“And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.” –W. B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
This has been one of the most incredible weeks of my life. Last Saturday I went to the Aran Islands with Notre Dame’s Dublin programme for a field trip. After making a return visit to Coole Park, where W. B. Yeats did much of his writing and thinking on Lady Gregory’s estate, we drove to Galway, then into Connemara on the west coast of Ireland to catch the ferry to Inis Mór. And with that, plunged into an ancient way of life.
I’ve never been out on the ocean like that ferry ride into the Atlantic to reach Inis Mór. It was a queer, wild, risky feeling to know that I was standing in the open air, dissolved into the waves and the wind, and no major land mass stood between me and North America. The ocean was a bit choppy, since a storm was rolling in, and the sun set while we were in the boat, leaving the clouds like dark wreaths hanging over the receding coast, as we passed lighthouses and a Martello tower.
When we landed on Inis Mór, it started pouring rain, so we were eager to head into a dining room for a hot dinner and a night in the pub. Joe, one of the year-long students, had brought his fiddle and joined the men playing traditional music in the corner, as if he belonged there.
We walked out of the pub to greet the heavens, overwhelmed by a perfectly clear night, with as many starts as Abraham saw from the desert. The walk through the bare, lightless countryside to our hostel was bitterly cold, but my friend Kate Petelle and I decided to snub our beds in favour of lying out flat on our backs near the shore, staring at the sky for half an hour. As she said, if you could see that every night, you could never doubt the existence of God.
We got up early for Mass, which was said in Irish, since the Aran Islands are a Gaeltacht, one of the regions in Ireland where Irish is the first and primary language of the people. The priest spoke slowly and distinctly, unusual for any Irishman, and I was shocked by how much of the Readings and homily I caught. He was fantastic; a couple of us went up to chat with him after Mass, and he said that he had a friend who used to teach at Notre Dame, which was odd, since we felt that we were clinging to the very edges of civilization there, and yet suddenly so close to home.
Inis Mór is the most ragged and rugged place I’ve ever been. Connemara and Aran are infamous for the amount of stones their fields are buried under; it seems like the farmers spend two-thirds of their time just digging up rocks to make the six inches of soil usable, then building walls with them to get them out of the way and keep the animals in. The whole length and breadth of Inis Mór (9 miles long, 2 miles wide) is fragmented by loose stone walls, waist-high, dividing plots of land all of which are smaller than my front yard back home, creating a messy jigsaw-puzzle effect. Those plots support enough cattle, horses, sheep, and potatoes for 800 people, who live in a dozen villages scattered across the island. Standing in the middle of Inis Mór, you can often see the ocean on both sides of you.
We spent the whole day hiking with an archaeologist and anthropologist named Mick Gibbons, who explained every rock formation and ruined structure we encountered. Despite a climate characterized by fierce winds and driving rain and hail on a daily basis, the Aran Islands have been inhabited for well over two millennia. The most impressive man-made wonder we saw all day was Dún Aenghus, an ancient Celtic fortress composed of concentric circles, standing on the edge of a cliff. Why anyone in pre-modern (or modern) times would brave the seas to attack Inis Mór boggles my mind, but apparently it was a pretty strategically important site. But I’m afraid that Dún Aenghus was underwhelming after hiking along the edge of the rocky cliffs in high winds and chilling spray for four hours. It looked like an alien planet up there: the sheer cliffs plunged into the sea, which was so wild that the sea spray spouted up to drench us, hundreds of feet above sea level. The surface of the cliffs was all bare limestone, and treacherously slippery, not to mention heaped and mounded oddly, so I couldn’t decide whether it was more important to look where I was putting my feet, or to keep an eye out for the edge of the cliff, which ended abruptly. The water was impossibly blue, and the waves, sea-foam green. It was stunning and scary and awe-inspiring. Something I love about the Notre Dame Programme in Dublin is that Kevin Whelan often tells us that what we are about to do is very dangerous, but he never suggests that that is a good reason to stop us, only that we should be careful when doing dangerous things. This day of clambering up the cliffs of Inis Mór was one of the most moving and beautiful dangerous things I’ve done yet.
