for God to prepare the way. That looks almost entirely passive to a doer like me.

Might obedience be conjugated in the middle voice as well, like my seminarian friends suggested of faith over the summer? Might it be the Holy Spirit’s work, not my own?

Might it be, as Fr. Padraic had insisted to me repeatedly, that the almighty, holy God whom I have tried to follow relentlessly for 26 years... is gentle?

Praying in the Aorist

I’ve watched it many times from my corner in the cathedral downtown:

An old lady will hobble into the church, rowing the marble tile with her cane to pull herself to the front. When she gets to the end of the center isle, she will bow at the altar as much as the cane allows, and then pull herself back up and continue to the tea candles in front of my favorite crucifix. She’ll rest her purse on the railing and fish out some change that echoes like slow metallic thunder as she empties each coin individually into the slot. Then she will pull out a candle from the box, light it with another candle already lit before the crucifix, and place it in its own candle stand. Finished with the task, she will hobble away with another belabored bow toward the altar, and exit the cathedral without further errands.

Other times it is not an old woman. It is a middle-aged man, walking briskly as if his lunch break is almost over. His kneel will take him down to his knees and keep him there a little longer, and his change will echo in the cathedral more quickly, like a deep applause. He will likewise light his candle, or maybe two or three, and exit the cathedral with another low kneel before the altar.

In any case, whatever the stature of the supplicant, I realize that their prayers for the unspoken requests that bring them to the cathedral are different from my typical prayers. At my most prayerful, I plead with God in tears and walk away wishing he was better at listening to me. At my least, I shoot up a thought in passing to the effect of, “Hey God, you should do that sometime.”

The supplicants at the cathedral, on the other hand, for the most part do not linger and weep. Nevertheless they have come, perhaps on their lunch breaks or on their way to the grocery store, perhaps even for a special trip. They make their prayers tangibly definitive, and they make their prayers generally brief.

As another esoteric analogy as I prepare for my last Greek exam, they seem to pray in the aorist imperative. Greek has two different tenses for commands: there is the present imperative which is used for ongoing actions that don’t have a fixed end-point (“Study English literature”), and the aorist imperative which is used for one-time actions or actions that have fixed end-points (“Clean your room”).

Initially I was upset to learn that the Kyrie Eleison (“Lord have mercy; Christ have mercy; Lord have mercy”), a regular part of church liturgy often said in conjunction with confession and absolution, was in the aorist imperative, as if we ask God for mercy as a one-time request with a fixed end-point: “Lord, have mercy right now and be done with it.” I almost never pray for anything like that; my prayers are more to the effect of, “Lord, be having mercy during this long and weary road of life.” I don’t want God to wave the mercy baton and walk away; I want him to be in the posture of mercy.

At any rate, whatever the reason for the tense of the Kyrie Eleison, it strikes me that my faith could use a little praying in the aorist, as if God were going to hear and do and say “It is finished” afterwards. Whether in confession or in supplication, even if the supplication is for something that seems indefinite, I would do better to pray as if God would hear and act and be done. I certainly want God to be a posture of mercy too, but maybe he already is, and maybe that posture makes him ready to respond immediately to prayers that we make definitively like a trip to the cathedral and walk away from like tea candles.

Don’t worry, readers. My grammar posts should stop coming soon...

Come, Peter.

‘Lord, bid me to come to you on the waters.’ Jesus reached out his hand and took hold of Peter. He said, “Man of little faith, why did you doubt?’

With a few odd exceptions, my first experience of a Catholic mass was in Ireland last summer, at the local Augustinian Church whose mass card office I mentioned in a previous post. I cried for an hour afterwards.

There I was, someone who was accustomed to going in and out of different cultures, a Christian who had spent enough of her life going between Pentecostal and Presbyterian and non-denominational and Baptist and Anglican circles to be pretty familiar with rethinking her approach to the faith, who had been pondering an exploration of the Catholic church for the past four years and who in some ways was closer to the Church theologically than most Catholics she knew, and my experience of mass felt so jarringly foreign. Combined with the fact that Irish Catholicism is, I learned only months later to my great relief, particularly quirky, and that I spent time going back and forth between my passionate seminarian friends and a delightfully loving Protestant family who took me in that summer, my crash course in Latin merged with quite a crash course in the Catholic church and the need for reconciliation.

If mass felt that foreign to me, I pondered as I wept in the Augustinian church, Church unity was nowhere on the trajectory.

