Category: Friends (Page 6 of 7)

Another Walk through the Connemara

August 3, 2011 / eric / 2 Comments

Yesterday and today our student body toured the demesne of Ballynahinch Castle, wandered the narrow main street of Roundstone, and climbed a steep, rocky, boggy hill outside of Cashel in the company of Michael Gibbons, a native of Connemara who is one of Ireland’s leading field archaeologists, a writer, broadcaster, and mountaineer. He is a former director of local and national archaeological survey programs. In his talks about holy wells, ancient burial sites, and the history of the Gaelic lords, it was quite evident that he is very knowledgeable about Irish history especially the pilgrimage tradition in Ireland. I later learned that he spent three years excavating the summit of Croagh Padraig, climbing more than 2,500 feet to work every morning. He certainly moved skillfully and quickly up the hillside in Cashel!

Michael Gibbons, Irish Archeologist and Historian

Michael has supervised archeological work in such diverse places as the Negev Desert, Egyptian Sinai, and Southern Greece. He has lectured throughout Ireland, at Oxford and Cambridge, at the American National Geographic Society, and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. It was quite a privilege to spend an afternoon hillwalking with him. (Half of the students when on his tour on Monday and half today. I was in the second group.)

Our first stop was at Ballynahinch Castle, a place where Evelyn and I spent a couple of days on our first trip to Ireland in 2005. I was disappointed that today we didn’t actually go into the hotel (yesterday’s group apparently did), but simply roamed the demesne following a circular path around the castle itself.

Ballynahinch Castle Hotel

A famous resident of Ballynahinch was Richard Martin, also known as “Humanity Dick”, founder of The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). His ancestors took over the house in 1590. His father the present manor house in the early 1700’s as an inn, the same purpose it now serves as one of the finest hotels in Ireland.

The name Ballynahinch comes from the Irish Baile na hInse meaning “settlement of the island”, a reference to the small island fortress in the lake over which the castle looks. The estate comprises 450 acres of woodlands, gardens, lakes, and rivers, just a small portion of the more than 200,000 acres which the “The Ferocious O’Flahertys” ruled from this place. The lands of the O’Flaherty clan stretched to within fifteen miles of Galway City on the east and into County Mayo to the north-west. The clan leaders were the Gaelic Lords of Connaught and held castles at Ballynahinch, Aughanure, Doon, Moycullen, Bunowen, and Renvyle.

Crannog in Ballynahinch Lake

Perhaps the most famous O’Flaherty was Grace O’Malley from Mayo who married Donal O’Flaherty in 1546. Called the Pirate Queen of Connemara, she is well known for her meeting with Queen Elizabeth I in 1593. At the age of 63 years at the time, she was said to be an awesome and formidable lady. Although Irish was her native tongue, Grace conversed comfortably the English queen in Latin. An English court scribe described her this way: “In the wild grandeur of her mien erect and high before an English Queen she dauntless stood.”

On the grounds of the estate, Michael Gibbons showed us a holy well dedicated to St. Feithin (Festus), one of several which stretch in a fairly straight line from east to west across this part of Ireland. He explained the importance and history of holy wells in the folk religion of Irish people. What I found of interest is that holy wells were disliked by and the tradition actively discouraged by both Anglican evangelical missionaries and the French-trained Roman Catholic clergy who came to this area after English law again permitted Catholicism to be practiced; nonetheless, the tradition continued and even today one finds holy wells as places of reverence throughout this nation. The Roman church seems to have learned the lesson that this sort of folk religion cannot be obliterated and so has adopted many of these sites as places of pilgrimage. The holy well at Ballynahinch, however, is not one of them as it has dried up (according to legend it did so because it was insulted by a Protestant).

Tobar Feithín on the grounds of Ballynahinch Castle

We also saw, from a distance, the island fortress or crannog from which the area gets its name and the remains of a 16th century cannon used by the O’Flaherty’s to defend their headquarters. (The term crannog refers to emplacements on small islands, often artificial ones; remains of them can be found in many of Ireland’s lakes. The name is derived from the old Irish crannóc from crann, tree. These islands in many cases were fortified and lived on by people as late as the 17th century.)

After hiking around Ballynahinch, we drove to Roundstone where we spent an hour having lunch. I’ve written about Roundstone in another post on this blog.

Our bus next took us about twenty minutes south of Roundstone to Cashel Hill (Cnoc an Cháisil) where we climbed about eight hundred yards up the hill from a roadside cottage to a megalithic tomb dating from the end of the Stone Age or beginning of the Bronze Age, about 4500 years ago. It is known locally as Altoir Ula (altoir means “altar” and ula refers a tomb or penitential station ); it is also said to have been a “Mass Rock”, a place used by outlaw Roman Catholic priests to celebrate Holy Communion when Roman Catholicism was illegal during what are called “the Penal times”.