But the real adventure was yet to come. At the end of the day, we boarded the ferry to return to the mainland, where Kevin sent the four of us who are still taking Irish language courses onto a different minibus for a week of living in the Connemara Gaeltacht, taking intensive language classes and practicing our Irish with the locals, while the rest of the Programme returned to Dublin and set off on adventures in Spain, Italy, and Eastern Europe for spring break. I’ll have to admit that getting dispatched from the ferry was a bit of a getting-kicked-out-of-the-nest-by-mother-bird moment for me, since we didn’t have any details about the week and didn’t know what we were getting into. Later on, the bus driver explained that he was taking us to Ceathrú Rua, a small peninsula of Connemara, about a forty-five minute drive from Galway, and west across the bay where we had boarded the ferry. We would be staying with a bean an tí (“lady of the house”) in the town, where our Acadamh (“academy”) was. We would have Irish classes for six hours per day, with artistic and social evening activities in the town.
All of my worries about the week were immediately dispelled upon setting foot in Máire Uí Ráighne’s house on the Lake Muilinn, where she had a big, steaming cauldron of lamb stew and mounds of mashed potatoes and freshly baked brown bread waiting for us. I had mentally prepared to live in a hostel and cook for my compatriots all week, so this was far more than I could have expected. I ate like an Irish farmer all week, and we had electric blankets to ward off the chill of the fierce winds and constant rain and hail outside. But my favourite part was getting up every morning and walking into the sunny kitchen to a chipper “Dia duit!” (“God to you!”) from Máire, and watching the lake glimmer out the window while I ate breakfast by the peat fire and listened to Raidió na Gaeilge.
My Irish improved more in this past week than in any single semester at Notre Dame in the past two years. Even after two years of Irish, I was terrified of opening my mouth and trying to speak; I knew the grammar and I could visualize the words, but I thought my pronunciation was rubbish and I fumbled to get a grip on the vocabulary quickly enough. When I studied Latin and German in high school, it was purely for the purpose of translating out of books, and I’m afraid my Irish was headed in that direction, too, which was disappointing, because my primary attraction to Irish has always been as a spoken language and a living tongue. But in Connemara, totally immersed in an Irish-speaking culture, Irish became a truly spoken language for me for the first time. It was exhilarating. We would walk out of class and hear Irish on the sidewalks and in the shops and on the television. We went to Mass in Irish at night, we chatted in Irish at the lunchroom, and we called out “Dia duit!” to all the locals we passed on the street, and pretended we belonged there.
As with the language, I felt truly, deeply immersed in Irish culture for the first time, living in Ceathrú Rua for a week, and I’ve never been more in love with it. After our long days, we went to the pub every night, to get pints with the other students. Along with us, there were 25 students visiting from Trinity for a fortnight, and 75 from UCD, along with the local teenagers. They were all so friendly and extroverted- always taking the mickey out of each other, and laughing, and singing. In Dublin, I’ve never been in a pub where people actually sang the old drinking songs, but in Ceathrú Rua it seemed like we sang more than we talked, and the singing was all in Irish, too- “Cúnla,” “Bean Pháidín,” “Peigín Leitir Móir,” and, of course, at the end of the night, “An tAmhrán Náisiúnta” (Soldier’s Song, the National Anthem of Ireland). One night, we went to a play in Irish, and at the end of the play, the actors invited anyone in the audience who had a mind for it, to sing or play a tune, and it was a perfectly natural and normal request there- we sat around for another half hour at the end of the play singing in turn.
Again, I was shocked by how much of the performance I understood; my favourite vignette was when the lead male actor was enacting the story of a man in the 1920s moving from Ireland, where he only knew Irish, to London, where he slowly learned English. At one point he bumped into someone and reflexively called out “Gabh maith leith-scéal!” then remembered and switched to “Excuse me!”. That’s how I felt all week: after six months in Ireland, I’ve finally trained myself to say “Cheers!” instead of “Thank you!” and “Sorry!” instead of “Excuse me!” or “Pardon!”, but by the end of the second day in the Gaeltacht, it had reflexively become “Go raibh maith agat!” and “Gabh maith leith-scéal!”, which kept popping out of my mouth even when we returned to English-speaking Galway at the end of the week to get a train back to Dublin. I’m afraid I’m going to be deeply verbally confused for a very long time.