Last night I went to another mass at the same Augustinian church, my first time back this summer. My classmate Hector was singing, so I had wanted to come support him and possibly redeem my time there. My classmates and I had taken a trip to the coast to celebrate our last grammar exam that morning, and made sure to be back in time. Though we had come at different times and were in various corners of the sanctuary, we congregated afterwards to congratulate Hector who was beaming to see his friends at his church.

It’s hard to describe what I felt as the group slowly converged and I realized how many people had come in that room that had felt so foreign and distant last summer. There were seminarians, friars, Evangelicals, atheists, agnostics, and whatever places in-between people might have been. There were eleven people from our class of seventeen, plus one of my friends from the Protestant family I’m staying with. I was shocked by the crowd.

Hector invited us up to the priory for tea afterwards, and we stayed much later than our sleep-deprived bodies wanted after a day of climbing over rocks along the coast. As we lingered in the priory of the first Catholic church I ever attended enjoying one another’s presence, a group who delighted in each other enough to spend Saturday night in a church where most of us could not participate, I realized something smelled of the kind of story that ends in the Church unity which had seemed an impossibility to me in that very building one year earlier.

After we finally left to allow Hector to clean up and we all began our weary pilgrimages to our various corners of Cork, I crawled into bed to do my evening prayers. The Magnificat Antiphon (bookends around a regular prayer said every evening) for that particular Sunday happened to say,

‘Lord, bid me to come to you on the waters.’ Jesus reached out his hand and took hold of Peter. He said, “Man of little faith, why did you doubt?’

Teach us to Pray

Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciple said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray...”

Prayer has been a recurring theme over the summer; I don’t know when I started realizing it, but at some point it became clear that the topic of prayer has characterized my entire time in Ireland.

Maybe it was because I spent the first week here traveling around the country in my own make-shift pilgrimage to St. Patrick sites, traveling alone and camping along the way.

Maybe it was because of a conversation in a Bible study that consisted of people from various corners of the Church in which we ended up coming around to the same conclusion that the writers of the liturgy came to when they wrote, “Jesus taught us to call God our Father, so with confidence we now pray, Our Father, who art in Heaven...”

Maybe it was because my Dominican friend likes to say, “Prayer is like spending time with my family: I always look forward to it, often do not enjoy it, and constantly miss it when I am away.”

Maybe it was because someone I hardly knew contacted me one morning from the US with an intense personal crisis, and I had to go through the day with nothing to do for him but pray regarding a situation I knew almost nothing about.

Maybe it was because an Augustinian friar had been wearing an Eastern Orthodox Rosary to class, and in answer to my questions about it he loaned me a book about the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”).

Maybe it was because the cathedral downtown is always open for prayer, and in the bustle of the city I often take advantage of the refuge.

Maybe it was because one of the regular blogs I check posted an entry about praying through the psalms during a time in a religious commune which sounded familiar to me.

One way or another, when my Dominican friend asked me last week if I’d be interested in learning to pray the Divine Office, the Liturgy of the Hours, I knew I certainly was. He and a seminarian came over after class on Friday to teach me the ropes to navigate a prayer book that to a beginner seemed almost as complicated as Greek grammar (the three of us made many a joke about how the Divine Office was “easy” and “relatively straight-forward” as our grammar teacher keeps trying to say of Greek).

“So is this like the Catholic equivalent of a Protestant quiet-time?” I asked early on.

“Not quite,” the seminarian pondered. “It would be better to think of it as an entirely different way of praying.”

“It certainly is different,” I agreed, flipping through the giant prayer book, wondering if the complex system would ever feel meditative.

“Part of the difference is that, even if you are praying it alone, you are praying it together with the Church,” the Dominican explained. “Christ himself would have prayed with these very psalms, and the practice of praying the Liturgy of the Hours has been around for centuries. Part of the idea of praying the same words is that the entire Bride of Christ is united and speaking to her Groom with one voice.”

“And it is a different experience of prayer,” the seminarian continued. “It is not as conversational as what you may be used to, not the kind of prayer where you discuss with God what has happened throughout the day, though there is certainly a need for that kind of prayer as well. But in the Divine Office, you are praying by listening, adjusting your soul to a prayer that does not come out of your experience.”

“So is it like,” I struggled to understand, “instead of God coming down to your level, the psalms set the bar for your prayers to reach?”