Megalithic Tomb, Cashel Hill, Connemara, Co. na Gaillimhe, Éire

Looking like a low hut built out of a few massive and irregular stone slabs, it is a wedge-shaped gallery grave. Its chamber narrows towards the rear or eastern end. The cap-stone forming its roof is about five feet square and sixteen inches thick, and rests on smaller slabs set edgeways in the ground to form the sides, which are the interior stones of double-sided walls. One of these outer slabs, five feet high, stands forward of the main chamber as a sort of portico at the front of the tomb. Originally the whole construction would have been covered by a cairn, traces of which can be seen around it. This is the only known megalithic tomb in the South Connemara area.

Megalithic Tomb, Cashel Hill, Connemara, Co. na Gaillimhe, Éire

After the tomb, Michael showed us a nearby active bog and explained how bogs grow. He showed us how to walk through bog safely (don’t ever try to jump from place to place!) and demonstrated the buoyancy of a bog mat. One of our classmates, Mara B., stepped out onto the mat (at Michael’s invitation). It was fascinating the way the “ground” in the bog bounced as others walked across it. The mat on which Michael and then Mara stood moved dramatically! The bog water around the mat may have been as many as 18 feet deep; Michael probed with his 5-foot walking stick and met no resistance. The bog is much like quicksand and can suck a person under in just a few minutes.

Active bog area, Cashel Hill, Connemara, Co. na Gaillimhe, Éire

Mara B., active bog area, Cashel Hill, Connemara, Co. na Gaillimhe, Éire

A Drive Through the Bog

July 31, 2011 / eric / 4 Comments

On a recent afternoon I had one of those introversive episodes when I needed to get away from everyone, from the teach lóistín (“boarding house”) where I am staying, away from housemates, host family, school, and so forth. So I told my bean an tí (“landlady”) that I wouldn’t be home for dinner, got in my rental vehicle (an Opel Astra), and drove away.

My first and only planned stop was at a famine house in the northern precincts of An Cheathrú Rua which I had seen from our school bus when returning from one of our “tours”. Unfortunately, I discovered that the property is fenced off by a vicious looking barbed wire fence, so the photos I had hoped to take, and did take, are all from a distance. I’d hoped to go inside it and take some interior shots, but alas ….

Famine House, An Cheathrú Rua

I then drove to what passes for a “main highway” in these parts; from an American perspective these are very narrow roads on which the Irish drive at unreasonably high speeds. I turned toward Leitir Moír, deciding on a moment’s notice that since I am familiar with the Irish folk song Peigín Leitir Móir (I can even sing part of it), I should be able to say that I’d been to the town. I have now been … it’s not much; it’s just a small Irish town with a “city center” consisting of a Roman Catholic church, a small park (and car park), a community activity center, and little grocery store. But the song is still catchy and fun – if you want to hear it, click here for a YouTube video of an Irish folk singing family singing it.

After Leitir Moír, I decided to go to Cloch na Ron (the Anglicized name of which is “Roundstone”, although the Irish actually means “rock of the seals”) and maybe have a bite to eat. That turned out to be a drive through “the bog” which is the area where locals “cut turf” to be used as fireplace fuel during the winter. I took some pictures of turf cutting along the way and enjoyed the views of the Twelve Bens which are the mountains of the Connemara. Lots of people go “hillwalking” among these mountains, a very popular holiday (vacation) activity for the Irish.

The Twelve Bens from Derryrush Road

It is estimated that bogs cover about one-sixth of the available land in Ireland, which gets more of its fuel from peat than any country except Finland. In Ireland, many families have an inherited right to cut turf for domestic use which has been handed down for hundreds of years. This inheritable right is called turbary.

The Bog, Showing Family Turf Cutting or "Turbary" Areas

Here in the west of Ireland, the bog is technically a lowland blanket bog. These are unique in that they are formed in a rainfall-rich locale where the supply of minerals is kept up and the acidity down. The makeup of the bog material includes vegetation of many types.

According to tradition, turf is not cut until after St. Patrick’s Day after the March winds dry the boglands. Early May is generally the turf-cutting time in the West of Ireland, although it continues through the summer months and is still going on while I am here. My host family has gone out to the bog to cut turf, although I’ve been unable to go along because of classes a that the Acadamh. While driving the Derryrush Road from An Cheathrú Rua to Cloch na Ron, I witnessed an old man in rubber boots stacking footings and took the photos you see here. (In retrospect, I wish I’d pulled over – if I could have found a wide enough, dry enough spot to do so – and asked the old man about his activity … 20-20 hindsight!)

In some areas, before turf is cut the top layer of heather and roots is stripped; this can be done by the time consuming process of mowing the vegetation and then cutting back the top layer of soil, or by burning. Burning requires a permit, which is often difficult to obtain.