We also got to visit the coral beech on the peninsula, almost unique in Europe, and stunningly beautiful. The water was perfectly clear as it lapped up on the coral shore. Everything underfoot was crushed coral and perfectly formed seashells. I’ve never seen such beautiful sea shells, and such varied sea life on the big granite rocks projecting from the beech, looking out to the Aran Islands.
But my favourite part of the week was when one of our teachers took us out for a long walk through the bogs and down to the sea. We climbed to the top of a big hill, where we could see the peat bogs stretching out for miles, to the lowlands of the great ridges in the distance. As we went along, our teacher told us all the names of all the plants and topographical features in Irish. Then we turned and walked down to the sea, clambering over the rocky coast to reach a beach of the purest, cleanest sand I’ve ever seen. Perched above the beach was the graveyard of Ceathrú Rua, which still inhabits the churchyard of the abandoned, ruined 16th century church, called Teampall Mhic Ádhaim (the “Temple of Adam’s Son”). The graves lie ten feet above the beech and look out across the bay on a Martello Tower, one of scores of low, round towers built by the British when France was trying to liberate Ireland. Ceathrú Rua’s dead have the prettiest view in the whole peninsula. It was so peaceful there; it doesn’t seem like death could be such a fearful thing if you were a child in Ceathrú Rua, and grew up there, and grew old there, knowing that when you died you would be lying parallel to all your ancestors, looking out over the ocean until the dead will rise. We all had to do a big translation project for the last Irish class I took back at Notre Dame, and for mine I had chosen to translate sections of Cré na Cille by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, which is meant to be the greatest 20th century work of Irish fiction. It was devilishly difficult- strongly dialectical, with the pre-standardized grammar and spelling, but now I don’t regret the all-nighters I pulled for it at all, because it was about the conversation between the dead in a graveyard in Connemara quite close to the graveyard we were in, and as I walked among the headstones, their inscriptions untranslated, I could imagine them babbling away to each other: “Bury me in a pound plot. At the pound plot. Some of us are buried at the Half-guinea plot, but if it is so for myself...I said it in order to get the best coffin at Thaidhg’s shop. It is a good oak coffin at any rate... I have a layer of protection.”
It was an intense experience. Usually around 3:30 I’d get thoroughly sick of the same sentence constructions, of trying to get my mouth around those unnatural sounds, and of reaching to grasp all of my new vocabulary. If you were stranded in a small community speaking an utterly foreign and ancient language for a week, what single English book would you bring? That’s right. Infinite Jest. I read 250 more pages of the Jest in four days, because when I got to a break, I didn’t want to memorize anymore Irish words or read Irish books or drill simplistic sentences; I wanted complex sentences with long English words and too many characters and no real plot. But all of that would melt away after dinner, when we went to An Cistin (“The Kitchen”) to meet up with our new Trinity friends and try to tell them about where we came from and why we were here sa Ghaeilge (in Irish). They’re still convinced that there are Gaeltacht in America, no matter how many times we explained that you might be able to walk in and speak Irish in certain pubs in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, and Notre Dame has an impressive number of fluent Irish speakers on faculty, but there’s no such thing as an Irish speaking community outside of Ireland. It was rather a funny conversation to keep cropping up, since usually I’m trying to explain to my American friends that Irish is actually a living language and there really are communities that primarily live out their lives through the medium of Irish. Well, now I’ve lived there.
By the end of the week, I didn’t want to leave that beautiful, rough countryside, or the ocean, or the smell of burning peat embedded in my clothes, or my now-reflexive Irish phrases of courtesy. I am overwhelmed with gratitude for having the opportunity to live and study in Connemara for a week. I could never have dreamed of one day doing such a thing as a child listening to haunting Irish songs on our old tape player at home, or even as a freshman at Notre Dame struggling through the copula (a particularly nasty and unfortunately basic grammatical construction in Irish) and embarrassed even at how my “Dia duit!” sounded. Life continually surprises and delights me. What an incredible world.
