Five Notes on Ireland

Pictures by Nick Hofmeister, Jon Achenbach, and myself

A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of taking a trip to Ireland.  It was a gift from some very close friends, in celebration of my upcoming marriage.  We had a fantastic time, especially because it was my first trip to Ireland.

Five experiences really resonated with me, and will stick with me for a long time.  After a couple of weeks to process the experiences, I wanted to put into words the ways that this trip has affected me.  Three of the five experiences have to do with churches; two (and really, three) of them have to do with dying to some degree, which is not all that surprising as I very clearly brought my Mom with me on this trip.  Most people would say that three of them have to do with spiritual matters, but I actually think all of them do, in truth.  And all of them are, in one way or another, about the past and how we relate to it in our time (or, at least, how I relate to it)

One--Stories and Writers:  On night #3, we went on a "literary pub crawl" in Dublin City.  Two actors took us on a tour of four or so pubs and other locations, talking about and performing pieces from the works of writers associated with those locations.  What was notable about these locations--and you see this all around Dublin, not just in those particular locations--is how much Ireland reveres its writers and storytellers.  In the courtyard of St. Patrick's Cathedral are statutes of Joyce and Yeats and Shaw and the other famous writers of Irish history.  In one of the pubs we went to, tucked into a corner next to the screen showing Ireland playing Greece in the Euro Qualifiers was a black-and-white photo of Yeats.  It wasn't making a point or trying to show how smart or learned the people running the bar or drinking in the bar were.  It just was.

It can be really, really problematic to talk about the inherent, genetic traits of folks who come from a particular place.  And I am not so naive as to think that I am exactly like the people who were born and lived their whole lives in Ireland.  I know I am an American, and that is the most defining element of my background.  And, yet, it is still true that there are threads of culture that run from the place where 11 of my 16 great-great-grandparents come through to me.  I was raised in an environment that saw intelligence primarily (not exclusively, but primarily) through the lens of the ability to express yourself and tell an entertaining and compelling story.  Both of my parents were very proud of their kids, but most proud of them for being articulate, for being funny, for being storytellers.  Having now seen the homeland, that trait clearly comes from Ireland. 

Of course, Ireland and the Irish do not have a monopoly on communication and storytelling.  But I think there is some bit of Capital T Truth in placing an importance on being able to tell your story, in making that a lynchpin of a collective identity.  Expressing yourself--in any form, but particularly in words--is maybe the most quintessentially human activity.  Ireland and the Irish spent twelve hundred years being ruled by other people--first the Vikings, then the English.  And while that had profound effects on the culture of the Irish, something essential and differentiating endured, and I can't help but think it has something to do with a focus on expressing what is inside you.  If you can speak your truth, then maybe that truth never dies.     

Two--Faces and Places:  In preparation for the trip, I dug into the genealogy of my family.  I was able to identify and trace every line back to the time of immigration, but had a hard time finding anything prior to immigration, especially for the Irish branches.

There was one exception.  Andrew Ivory was born in 1758 in Dublin.  In 1780, he married Mary Tommins at St. Catherine's church in Dublin.  In 1798, he and Mary came to North America, first to New Brunswick in what would become Canada, and then eventually to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  He died in Pittsburgh in 1854.  His granddaughter, Mary Ann Ivory, married Samuel Gilson; their granddaughter, Mary Ann Gilson, was Mom's grandmother.

St. Catherine's parish is in a neighborhood of Dublin called The Liberties.  It is a working class neighborhood (then as well as now), best known for being the heart of the brewing and distilling industries in Dublin (the massive Guinness brewery complex in in The Liberties, for example).  The parish church is located on Meath Street, the same street Andrew lived on before moving to America.  The church that is there now is not the one that was there in 1798, but it is on the same spot.

As it turned out, we stayed in The Liberties while in Dublin, within walking distance of St. Catherine's and Meath Street.  I visited the church.  Truthfully, the current parish church of St. Catherine's was very much of its time--clearly a product of 19th Century Roman Catholicism, self-conscious in its attempt to communicate a sense of grandeur and power on the viewer.  The actual church building was just another church.  But the street it was on, the place, was incredibly powerful.  It made the story of this man who came from Ireland to America and eventually gave birth to Mom real.  I felt connected to it, and to the place, rooted in something that goes back into that shadow world of the past. 

