Along the Kerry Way

Within the freshness of its weariness
The land is written with green pen that’s read
Before the fisherman is out of bed
And wet—he says—forever, more or less.
The sun—he says—shines green, and if you press
Them rocks will cry green tears, for they are fed
By prison bars of rain that he is led
To hate just as he loves its fruitfulness.
If one must be a nomad, may as well
Be here; and if a life is simple, may
As well be simply green and have the smell
Of rain on midgy mountains pushed away
To Cork, and drink in instant coffee with
The morning dew in all its splendid pith.

Drinking rain and coffee

‘How are you?’ the fisherman shyly asked as he returned to his car right as I walked by. A greeting was to be expected as we were the only people visible at 7am in the Irish mountains.

‘I’m doing well; how ‘bout you?’ I answered in what I knew as a glaringly American accent.

As I had grown accustomed to over the summer, a passing greeting sparked curiosity the second I opened my mouth. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked from his double-take.

‘North Carolina,’ I answered, not even bothering to give the country.

The fisherman’s face grew puzzled as he tried to place it. ‘I think I’ve heard of it…’ he struggled.

‘No,’ I smiled. ‘You’re thinking of California. They’re very different… they’re like Ireland and England.’ My analogy served to give us a point of connection, and he relaxed from formal conversation by leaning against his car and looking down the hill toward the river where he had been fishing. I stood and took in the mountain landscape in the early-morning cold, happy to be out of the dripping tent that was now on my back, breathing in the wet air after a night of being soaked on the mountainside.

‘And what do you think of this weather we got here now?’ he asked. The question had become to me almost as universal a greeting as how-are-you, the Irish way of welcoming me to their country by complaining about it: apologizing, bragging and relaxing in the same sentence.

‘I’m actually glad of it,’ I confessed to his obvious shock, not wanting to complain about someone else’s country. ‘Back home we’ve just had a year of drought and I’m sure a summer of 35-degree-days, and I’m glad to be away from the heat.’

‘Why did you leave?’ he asked in obvious amazement. ‘The weather is disgusting [sounds like ‘disgoostin’], the worst summer we’ve had in 75 years. Why would you spend your summer in Ireland of all places? A hell of a place to visit!’

Even though his complaints gave me permission to complain, I was not about to criticize Ireland to an Irishman alone in the wilderness. ‘But it’s a beautiful country,’ I observed, surrounded by a landscape that demonstrated the point.

‘Oh, that it is!’ he exclaimed as his face transformed. One would imagine he was suddenly talking about a different country. ‘No question about that; it’s like nowhere else in the world.’

‘Your green is amazing,’ I added.

‘Oh, this is a special place. I’ve never been anywhere else, but you come out on a morning like this and you can just tell that there is something special about this country.’

Rain, evidently.

He breathed in the wet air a bit longer over, and suddenly his earlier expression returned. ‘Disgoostin morning. I don’t know how we survive this every year. Would you like some coffee?’

As I allowed the instant coffee from his thermos to warm my wet body, I wondered if we would do well to love one another like he loves his disgoostinly special country.

Pray for us, now and at the hour of our death!

I don’t know if this is true of all Catholics or just those who become priests, but my experience this summer gives me the impression that Catholics are always asking for prayer.

“I’ll be praying for you,” my seminarian friend told me the afternoon of my second day of class; “will you please pray for me?”

Lest I should think it was his particular quirk, the next night when we were leaving my pub his friend said the same: “Will you pray for us?” he asked as we parted. I gave him the Protestant response of “How can I be praying for you?” and he thought I was being sassy. Evidently, Catholics pray for people without asking for specific details.

In case I might be tempted to imagine it was something they had picked up in their country of origin, the Irish priest I had lunch with the next week said goodbye in the same way: “I will pray for you; please pray for me.”

And before I could assume that in all three cases it was just a component of my particular situation as a Protestant visiting the Catholic Church, I wandered into mass early one day and an old collared Irishman hobbled over to me and whispered in my ear, “Let me make a deal. How ‘bout I pray for you, and you pray for me?”

By that point I was starting to realize how little I actually pray for people other than myself. Maybe some of it is a component of my seminarian-friend’s observation that each Protestant has the responsibility to be his own personal pope, and I can’t take the mental pressure of knowing what to pray for each friend I might pray for. But the people mentioned above did not seem to expect that of me; no matter who I might be, it couldn’t hurt to have me mentioning them to God. It couldn’t hurt me either.

So I did. Two or three weeks into my trip, I took to making prayer for people part of my regular rhythm of life. And with Latin having turned my brain to mush I couldn’t put much thought into the prayer. For now, all my mental exhaustion could handle is a simple, “Dear God, I pray for Mom… and Dad… and my brother…” During my 20-minute walk to class every day, I list the names of members of my family, friends back home, people I’ve met in Ireland, friends long-gone… whoever comes to mind. I don’t have to know what to say for them; for now, the discipline is just stand before my God and love them.