The Path of Least Resistance
Being a pilgrim in Rome for Holy Week was the sort of experience that slightly refined north on my compass.
I started the journey with my good friend Keiley, also a student in the Trinity College programme, getting into Rome on Wednesday evening. We walked all the way across the city from Termini Station to our hostel just south of the Vatican in the dark, a little lost and terrified by the traffic, but immensely enjoying the night-views of the city. After eating dinner, we headed straight for the Vatican, because we wanted our first sight of St. Peter’s to be in the peace and intimacy of the empty Square under the night sky. Just the sight of the building and the Pope’s bedroom lamp on was enough to start making everything much more solid, but still make us tingle.
Keiley and I walked around all day on Holy Thursday in blazing sunshine, following the trail of a walking tour an old priest-friend of my family wrote up years ago. We crossed the Tiber and went east on the Victor Emmanuel, to see the Campo de Fiori, a big square with an open market, the Argentine Square ruins, which are the oldest in Rome, various and sundry architecturally interesting churches, the Palazzo Venezia where Mussolini lived and pronounced his speeches, the Wedding Cake, an over-the-top monumental building to Victor Emmanuel, and climbing the Capitoline Hill. The layers of history caking everything are staggering, almost in a way which becomes numbing. It’s hard to believe that modern men grow up in Rome taking the fragments of early Christian murals and the Empirical ruins which predate them for granted. We looked out over the Palatine Hill and the Coliseum, then turned slightly north to visit the Angelicum, where my good friend Brian did his study abroad last spring. Then, eventually turning westwards again, we were able to visit the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, and the Navona square before heading back for Mass. Someone accused me of being thoroughly midwestern this weekend in my approach to directions, preferring those of the compass to simple rights or lefts, but it really astounded me how quickly I became oriented in Rome. Perhaps it is on account of the Tiber with all her bridges. All great cities have orienting rivers: Dublin, London Paris, Rome, South Bend.
However, navigating Rome was a challenge on account of the traffic. At first we attempted to take the path of least resistance, avoiding the wide roads whose traffic signals the Romans seemed to ignore, but eventually we realized that if we continued in that strategy, we would never see all the wonderful things we wanted to see. It was terrifying to step out into those chaotic streets, but it seemed like the more spectacular our goal, the more dangerous the traffic surrounding it was, and there was nothing for it but to abandon the path of least resistance and caste out into the deep. I thought about that idea a lot as we wandered the streets of Rome all afternoon. I am so grateful for all the people in the Dublin Programme this year who have expressed a passionate desire for me to flourish, to be free, to feel at home, to discover the world, be delighted by it, and recognize my vocation in it. I love them for it, and they in turn inspire me to be passionate about other people like that. But it’s so easy to be discouraged when I reach out to the people around me and it seems as if they respond only with apathy or thoughtlessness. It requires a lot of persistence to continually be present to the people I am among and not to just shrug and become content with and insulated by the comfort zone I have created by now in Dublin. I don’t want to be complacent and accept the path of least resistance, I want to push onward. Christ’s was not the path of least resistence.
We went to Santa Maria in Trastevere for the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, which was very beautiful, on account of the architecture of the church, the quality of the choir, and the number of people in attendance. I was grateful for the amount of Italian I understood after studying Latin for four years. The full texts of the readings and prayers were printed on leaflets to make it manageable. But I have to admit that it left me missing Notre Dame’s Triduum celebrations. There must have been a few years in my life for which I was not in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart for Triduum, but if so, I have no memory of them. And when you love one particular liturgical interpretation of the Triduum for its music, pacing, language and feeling, and anticipate it all year long, it’s hard to put that out of mind. However, immediately following the Mass, I started to enter into the riches which Rome has to offer pilgrims, making it a unique and more intense Holy Week than I’ve ever undertaken.