The Bog, Showing Turf Cutting "Ridge"

In this area, they don’t seem to strip the bog first. The top layer is fairly sparse here, so the turf is simply cut through the top surface. Generally, it takes one man a week of cutting to prepare a year’s worth of turf fuel.

Antique Slane (Modern Tools Have Steel Blades)

Turf cutting is done with a sléan or slane, a long-handled turf spade with a shaped steel end. Slane styles vary from county to county. The direction of the cutting varies from place to place. In this area, turf is cut in a vertical direction; where the bog type is what is called a red raised bog, it is cut in a horizontal direction.

Dried Sods Ready to Burn in the Fire

The depth of a single piece of cut turf is called a spit or a bar. A vertical turf bank is measured in numbers of bars to a depth of a slane (twelve to eighteen inches in this area.) A good bank might be six bars deep; I’m told that a day in the bog is difficult work and taxes the strength of even the fittest person. The bog is very wet and the trenches created as turf is cut fill almost immediately with water; cutters usually wear high gum or rubber boots. The lowest row of bars is the wettest, but they say that when dried they make the best fuel.

The cut turf is removed to open ground to dry. The soggy sods, as the brick shaped cuttings are called, are laid out on the ground to dry for a week. They are then stacked upright into a footing which continues the drying procedure.

A Field of Footings Next to the Trench or Ridge from which they were cut

Close-Up of Footing

Once the footed turf is somewhat dry, sods are piled into a rickle. When it is finally dry, the turf is carried home to be stacked against an east-facing wall or in a covered shed for protection from westerly winds.

A "Rickle" or Pile of Turf Ready to be Transported Home

In the past, turf cutting was only fuel available to many families living in the Connemara, where it is illegal to cut it other than by hand. Many families still use turf for homeheating, although today it can be purchased in compressed briquettes in supermarkets throughout Ireland. I’m told that turf burns cleaner than coal; it has a very a pleasant smell which, together with the smell of mown heather, has come to really be the scent of Ireland to me. There’s nothing quite so comfortable as sitting by a turf fire on cold, damp day with a mug of tea (or in my case, coffee) in hand. I’m told that scones cooked over a turf fire have an especially lovely flavor – I’ve not had (nor do I anticipate having) that experience, but I can imagine that it is true.

After my drive through the Bog along Derryrush Road, I connected with one of the small “highways” of Ireland and made it to Roundstone, which was a bit of a mess. It is a fishing village turned vacation resort. One very narrow street along the waterfront, several B&Bs and a few pubs/eateries. It was a “mess” because next Thursday is the running of the Tour de Bog, a bicycle road race that begins and ends in Roundstone and they were setting up signs, starting/ending line, viewer stands, etc. Some guy with a trailer was trying park it on the main street where there was patently no space to park it! So a long line of cars waited about fifteen minutes for the fruitless maneuvering to end.

I finally parked in the free public parking area and walked to a local pub – had a pint of Smithwick’s ale with the barkeep, a woman about my age who bemoaned the Irish economy and the fact that at 6 p.m. on a Friday evening she had absolutely no business. For the first twenty minutes or so, I was the only customer in the place, then a French family entered and since they had very little English and she had no French, I served as translator.

I finished my beer, bade my new friends farewell – “Adieu!” and “Bon nuit!” to the French family, “Slan!” and “Oíche mhaith!” to the Irish tavern owner – headed back to the car where I noticed that the music shop of Malachy Kearns, reputed to be the best bodhran (Irish drum) maker in Ireland, was open.

I bought a bodhran there in 2005 when Evelyn and I made our first trip to Ireland. We also bought a CD that I really, really liked, but which we gave to a friend (after making a bootleg copy for ourselves, a copy which has since disappeared). I thought I might find another copy but, alas, the stock at Malachy’s store has been replaced with Celtic Woman and a bunch of touristy “moods” CDs that you can find in any Celtic-Gaelic store in the USA. So I bought nothing.

I headed back to An Cheathrú Rua, covering the same roads in the reverse direction (I thought “Jack the GPS” might take me a different route, but no). I got back to town just in time for a really good lecture on “the function of music in the Irish tradition” by Breandán Ó Madagáin, an elderly professor from NUIG. Old he may be, but he has a great singing voice. He really knew his stuff. I had a chance to talk with him briefly about my project and he gave me a copy of an ethnomusicology article he had written which references and briefly discusses the hymnal I’m working on.

After the lecture, I headed for home and bed.

My Typical Day in the Gaeltacht

July 24, 2011 / eric / 2 Comments

I thought I would share with you the usual daily schedule at an Áras Uí Chadhain: an Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge ag An Cheathrú Rua (the Irish Language Center of the National University of Ireland in Galway at An Cheathrú Rua). Here’s my typical day during the last week:

I get up at about 6:30 a.m. (before anyone else in the house) and brew a four-cup pot of coffee in our host’s French press. I do a chapter of work in a basic Irish grammar book (this is on my own, not something assigned by the school which is more concerned with speaking than with writing the language).