To my family and friends out there, I’ve been praying for you a lot this summer. Please pray for me.

Come and have breakfast

I was reading John 21 yesterday morning. Of the precious few stories we hear of interactions with the resurrected Christ, two are about food. It strikes me as interesting that Christ conquers death, and one of his first acts as the Firstborn of the New Creation is to eat, whether with unsuspecting travellers on the road to Emmaus, or with sleep-deprived fishermen who are winded from a miraculous catch of 153 fish. “Come and have breakfast,” he tells them.

There is so much sanctifying of eating going on in Scripture. Levitical sacrifices were mostly feasts, as if God were sanctifying one of the most mundane acts of our existence. He makes the mundane holy, which is why there are so many laws about pots and storage and cleanliness.

And one of the few stories that all four gospels contain (up there with crucifixion and resurrection) is Christ feeding a hungry crowd of people. If I were Catholic I would read that Eucharistically, but even though I’m not (yet), I still find it interesting.

Then Christ dies and rises again, takes on Death and defeats it in the same act, begins the process of restoring creation, and he makes breakfast for his friends.

I’m notoriously bad about eating (or more precisely about not eating). Sometimes I seem to be too well indoctrinated with some form of Christian dualism that tells me that I need to focus on ‘spiritual’ things, and the physical things are less important. But the Incarnation itself, to say nothing of the specific things that the incarnated Jesus did, tells me that dualism is wrong, that the physical has become the holy. And that means food too.

“Come and have breakfast.” I suppose I should.

A prayer from my nephew

My nephew, whose fourth birthday I will miss while I am in Ireland, evidently prayed for me this week. My sister-in-law recalled the paryer to me as follows:

"Oh, Dear God, please bless Auntie Em. And, Dear God, please help her to learn Latin. Amen."

Amen to that!

Look upon thy Church...

The Latin program I’m attending here in Ireland has a surprising Catholic majority from the Americans in the group. Of the 16 students, 7 attend mass regularly, five daily, three study theology at a Catholic institution (called, very catholically, Christendom), and two are seminary students at the Gregorian University in Rome.

Since I’m in Ireland to study Latin in order to write a thesis on (Saint) Thomas More under the direction of a well-known Catholic intellectual, I am attending mass with my friends. Day after day this summer, we as a congregation have prayed

‘Lord I am not worthy so much as to gather the crumbs from your table, but only say the word and I shall be healed’

…only, my friends do end up gathering crumbs, and I kneel and only hear the word. But the word is a good one, and if the Word was made flesh then maybe I am gathering crumbs in a less sacramental sort of way.

One way or another, the discipline of attending a mass I cannot receive has allowed me to add the important disciple of prayer for Church unity into my daily rhythm. In that context, as I kneel and pray for a divided Church in which a local formerly-Catholic Irish Evangelical had picked a fight with my Catholic friend in Subway the other day, a Church with principles on both sides to back up long wedges and injury, the words of Saint Francis of Assisi have been on my lips daily this summer:

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is sorrow, joy;
where there is darkness, light.

Gracious Master, grant that I may seek
not so much to be consoled as to console,
not so much to be understood as to understand,
not so much to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

In whose name...

So there’s a collect for the American Independence Day… who knew? It must not be part of the official Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England, I wouldn’t think. I read it in a church newsletter today, and it sounded weird to me while I am in the U.K. (interesting anecdote: I have spent six of the past ten July 4ths overseas).

Lord God Almighty, in whose Name the founders of this country won liberty for themselves and for us, and lit the torch of freedom for nations then unborn: Grant that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain our liberties in righteousness and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The actual request seems about right. We have liberties; grant us grace to use them in righteousness and peace. The intro feels a little awkward to me, and I’m trying to figure out if it is because of the earlier interesting anecdote that allows me to see what we look like from the outside, or if I have been brainwashed by my liberal education, or what.

But this is my listening blog, not my ranting blog. What do my readers think? Does God get an American title? Does the country, certainly founded in a spirit of the enlightenment, also get to claim God’s name? Maybe… it just sounds weird to me while I’m overseas.

A lessoned learned too well

Random Irishman #2 returned to the table with refills of our pints and hopped in to catch up with the banter between me and Random Irishman #1 (or rather to force the conversation back to banter if we had moved on). Right about that time, “the ladies” showed up to the table, finished with their shopping.

“She’s actually from Cork,” Random Irishman #1 indicated about the woman who had just sat down, “so she has that terrible accent. Show her your imitation of a Cork accent!”

Having urged many a foreigner to imitate an American accent before, I recounted a gentleman’s words to me in a park the previous day. The Random Irishmen rolled in laughter and the Random Irishwoman rolled her eyes.

Eager to get the attention off of my poor imitation of a Cork accent, I turned my attention to her silently smiling friend. “Where are you from?” I asked.

“Poland” she answered in her quiet voice.

“Oh really?” I brightened. “I’m actually a quarter Polish! My grandmother is from Poland.”