After Mass I joined Hoyt, our Notre Dame campus minister, and Anthony, an ’02 Notre Dame alum who shared his vast knowledge of Rome, and Catholic theology with us throughout the weekend, and a few other friends, for a lengthy nocturnal chapel hopping/church crawling through the streets of Rome. We went from church to church, participating in the perpetual adoration going on that night after all the Holy Thursday Masses. Just the repetition of walking two or three blocks, or even just crossing a square, to enter yet another ornate church, to find another packed side chapel, to genuflect again before the same living presence of Christ in each tabernacle, made a strong impression on me. Where ever we turned, Christ was with us in the city, and people were worshipping Him.
For the duration that I was with the group, we went to 18 churches, spending ten or fifteen minutes in each. Most of them are a blur now, and since for the first time in twenty-four hours I wasn’t solely (or even partially) responsible for knowing where we were in a foreign city, I didn’t even try to keep track. But a few of them stuck out at me in particular. Saint Brigid’s was one of the smaller ones, and in its side chapel Fr. Moreau had important discussions concerning the charter for the Holy Cross Order. A nun in an Anglo-Saxon helmet gave me the biggest smile as I left the chapel. A little later we visited the church in which Saint Monica, most patient of all mothers, is buried, though I can’t recall whether the church is named after her or not. St. Andrew’s was remarkable for many reasons. One of the biggest works of art I have ever seen confronted us on entering, a giant portrayal of Saint Andrew being crucified on his X-shaped cross behind the main altar. Somehow, the X creates so much more tension and pain to my mind than the traditional Latin T, and it kept drawing my eyes. St. Giuseppe Maria Tomasi, a cardinal who died in 1713 and whose body remains perfectly incorrupt, lies in a glass coffin to the right of the main altar, and on the left is a dark, grubby side-altar for St. Sebastian, an old Hannan family favourite. The chapel stands on the place where he was found dead in a gutter, beaten after being pierced full of arrows, and there is something very appropriate about its gloom and dinginess, since the man it honors died in dirt and darkness. It’s like why I like Caravaggio, only more directly. But also in St. Andrew’s on that particular night, I ran into Marco d’Avenia, an old friend from the Center for Ethics and Culture, who completely caught me by surprise, as I thought he was still in South Bend. In a weekend which strongly emphasizes the universality of the Church, this was a very real and joyful encounter with it. All roads lead to Rome.
The climax of the night came at the end, when we were going far astray from my hostel and it was time for me to turn westwards again. Hoyt said one last church before quitting, and the last was the best. We rounded the corner to come upon the Church of Gesu, the mother church of the Jesuits. I had tried to visit it earlier in the afternoon, but it had been locked, and I was disappointed because I’d heard it was the most impressive baroque church in the world. Now it was open, and we filed in and knelt in the aisle of the adoration chapel, because it was crowded, and prayed for a while. Then we made our way into the main church, which was dark and enormous. I couldn't even see the ceiling. Anthony lead us over to a side chapel dedicated to St. Francis Xavier, who baptized thousands as a missionary in the Far East. They had his whole right hand, that baptized all those thousands, on the wall of the chapel, in a frame, which was powerful enough, but then it occurred to me to ask whether Ignatius of Loyola would have been laid to rest in the Gesu. Ignatius founded the Jesuits and he and Francis Xavier were great friends, even though they never got to see each other again after Francis departed for Asia. It mattered to me because my favourite prayer of all time is Ignatius' Suscipe ("Take Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will- all that I have and call my own. You have given it all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace. That is enough for me.") Hoyt gave it to me in October, coincidentally three days before my cycling accident in Kenmare, and I always keep it on me, so it was in my pocket when I broke my arm and has been in my wallet ever since, even though I know it by heart. I can’t fully explain its power or profundity, but to begin with, I can't just mouth the words and not mean that one; it's wrenching to say and unbelievable to think I actually mean what I say. Anthony pointed across the church, and we crossed it to discover the biggest side chapel of all dedicated to St. Ignatius, with his body lying in a coffin under the altar. I had been praying the Suscipe all night, in every church we entered, and here was Ignatius’ body lying before me, so we knelt together in front of the body of St. Ignatius and prayed the Suscipe again, with so much gratitude and awe. All the other prayers were summed up right there, in the Gesu, waiting for Good Friday. And then when we walked out of the church, they locked the door and wouldn't let anymore people in for the night.