About 8 a.m. the rest of the house is up and functioning and by 8:30 a.m. we have our breakfast (“bricfeasta” as Gaeilge).

Uí Fátharta Home (Taken in July 2008)

The seven of us students walk to the school at about 9:10 or so and arrive in time for classes at 9:30 a.m. Two of us are in the “meánrang” (pronounced “mahn’-rahng”, the intermediate class), four are in the feabhaseoirí (pronounced “fouse’-i-ori”, the improvers, which is the elementary class for those who have had a minimum exposure to the language), and one is in the “búnrang” (basic class) for rank beginners with no Irish at all.

Classes run until 11 a.m. which is tea time (“sós” which means “break”) – we have tea or coffee or whatever until 11:30 a.m. and then it’s back to class until 1 p.m.

Lunch (“lón“) runs from 1 to 2 p.m. More class time from 2 to 4 p.m. (with no break). At 4 p.m. there is some sort of lecture (archeology, music, Irish orthography, folk lore, etc).

At 5 p.m. we walk back to the house; our bean-an-tí (pronounced “ban’-uh-tee”, landlady) feeds us dinner at 5:30 p.m. and that usually takes more than an hour.

Shortly after 7 pm. we walk back down the hill to the school for an evening lecture from 7:30 to 9:00 p.m. (these are the same sorts of lectures as in the afternoon, but usually more specialized or more in depth).

At 9:00 p.m. we return home and do our homework, which usually takes me until 11 p.m. At that point, I either go to bed (this happens most often) or I walk down the hill to have a pint at the pub across the street from the school (“An Chistin” which means “the kicthen”, also known locally as “tígh sea” – “tee shay” which means “house of the O’Shays” because that is the name of the family who has owned and run the place for generations) and have a pint. In either event, I am usually in bed by midnight (“meánoíche“, prounounced “mahn’-ee-khuh”) or shortly thereafter

This is the pattern three of the six days in a week. One day each week there is a “turas” or tour of some local area – Kylemore Abbey and the National Connemara Park, the Arann Islands, into Galway, etc. On Wednesday afternoons we are given the afternoon off, but those become intensive study times with others in our class as we prepare for the oral tests that happen on Thursday afternoons: each week we are expected to converse with two instructors about a particular subject. We know in advance what the subject will be, so we can get together with classmates and practice conversation about whatever (this week it is our favorite music – type, performers, compositions, concerts, etc.)

In general the weekly pattern is

Monday – basic pattern
Tuesday – basic pattern
Wednesday – morning basic with free time in the afternoon; after-dinner lecture.
Thursday – morning basic with conversation exam in the afternoon; after-dinner lecture.
Friday – basic pattern
Saturday – tour
Sunday – free (but filled with homework)

You can see that there is not much time for other activities! I try to take a walk of a couple of miles every day and, when I can, to take some photographs, but there is almost no time for writing posts to this blog!

Today (Sunday, 24 July 2011) I attend the Sung Eucharist at St. Nicholas Collegiate Church in Galway (a 45-minute drive each way) and did take some pictures of the church. I will make every effort to write a posting about that and hang some pictures here later in the evening, but right now …. I gotta study!

Travel Frustrations

July 15, 2011 / eric / 3 Comments

Finally, I am in one place for more than a day or two … but getting here was a 24-hour exercise in frustration!

I drove from Wilmslow near Manchester in England to Edinburgh, Scotland, after a very pleasant visit with my friend Sally M. and her husband Tim. Sally and I had gone to the weekday Eucharist at St. Bartholomew’s Church, then toured the Quarry Bank cotton mill historical site maintained by the National Trust. Then I hit the road.

I arrived at the Quality Hotel at the Edinburgh Airport, unloaded my things, cleaned up the interior of the car and made sure I had everything out of it, then drove from the hotel to the rental car return lot … somehow making a wrong turn and ending up in a lane and an area of the airport reserved for “authorized vehicles” only (i.e., buses and taxis). Zipping quickly into an escape lane labeled FastTrack, thinking it was a quick way out of the airport, I found myself headed instead for a £26 short-term parking lot!!! Another quick lane change into a lane labeled Drop Off Only and I was in a covered drive with hundreds of people getting out of cars with their baggage; I finally made it to the exit of this area, only to find I had to pay £1 to open a gate … in any event, I made it to the car park, turned in the car, and went to find the shuttle bus to back to the hotel. On the way, I had the good idea to enter the terminal and locate the Aer Lingus ticket counter which I found at the far left end of the counters. Good, I know where to head in the early morning.