“Well, I don’t think I’d describe it as a bar,” he answered. “The main difference I think is finding the prayer outside yourself instead of within yourself, adjusting your soul to a rhythm you didn’t set.”

“So it’s like,” I tried again, “learning the posture of prayer by sitting with the Psalmists?” English majors need analogies, I suppose.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“And what you may find,” the Dominican continued, “is that as you sit with the Psalmists, their prayers do indeed become your own, and you identify your own experience in their words and respond as they do, and that you acquire a repertoire of familiar prayers that come to mind outside your regular times of prayer. The Divine Office is ideally the first step in learning to pray without ceasing, and in doing so uniting your soul with Christ.”

“I hope it can be a refreshing time for you to pray without needing to come up with your own words,” the seminarian concluded as they left to study for the looming exam the next day, reminding me of some conversations with his peers last summer. “Enjoy it.”

We’ll see. One way or another, after the last blog entry, I could not help but be struck when I read this morning in my prayers, “let us rise with you to walk in the light of Easter.”

Let us thank our Saviour, who came into this world that God might be with us. We praise you, O Lord, and we thank you.
We welcome you with praise, you are the Daystar, the first fruits from the dead: let us rise with you to walk in the light of Easter.
Help us on this day of rest to see the goodness in all your creatures: open our eyes and our hearts to your love in the world.
Lord, we meet around your table as your family: help us to see that our bitterness is forgotten, our discord is resolved, and our sins are forgiven.
We pray for all Christian families: may your Spirit deepen their unity in faith and love.
Our Father...

The Present Tense of Hope

The readings at church this past Sunday came from II Kings 4:42-44 in which Elisha miraculously feeds 100 men with 20 loaves, Psalm 144 for which the congregational response was “You open wide your hand, O Lord, and grant our desires,” and John 6:1-15 in which Jesus feeds the 5,000. Father Padraic, whom I got to know last year, gave a lovely homily that emphasized God showing up in history, ultimately through the incarnation where he walks up another hillside to feed the people as he opens wide his hands on the cross. It was a fabulous homily for an English major.

But as any of my regular readers may recall, God’s presence was an issue of serious question for me this past spring. Furthermore, though Ireland has proved to be a refreshing holiday from my characteristic melancholy, the intensive language school has a tendency to push each of its victims to his breaking-point throughout the summer, and Tuesday ended up being my day to snap. That afternoon I found myself unable to study and hounded by all the questions that I knew where waiting for me in the US, and I left my homework and went to the cathedral to pray.

And eventually Father Padraic showed up beside me, having uncharacteristically decided to do his evening prayers in the cathedral that day, and finding me crying in front of the crucifix he asked me if I’d like to get a cup of tea with him. We walked to a nearby cafe and talked for about an hour.

“But there are sometimes God doesn’t seem to show up,” I interjected at some point in the conversation, thinking about the situation this past spring. “And I can’t walk away unless God starts providing more people. Sometimes there is no one else...”

“Watch out with those kinds of words,” Father Padraic interrupted me. “There are six billion people in the world. You only have a vague idea of what God is doing with one of them.”

“I know...” I admitted. “I know I shouldn’t say any statements with words like ‘no one’ or ‘never,’ but it certainly seems like God stands aloof sometimes.”

“Maybe you’re asking for the physical proof like Thomas was,” Fr Padraic suggested. “Unless you have the categorical evidence that you can see and touch you will not believe in the risen Christ. But blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. The call of the Christian is a call to hope in the risen Christ.”

I never thought of myself as a Cartesian materialist demanding physical proof. But maybe he was right; one way or another, he was certainly dead-on with suggesting my need to grow in hope.

“What do you mean by hope?” I asked. “Is hope in this case a future thing, hope that God will work everything out in the end into a beautiful story that makes all the evil worth it? I have plenty of that, but a hope for the future can often lead to a despair in the present.”

“No,” he assured me, “it is a hope for the present, hope that the risen Christ is alive now and working miraculously whether or not you see him. Your friend back home, for example, might have 50 people in her life right now; it is a hope that God is using the other 49 as well, whether or not you see it. It is also a hope that God is taking care of you, using people in ways they are not aware of to meet your needs, like when I came to the cathedral this evening when I would normally be elsewhere. You are not always given the chance to see him, but he is risen.”

The next morning was the feast of St. Martha. At mass we celebrated her belief in the resurrection that she had in the midst of her grief, hope that was not only in the future tense, but also the present:

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

Martha said to him, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

She said to him, “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”