The next morning I headed north with my friends Keiley and Cait, to see the Piazza del Popolo, a massive public square, and climb up the Pincio for a view of the city from above, then turned south and east, past the Spanish Steps and Mary Major to meet the rest of the Notre Dame group for a tour with Anthony of the Passion Relics, John Lateran, the Holy Stairs, and Mary Major. The Passions relics include two thorns from the crown, pieces of the True Cross and Dismas’ cross, a nail, and the INRI sign, all retrieved by St. Helen from the Holy Land. As we were waiting to go in, I turned around to see a stained glass window which proclaimed so appropriately and so familiarly, “Ave Crux, Spes Unica!” the motto of the Congregation of the Holy Cross. Then walking across to John Lateran, we passed a massive Egyptian obelisk which was first erected in 1500 BC, making it sufficiently old to have been gazed upon by the eyes of Moses. It was as if the whole of salvation history, as read out in the Easter Vigil Liturgy of the Word, was visually summed up in a two hundred yard stretch in south-east Rome.
The single most intense experience of the whole pilgrimage for me was climbing the Holy Stairs, the staircase of Pilate’s Praetorium which Jesus climbed on his way to condemnation. Now pilgrims climb it on their knees in reverence. At 3 p.m. on Good Friday it started raining and hardly ever stopped for the next 48 hours. Shortly thereafter we started climbing the stairs on our knees, crowded together in a sea of pilgrims, the line stretching out the door waiting to undertake the climb, looking directly up at an image of the crucified Christ at the top. From the moment my knees hit the first stair, I started sobbing uncontrollably and couldn't stop until I had gone all the way up and returned to the bottom twenty minutes later. The gravity of the suffering of Christ, and the injustice of it, and the overpowering depths of His love for us, and how we still spit in His face, was utterly overwhelming and vividly real. It's not something I can articulate. I could say what was going through my mind on each one of those 28 stairs, and I can say exactly which prayers I was praying, but that doesn't even come close to undergoing the experience. And then I got to the top and took some deep breaths and realized that when Jesus got to the top, he was still just at the beginning of his terrible road, and still had to haul that cross to the hill and get nailed to it and hang on it and die without his friends.
There was so much rain and so many miles. As I said, the rain started at 3 pm on Good Friday and continued for nearly 48 hours straight. and I don't mean a spring shower; it was usually a torrential downpour, unheard-of in Rome. And we kept walking to these pilgrimage sites all over the city, our feet sodden and our umbrellas leaking and no one having brought rain coats. We stood by the walls of the Coliseum for 4 hours waiting for and doing the Way of the Cross with the Holy Father, and it was just a sea of umbrellas in this downpour, and it was dark and freezing and our feet ached and our knees were bruised from the Holy Stairs, and it was all in Italian, except the Pater Noster, which when it came along at every station I enunciated loudly and clearly because it was the only way I could embrace the situation.
The meteorological climax aligned with the liturgical one: we went to Easter Sunday morning Mass with the Holy Father in St. Peter's Square, getting up early to queu up for seats after staying up late for the Vigil in Santa Maria Trastevere. About 20 minutes into Sunday Mass, it started thundering and lightning and absolutely pouring rain, and we just kept singing and praying in St. Peter’s Square. It was nuts. I liked that Mass best of all, because it was all in Latin and easy to understand, and I just kept standing on my tiptoes to stare at the Holy Father and wonder what he must think of it all. I loved hearing him saying the prayers in Latin and understanding what he was saying and realizing, because this weekend was the first time I’ve ever heard him pray in person, that he really believes all of it.
The thunderstorm became its most intense just as we started to receive communion, but there was no way that I was going to carry an umbrella with me up to receive Christ's Body on Easter morning, so I dumped my umbrella and threw back my hood and trudged up to the priest with all the waters of the heavens just pouring down on me, closer to drowning than when I got dunked for my baptism, and I couldn't see, and all of my clothes were soaked through, and as I went up to receive the Eucharist I tried to dry my hands on my pants but that didn't do any good, because when I cupped my hands in front of the priest, they started filling with water, and the water was running through my hands like that picture you may have seen, when he put the Eucharist in my hands. It was completely awesome.