Something else that I noticed during my time in Ireland were the faces of the people.  I of course don't know anything of them, but they looked like members of my family.  On my way home, there was a woman in the security line who looked like my Aunt Ann thirty years ago.  There is something about the faces of the Irish that reminded me of me, and my family.  They were the faces of my earliest memories, even though they were strangers.  This is perhaps not really true, but I almost think that if my family had no knowledge of where we came from, we would be able to reconstruct it by looking at the faces of the people of Ireland and recognizing that lineage.  

This trip grounded me.  For the last year I have felt unmoored.  So much of my life is different now from what it was two or three years ago, and while much of that is good, I have had moments where I don't recognize who's life this is.  But I saw myself in the places and people on this trip, and it gave me a sense of connection to something beyond my kinda confusing present.  The big markers that seemed so constant have proven to be somewhat transitory, but there is an underlying continuity that I hadn't seen.  This trip showed that to me.         

Three--Church and Graveyard #1:  Down the street from St. Catherine's in The Liberties is the former St. James church (which gives its name to St. James's Gate, where the Guinness Brewery is located).  A church of some sort has been on the spot since the 11th Century, when Dublin was founded.  The most recent church building stopped being a functioning church in the 60s, and fell into complete disrepair in the 90s.  About ten years ago, the physical plant was bought by Pearse Lyons, an Irishman who made his fortune in Kentucky providing agricultural services to the bourbon industry.  In his retirement, he bought the building and turned it into a distillery.

There are people who will tell you that a church that has become a distillery is sacrilegious, or disrespectful, or some kind of tragedy.  I can tell you, it certainly doesn't feel like any of those things walking through the Pearse Lyons Distillery.  Throughout the building is a profound sense that their current work is paying respect to what had come before, moving forward in a way that is different but not contrary to the spiritual project of the past.

This continuity in difference can be seen most clearly in the graveyard.  Surrounding the church/distillery building is a graveyard, which has graves going back to the 16th Century.   The renovation project took pains to catalogue and preserve the names and the graves while refurbishing the main space.  I have no doubt that the Pearse Lyons folks were required to do this by the local authorities, but I got no sense that this was done begrudgingly.  No, the sense I got was that they were proud to be able to preserve and maintain this space, in which generations of people from this neighborhood were interred.  The folks at the facility made the case that Mr. Lyons wanted to come back to this particular community and do something that was and is core.  St. James's neighborhood makes alcohol; how could it not be appropriate to have a distillery there?  

There is a temptation to draw a thick line between the things associated with God and the things associated with the rest of your life.  Usually this gets critiqued from the "secular" direction, that people try to wall off their normal life to avoid the requirements of the spiritual.  But I think this is every bit as much a problem from the other direction, where religion demands that it be held apart, free of purported corruption from the secular world.  But I think it is a false dichotomy in both directions.  If God matters at all, it must be because God is found not only in church buildings, but in all of mundane details of life.  The more mundane, the more it matters because it is harder to see in the mundane.  Including, even, making whiskey for people.

Truthfully, the Pearse Lyons distillery felt more authentically spiritual than the current St. Catherine's Church.  St. Catherine's was trying so hard to be Capital S Spiritual; Pearse Lyons was just trying to make something people enjoyed in and among the people who lived in the neighborhood for generations and generations.  Some things cannot be intentionally created and can only come into being organically.  

Four--Church and Graveyard #2: The first two days of the trip were spent on the west coast of Ireland.  On day two, we took a ferry to the island of Inisheer (or, Inis Oirr, in the Gaelic that is still the native language of the inhabitants).  At the center of the island is the church of St. Caomhan of Inis Oirr, rendered either "Cavan" or "Kevin" in English.  The saint's grave is there.

The church dates to the 10th Century.  But for hundreds of years, it was buried completely under the blowing sands from the sea shore, and completely forgotten.  Except not completely forgotten, because even while the church was buried, the area around the church was still used as a graveyard.  Indeed, the church was discovered in the 20th Century by accident, as the locals made exploratory digs for new gravesites and discovered the building.  It is now known as the sunken church, as it is several levels below both most of the graves and the surrounding hillside.