Back out to the shuttle bus and back to the hotel. I’d checked the Aer Lingus web site about baggage limitations and learned that there is 20 kilo limit on luggage, so with two bags that were packed to a 50 lb limit in the states (one about 30 lbs or 16 kilos, one about 48 lbs or 22 kilos) I knew I needed to do some shifting of items and get them more evenly distributed. That took a lot of doing … I spent nearly two hours moving things back and forth and finally getting the one down to 20 kilos (books and my CPAP machine being the heavier and harder to distribute items). Then I hied myself to the bar for a beer and a fish-and-chips dinner.

I went to bed about 11:30 p.m. setting my clock for 5 a.m. so I could get up and get the 6 a.m. shuttle in order to check in the recommended two hours before the 8:20 a.m. flight time. Tossed, turned, last looked at the clock at nearly 1 a.m. and then woke up at 4:00 a.m. and couldn’t go back to sleep. Thirty minutes later I faced the inevitable and got up, showered, finalized the packing, checked out and got to the airport at 6:00 a.m.

Loading my two bags to be checked, my carry-on backpack computer bag, and my jacket on a rolling cart, I headed to the previously scouted Aer Lingus counter … and found that it was now the City-Jet Airlines counter! And, further, that there was no Aer Lingus counter at all! I asked the young woman a the City-Jet counter what was going on. She said their counters are not permanently assigned and changed “all the time.” A young man behind her overheard our conversation and told me that Aer Lingus would open at Counter 14 in a few minutes, so I stood back and waited about 20 minutes and, sure enough, it did open up … with said young man manning the counter. I went up to check in … and he told me my luggage was 17 kilos overweight! All that work to balance the distribution between the bags and now I am told that the 20 kilo limit is “per person” not “per bag”! I would have sworn the website read as if this were a “per bag” limit, but I was reading the “Checked Bags Fees” section and not the “Checked Bags Allowances” section which I have now seen on re-reading the site. So … at £12.00 per kilo overage fee, I pay $330 to send my bags one-way to Ireland – this is $100 dollars more than the round-trip ticket to send me there and back.

Deep sigh of resignation … pay fee, get boarding pass, go off to security and the gates.

Security – guess who gets singled out for special pat-down and carry-on baggage examination.

At this point, I’m about as frustrated with everything as I can be. The Edinburgh Airport has rapidly become a non-favored place in my experience and I am ready to leave. In fact, I’m about ready to say, “This has been a great two-weeks, let’s cancel the rest of this exercise and go home!” But I don’t … I finally get to the gate … and find it’s been changed. So I go to the other gate, fortunately not far away.

Chill for 90 minutes. Go through the check-in procedure, walk out on the tarmac, enter small propeller-driven aircraft, collapse into seat.

Conversation with the woman next to me … she’s from Wichita, Kansas! An emergency physician traveling with her college-age son for a vacation in Scotland and Ireland. Very pleasant 70 minutes on the flight and we arrive at Dublin. Passport, baggage claim, customs, all no problem.

Car rental – pre-arranged months ago for a two-month long-term rental with insurance provided by my VISA card which advertises “world-wide” insurance coverage on rental cars. Except … it turns out … in Ireland, Syria, Iran, and other “terrorist countries” – Ireland? A terrorist country? Really? Long-distance call to the US to the VISA issuer confirms this. Damn! Basic insurance on the car is €15 per day, or €75 per week for a long-term rental. And, oh by the way, we don’t have your reservation … you shouldn’t have been able to do that on the website! Don’t worry, we’ll get it worked out (which they do) but it will have to be another car because we don’t have any in your reserved class with the proper registrations and permits for long-term rental. (I get a bigger car, but at some point, through the Galway office, I’ll have to trad it for the size I reserved.)

Finally, this all gets worked out and I get the car … some sort of Opel sport sedan with a diesel engine. Very posh. Feels HUGE after the little Vauxhall Meriva I’d been driving through the UK. I get my luggage loaded, get my Garmin GPS out of the suitcase, set it up on the dash, turn it on, set my destination, and move out … and get incomprehensible instructions from the GPS! The maps for Ireland are out-of-date. They have built new, high-speed motorways since these maps were produced, and in Dublin they have replaced roundabouts with American-style light-controlled intersections. Garmin’s instructions are worse than useless – they are dangerous! I turn it off and navigate by blind luck, finding my way to the Vodafone store where I am supposed to be able to convert my Nokia cellphone to local service so I don’t have to pay British international roaming charges. Guess what – Vodafone UK misinformed me – Vodafone IE can’t convert the phone. No big deal, I’ll just pay the roaming charges. I can top-up the prepayment arrangement here, so we’ll just go with that.