“Springs of water bless the Lord, give Him glory and praise forever,”
“Like a deer that longs for running water, so my soul longs for you,”
“Fill the jars with water,”
“Blood and water flowed from his side “
—those are all perfectly real, but this was WET.
I wish I could convey how solid and real and physical and visceral Rome made the Faith for me: Bartholomew and Andrew and Peter and Cecilia and Sebastian and Paul really had to be all the way in, embracing Christ's love and suffering with their whole minds and hearts and their physical bodies, to be flayed alive and crucified and beheaded and beaten to death, and it was all grace. But that’s just it- it was a pilgrimage, a journey, not an encyclical or a Scripture class. The suffering of the martyrs became so real to me, and we were blessed to participate in it in a very slight way, but it wasn’t just that the pain and loss became so real to me, because I already knew the world is painful and hard. More significantly, I knew by walking these miles and visiting these places and really hearing these stories that their, and our, suffering is meaningful, that it’s the purest expression of a love so powerful that it had to be demonstrated by a bleeding God and utter self-emptying by the most authentic self. All of the other stories have significance only because that story is the most significant story of all time. Anthony said something very wise when we were visiting some relics, that we don’t venerate the saints out of pagan superstition but as a reaffirmation that we really are temples of the Holy Spirit, and that the Holy Spirit has been particularly effective through certain individuals who have been totally open to the grace poured out upon them, and we desire to be filled in such a way, too. Standing in the Vatican late on our last night in Rome, with the arms of St. Peter’s basilica encircling me, and the statues of the saints surrounding me, and my good friends embracing me, I realized the most important thing of all, that it’s not just that Christ and the saints had become as solid and real to me as the marble from which they are carved, but that what make them extraordinary above all creation is that their power and decisive sacrifice is all with a gentleness and aching desire of the most profound and transcendent Love, more real than anything in the world.... Find love, and give it all away...
Four of my friends and I made a spontaneous pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick this weekend, a 2500 foot mountain whose sides slope up at 45 degree angles. The questions that tore at me all the way up the mountain, and my best reflections upon undertaking the traditionally barefoot climb with my friends in icy wind, rain, hail, and, finally, snow:
1) Was there a meaningful difference between the last moment when I was still climbing the mountain barefoot, and the next moment when I gave in and pulled my boots back on, given that I was infinitely loved in both moments?
Yes, in that when I pulled the boots back on I accepted the fact that God loves me infinitely even in my limitations, and accepted that I am heart-rendingly limited in every direction, and I strove to feel neither guilt nor complacency about these brute facts of human existence.
2) Have I ever been able to sustain that attitude for more than five minutes?
No, and it turns out that it is harder for me to accept that than to climb a stony mountain barefoot.
3) Was it a less enriching experience to watch my dear friends struggle unshod all the way to the summit, while I reshod myself even before we reached the hardest stretches?
No, because it drove home that there is so much in life that I do not suffer myself but must watch my friends suffer.
4) What should I think when I can’t pick up every piece of glass in the path ahead?
I have to realize that that is the state of the world, that there is always glass on the path ahead, and sometimes I’ll see it and cast it away before our feet reach it, and sometimes we have to trod on it and be grateful for the pain and allow it to sanctify our lives by becoming raw enough to relate.
5) Can I really accept that? Can I really look all the way up to the peak of the mountain and let myself realize what’s unmovingly ahead?
No, but I pray that I’ll grow better at focusing only on the rocks I’m clinging to on all fours at the moment, because I get really dizzy when I look up.
6) When going downhill at a 45 degree angle puts me in a state of physical fear, and the only thing for it is to focus on each baby step down and be grateful for whatever it brings, is that anything like pushing through the important things in ordinary life that terrify me?
I hope.
7) Is there a rational defence for embracing something as beautiful and good even when it hurts you? When you engage the terrain instead of just looking out at it through a train window?
No. Go climb Croagh Patrick or cycle to Kenmare. Or love fiercely.
8) What did Croagh Patrick hurt most?
My heart, more than my feet. “Take, Lord, and receive...”