“What is it with you Americans?” Random Irishman #1 cut in with the urgency that alcohol induces. “You’re always obsessed with these fractions, as if it gives you some kind of credibility if you can say you are five-eighths Irish or something. What does that even mean anyway?”

“I was just making conversation,” I said innocently, taking another swig of my Beamish, “finding some commonality to draw her into the conversation. What should I have said?”

“Just say, ‘Oh really? My grandmother is Polish.’ You are American. No one cares about the fraction.”

* * *

The next day, when my previous conversation with a bookstore owner on Wednesday led to dinner with an English/Canadian/American family on Thursday which led to hanging out with a French woman on Friday who passed me off on her French-African friend who was in the process of passing me off on her native-Cork Irish friend, I was given the chance to redeem myself.

The native-Cork man who seemed to know the whole city stopped and gave a young woman a hug. He introduced us, and included our nationalities in the introduction. “She’s Polish,” he said of his friend.

“Oh really?” I interjected with an eagerness to learn from my cross-cultural mistakes. “My grandmother is Polish.”

“Oh, that’s great!” the Polish woman said with apparent delight. “If your grandmother is Polish, that means you’re part Polish too, right?”

* * *

There’s a lesson out there, I’m sure. It has to do with learning from mistakes, but holding the lessons lightly. It has to do with listening to people who tell you you are wrong, but not as if they are the absolute right. It has to do with recognizing your errors but not taking them too seriously.

There are too many people in the world for me to turn the pet peeve of two drunk Irishmen in a pub as a general rule of thumb for my interactions with humanity.

Home from the soaring

Most poetry does not translate well. But from the exposure I’ve had, I think Rainer Maria Rilke is a translatable poet. As I crossed the Atlantic on Tuesday and nodded off into a delightful 6 solid hours of airplane sleep, I read this from his Book of Hours:

I come home from the soaring
in which I lost myself.
I was song, and the
refrain which is God
is still roaring in my ears.

Now I am still
and plain:
no more words.

To the others I was like a wind:
I made them shake.
I’d gone very far, as far as the angels,
and high, where light things into nothing.

But deep in the darkness is God…

Somehow, though Ireland is a new country for me and though I am here alone, Rilke’s words resonate in my spirit this summer. Being alone in a new country is an interesting kind of solitude, and if it is a green country inhabited by people who sing their English (after all, isn’t that what an Irish accent is? It’s not a pronunciation; it is notes and rhythm), it is a beautiful solace.

Beware of the Romans!

In addition to being seduced by Plato, I have found myself somewhat smitten with Ovid. After reading a few books of the Metamorphoses for the first time, I found myself musing that a sense of loss and sorrow is woven into the stories of humanity, and that the Gospel is not a rival to paganism but an answer to it. I still find Ovid a pretty charming fellow.

One of the most striking examples of a story that could almost be included in the Bible is that of Baucis and Philemon in Book VIII. Jove and Mercury walk through the country of Phrygia disguised as mortals, and knock on a thousand doors looking for shelter. Finally, a poor old couple open their cottage doors to the strangers, and serve them with the most elaborate hospitality their poverty can provide. The gods reveal themselves to the astonished couple, and warn them to leave the country and follow them to a nearby mountain. The inhospitable country is destroyed by a flood, and Jove and Mercury create a grand palace on the mountain for Baucis and Philemon.

Can anyone say Lot and the visitors?

Fast-forward a century later. Paul and Barnabus heal a cripple in Lystra (a city in Phrygia), and the Lyconians declare “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!” Why not? Everyone knows that happens sometimes; we’ve all heard the story in Ovid. They assume Barnabus is Zeus (Jove) and Paul is Hermes (Mercury), and bring oxen and garlands to the gates of the city. Paul and Barnabus tear their robes, and declare to the people that they are mortals as well, but “even with these words they scarcely restrained the people from offering sacrifice to them.”

The Romans had learned the lesson, but it was the wrong one. Their story had a ring of truth that even a 21st-century grad student like me could identify, but perhaps the resemblance made its seductiveness dangerous.

I don’t know if I will ever know the Great Story so well that I will never find myself seduced by the smaller stories. Like a good English major, I like to hope that these stories are so seductive because they contain pieces of the Truth, and that the Gospel is so rich because it consumes them within its redemption. But in the mean time, I am left navigating a sea of stories that seem pretty convincing when I’m in the middle of them.

To the Lyconians who live in Ovid’s world, I do not have any advice. I too am so often seduced by a good story, and when repentance turns into a story of guilt or dignity turns into a story of arrogance, I rarely have a clear idea of where exactly I went wrong. I once lived in a house of people who were determined not to be seduced by stories of the American Dream, but most of us (me at least) had stories of martyrdom and prophesy that we had to keep reigned.

All there is to do is listen, I suppose, allowing the Gospel to correct the ways I’ve gone wrong, allowing Paul and Barnabus to correct the mistakes I am bound to make along the way.