Back on the road … “Jack” (my Garmin) still is useless – when I’m on the motorway, he thinks I’m driving through farm fields and keeps telling me “Drive to highlighted route.” So he gets turned off again – just follow the signs to Galway. Once I get outside Galway City, Jack is fine – the road in the Gaeltacht don’t change! He guides me properly from Galway City to An Cheathrú Rua.

I arrive at my host family’s home, greet my old friends Feithín and his sister Múirin, children of my hosts, unload the car and collapse for a nap!

These 24 hours have been an exercise in frustration and patience. Thank God, they’re over. Before I take my nap … I open up Dánta Dé and I read this prayer:

Paidir mhilis thrócaire
Atá lán de ghrása
Cuirimid-ne chugad-sa
Dár gcaomhaint ar ár námhaid,
Ag luighe dúinn anocht
Is ag éirghe dúinn amárach,
In onóir na Trionóide
‘S i síthcháin na Páise.

A Íosa mhilis thrócairigh,
A Mhic na h-Óighe cúmhra,
Sábháil sinn ar na piantaibh
‘Tá íochtarach dorcha dúnta.
Leat a ghnímíd á ngearán
Óir is agad ‘tá an tseachrán
Is cuir inn ar an eolas.

In English:

A sweet prayer of mercy,
That is full of graces,
We send to Three,
To protect us from our enemies,
On our lying down tonight,
And on our rising tomorrow:
In honour of the Trinity
And in the peace of the Passion.

O Jesu, sweet, merciful,
O Son of the fragrant Virgin,
Save us from the pains
That are nethermost, dark, emprisoned.
To Thee we make our plaint,
For with Thee is our succor;
Keep us from wandering,
And guide us to [true] wisdom.

Keep us from wandering and guide us to wisdom, indeed! Amen!

Visiting Wilmslow

July 12, 2011 / eric / 0 Comments

I’ve driven from Hay-on-Wye to Wilmslow (near Manchester) to visit friend Sally M. She’s taken me on a whirlwind tour of the area focusing on the two churches of the Parish, St. Bartholomew’s and St. Anne’s. Both lovely church facilities. Take a look at their website, which includes a virtual tour of the older church (St. Bartholomew’s).

One the way, I stopped in Shrewsbury and saw the Abbey, then drove on to Oswestry where I had planned to visit the neolithic round fort at Old Oswestry, but somehow got lost and never made it.

Now I’m here for my last night in England (tomorrow I’ll be back in Scotland and the next day off to Ireland). More later….

St. Edmundsbury Cathedral

July 9, 2011 / eric / 2 Comments

On 8 July 2011 I visited two cathedrals, the first of which was St. Edmundsbury Cathedral (which is in the town of Bury St. Edmunds – don’t ask me why the names are differently formatted; even the cathedral guide I spoke with couldn’t tell me). The town and cathedral are named for St. Edmund, King and Martyr, who was king of the East Angles; he was killed by Danish invaders in 869 CE. They had offered him peace on condition that he would rule as their vassal and forbid the practice of the Christian faith. For his refusal, he was tied to a tree and shot with arrows. Around 900 CE, Edmund’s body was brought to Bedericesworth (now called Bury St. Edmunds) and housed in a shrine in what developed into a great Benedictine abbey. That shrine became a great place of pilgrimage and Edmund was the patron saint of England, until St George replaced him.

The Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich was created in 1914, the Church of St James (on the grounds of the Benedictine abbey’s ruins) was designated as the Cathedral. In 2009 the Cathedral changed its dedication to become the Cathedral Church of St James and St Edmund.

Here are a few photos from the cathedral. First, exterior as seen from the gate from the Abbey Gardens. It was a very rainy day when I visited, so I did not go around and take a photo of the front of the cathedral from the High Street.

St. Edmundsbury Cathedral seen from the Abbey Garden gate

The main nave of the church:

St. Edmundsbury Cathedral Interior

The High Altar and then the altar in a side chapel:

St. Edmundsbury Cathedral High Altar

St. Edmundsbury Cathedral side chapel

Finally a couple of pieces of statuary. First, a wood carving of St. Edmund inside the cathedral. There is a larger bronze statue on the grounds, but because of the rain, I wasn’t able to get a picture of it. The second statue is a piece commemorating explorer Bartholomew Gosnold who gave Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, its name. He sailed to the island in 1602. On seeing wild grape vines growing there, he named it for his second child, who died in infancy, and who was named Martha. Martha Gosnold had been christened in St James Church and her body is buried it its churchyard.

Wooden carving of St. Edmund, King and Martyr

Statue commemorating explorer Bartholomew Gosnold

After visiting St. Edmundbury Cathedral, I left the city and drove to the university town of Cambridge to have lunch with friends. Unfortunately, the English roads, English traffic, and English congestion got the better of me and I never made it to the lunch date. I tried … but I can now say, “I have been to Cambridge, where I failed.” Instead of meeting my friends for lunch, I threw up my hands in frustration and drove on to St. Albans where I visited the second cathedral of the day and about which I will write another post later.