My experience is that religious people (and I include myself here) are mostly obsessed with doing religion right.  They don't agree on what right means, of course, but they agree that we need to be doing it right.  If you start from that place, change becomes a necessary problem.  Either change represents a move from right to wrong (and, thus, a sin against God), or a move from wrong to right (and, thus, a commandment of God).  Change is existential to your religion, as seen from that perspective.  From this perspective, how can we understand why this church, the resting place of the patron saint of the island, was buried for hundreds of years?  You might say that faith was lost for those hundreds of years, except we know that that's not true.  People came to the spot to bury their dead.  They saw it as a holy place, but they didn't think that holy place required them to maintain or acknowledge the old church.  And then a later generation of people found it, and found it to be meaningful to them, and dug it out.

Perhaps my most radical religious position, and one that I have come to slowly over the course of the time I have been writing in this space, is that all traditionalism is fundamentally fake.  We cannot recreate the way things were in the past, even if that were desirable.  We are inexorably fixed in our own time and in our own place.  We can look to the past for wisdom and inspiration, but we bring that wisdom and inspiration through a tunnel that changes it into something that is always, at the end of the day, modern.  Traditionalism, then, is an attempt to justify a particular construction of modernity by pretending its not actually modern.  That's why, I think, traditionalism is ultimately fake--it can't admit it is every bit as modern as everything else.

If you believe that, and I do, then change is neither a heresy or an commandment.  It just is.  It is like the sands from the beach that covered St. Caomhan's church in distant Inis Oirr.  The wind blows it where it wills.  You can fight it, and sometimes you should, but you shouldn't pretend that today is exactly like yesterday, nor will tomorrow be a copy of today.  The wind will blow no matter what.

The question is not, or shouldn't be, whether we are being faithful to some purportedly historical model that is presented as authoritative.  The question is whether we are being faithful to ourselves and to God in the here and now.  Authenticity is, perhaps, the ultimately measure of spirituality.  And the inhabitants of Inis Oirr, a place that seems to be immune to the winds of change, were being authentic at all time to their time and their circumstances--church or no church.    

Five--The Book:  On our last day, we went to see the Book of Kells at Trinity College.  Some of the guide books you will read portray it as a tourist trap, and it kinda is, but it is a very well done tourist trap.  The museum portion before you get to the book is very well done and very informative.  

For those who don't know, the Book of Kells is an illuminated Gospel book dating to the 9th Century, originally composed at the abbey of Kells (about 40 miles northwest of Dublin).  Illuminated Gospel manuscripts were a key part of, particularly, Irish monasticism, and the Book of Kells is famous mostly because it is one of the oldest to have survived.  And it is lovely.

When you go through the museum portion to see the actual book, it is contained in a transparent cube to protect the priceless text.  The book is open to a page that is periodically rotated by the curators, and during our visit the text was open to the genealogy of Jesus in Luke's Gospel (Luke 3:23-38).  From one perspective, it was perhaps one of the most boring passages we could have drawn.  And yet, it was a perfect canvas for the the illuminators, who had a chance to draw all of those ancestors of Jesus next to each of the names.

If there is a through-line with each of these five experiences, it would be the centrality of the personal experience.  It's easy to talk in abstractions, and abstractions are not bad per se.  But abstractions can only be a summary and collection of the concrete experiences of real people.  They can never be a substitute for those experiences.  

What really struck me about the Book of Kells was how personal it was.  It was an artist, sitting with the text, drawing what they saw in their minds as they digested it.  We don't have direct access to what this unnamed monk was thinking as he sat in the scriptorum in Kells 1200 years ago, but we can see a shadow of that distant person through his art.  Incomplete as that picture is, it is nevertheless real.  He was real, he had a real experience of God and that text, and we get to see that tangible experience.  That experience is not over or against our own personal experience--he is him, and we are us.  But it points toward the reality of an experience.  

That matters, I think.  Sometimes God feels distant.  Truthfully, God has felt distant to me for most of this year.  It happens.  I am not looking for someone to tell me who God is; I'm not looking for substantive information.  I just want to know that God is still there.  Seeing people who express their sense that God is there helps.  I may not be seeing it, but if others are seeing it, then it must be there.  In time, God will be revealed.