Connections: Friendship, Stones, and Walls

July 5, 2011 / eric / 1 Comment

I inhabit a world of instant connections, or so I believe. Back home in the States almost anywhere I go I can pull out my laptop, turn it on, find an available WiFi network, link to it with little or no problem, and be instantly connected with the internet. I can check my e-mail, access informational websites, Skype with family and friends – in a word, be connected.

Not so Great Britain. Except for the fact that the housekeeper Clovenfords Country Hotel had to keep unplugging the router to plug in her vacuum cleaner, there was no problem my first lodgings. The next evening, however, I discovered that there is no connection at all on Lindisfarne. Holy Island simply seems unwired. There times my phone couldn’t even send a text message. Now in Whitby, I’m finding that although the B&B where I’m staying advertises “free WiFi”, its router keeps cutting in and out (without the excuse of an interfering house keeper) – good thing its free! I’d be really angry if I was paying for this. (Note: The next day things improved immensely – I actually think the problem was with the ISP because my computer kept showing that I was connected to the router, but the router wasn’t connecting to the internet.)

This matter of “being connected” brings me to the sorts of places I’ve visited the past few days – the Duddo Stone Circle (2200-1400 BCE), Hadrian’s Wall (c. 120 CE), Bede’s Monastery of St. Paul at Jarrow (681 and c. 12th Cent. CE), Lindisfarne Priory (687 and 1150 CE). These are ancient places of varying purposes but all, in a sense, are monuments to human connectedness, our connections to one another and our connections to the divine.

Duddo Stone Circle

No one is quite sure what the Duddo Stone Circle is all about. It may have marked a burial site, but that cannot be proven because Victorian and early 20th Century excavations disturbed any cremation chamber that may have been there. It may have been a religious site of some sort, but who can tell. It is dated to the Bronze Age principally because of its size. Archeologists tell us that the final phase of stone circle building occurred during the early to middle Bronze Age (c.2200–1500 BCE) which saw the construction of small circles like Duddo, probably by family groups or clans rather than the larger population groups need to build the larger circles and henges.

The purpose of stone circles and henges is forever lost to us. They may have been religious; they have been astrological or astronomical observatories of a sort; they have been talismanic. Still, whatever the Duddo Stone Circle’s purpose and whoever its builders, it remains today as a monument to community and cooperation, to the human need to connect that which is greater than the individual. Though they have fallen been stood again over time, there they remain perhaps 4,000 years after their initial placement on that hillside in Northumbria.

Housesteads Fort and Hadrians Wall

Hadrian’s Wall was built between 122 and 128 CE right across the island of Great Britain; it is 73 modern miles long! About 70 percent of this fortification (more than 50 miles) is made of squared stone outer walls with a fill of rubble and clay between them; these walls were 10 feet thick and 20 feet high! The remainder (mainly west of the River Irthing) was made of turf stacked 20 feet thick and 10 feet high. Forts were built every five to ten miles and turrets or guard posts every mile. It was built by the Roman Legions and they did it, including the forts and turrets, in six years! I visited Housesteads Roman Fort near Hexham and was fascinated by the orderliness of its layout and massiveness of the section of the wall to which it is connected. The wall and its forts are monuments to organization and communication, it nothing else, and sections of it are still standing nearly 1900 years later!

Carrawburgh Mithraeum Brocolitia

However, the ruins of Hadrian’s Wall are not simply the remains of a secular, military fortification of massive proportions. There is evidence that Hadrian believed it was his duty by “divine instruction” to build the wall to protect the Roman Empire. Furthermore, along the wall there are worship sites. A goodly number of Rome’s Legionaries were Mithraists, followers of a mystery religion which competed with Christianity in the early centuries and with the Christian Church (after made official by Constantine) eventually wiped out. Along the wall are evidences of Mithraic worship sites called Mithraea. One such Mithraeum is found at Carrawburgh near Housesteads Roman Fort. (For some reason it has been given the Celtic-based name Brocolitia, which probably means “badger hole”.

Lindisfarne Priory

The monastery and the priory were founded by the Celtic missionaries from Ireland at about the same time and renewed five hundred years later. Lindisfarne and Jarrow were re-established as monastic communities by Benedictines from Durham Cathedral in the 12th Century and, if not for the savagery of Henry the Eighth’s disestablishment of the monasteries in the 15th Century, they might still be standing and might still be functional communities today. Like Duddo and Hadrian’s Wall before them, the still-standing ruins of these monasteries are testament to power of human connection and of human desire to connect to that which is greater.

While the Celtic ethos is certainly community-based, as the nature of the Celtic monastic communities of Ireland and those in Britain and Scotland in places like Lindisfarne, Jarrow, and Iona show, the hymns in Dantá Dé do not reflect that. The hymns Ní Ógáin selected are all, for the most part, hymns of individual prayer. However, there is one hymn which refers to God as “King of the friends,” or as Douglas Hyde translated it, “King of friendship.” The notes describe is as a morning hymn and as folk music (ceol na ndaoine, literally “music of the people”) “through L Grattan-Flood, Mus. Doc.” This is the Gaeilge original:

A Rí na gcarad, a Athair an tSlánuightheor’,
Fág in mo sheasamh mé ar maidin drádhachóir;
Déan-sa mo theagasg gan mearbhal, a Shlánuightheoir,
Agus sábháil m’anam ar cheangal an Aidhbheirseor’.

A Rí cruinne, do bheir loinnir ‘sa ngréin go moch,
Dílte troma agus toradh ‘na ndhiaidh go grod,
Innsim Duit-se mo chulpa agus féachaim is glaodhaim Ort,
Agus ná leig tuitim níos fuide bham féin san olc.

And this is a versified translation which Ní Ógáin attributes to Dr. Hyde:

O King of friendship, our Saviour’s Father art Thou;
O keep me erect, until evening shall cool my brow.
O teach and control, lest I unto sin should bow,
And save Thou my soul from the foe who follows me now.

O King of the world, Who lightest the sun’s bright ray,
Who movest the rains that ripen the fruit on the spray;
I look unto Thee, my transgressions before Thee I lay,
O keep me from falling deeper and deeper away.

Friendship, community, connectedness … these are the things that last and those human works which result from them last, as well. God is the King of the Friends, the King of Friendship. If we trust in God and in one another, the things we accomplish will be kept erect like the Standing Stones at Duddo. They will not be inconsistent, like internet connections. They will not fall “deeper and deeper away” but stand like Hadrian’s Wall and the walls of the ancient monasteries, testaments to the power of friendship and of faith.

Spelling, Grammar, Punctuation … and Grace

June 28, 2011 / eric / 2 Comments

Misused apostrophes added unnecessarily to plurals or added (or forgotten) with possessives … to use a serial comma or not … should this be a colon or semicolon … does a comma or period go inside the quotation marks or outside?

Verb tenses, definite and indefinite articles, prepositions, noun-verb agreement ….

Homophones (their, there, they’re … hear, here … right, write, rite) and so forth ….

This sort of thing drives me crazy as I write for “immediate publication,” which is essentially what blog writing is. Apparently I do not type what I think. Maybe I should retitle this blog “What am I TYPING this morning?” We would all be surprised, I’m sure! I know I am surprised when I re-read what I’ve published here. I find all of the issues above-mentioned and more when I do so. So there’s this constant process of correct, hit the update button, read again, correct, hit the update button, read again … and on and on it goes. (Especially transliterating the archaic Irish script of Dantá Dé into modern Latin lettering! I read and re-read, compare to the original, re-type, then do it again, and again, and still I find more things to correct.)

So, dear readers, I beg your indulgence. If you read a sentence that doesn’t make sense, read it again and figure out what’s missing. A helping verb, a preposition, a conjunction, something will make it good. I trust you to supply the correction … and to check back later and see if I’ve supplied something else!

A story …

When I was in seminary a good friend (a retired priest in my home parish) died, so I went to the seminary chapel and added his name to the prayer list for that day’s Evening Prayer service. The list asked us to include our name as requester and indicate our relationship to the person being remembered. Our officiant that evening was a commuter student who didn’t know all of the dormitory residents … and apparently in my grief or haste I did not write very legibly. So when the list of those for whose souls reposed was prayed came around, she prayed for “Father Hunt Parsons, friend of Ernie Funston.” Of course, there were sniggers and a few outright guffaws in the congregation.

Leaving the chapel at the conclusion of the service, Dr. Guy Lytle, who taught Anglicanism and church history, happened to go out the door beside me. He took me by the arm and said, “Don’t worry. God has spell-check on prayers.”

Since then I’ve come to regard that as a metaphor for God’s grace … God has spell-check on our lives! Like the automatic spell-checker in our word processers, God quietly and efficiently corrects (or simply chooses to overlook) the errors we commit.

And we are called to have spell-check (and grammar-check and gentle proofreading) for one anothers (another’s? anothers’?) lives.

So “grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ!”

Gnothach

March 24, 2011 / eric / 0 Comments

“Gnothach” is the Irish Gaelic (Gaeilge) word for “busy” – “Táim gnothach” means “I’m busy.” This can be modified by prefixes such as “an-” meaning “very” and “ro-” which means “too”. “Táim an-gnothach” means “I’m very busy”; “Táim ro-gnothach” means “I’m too busy.”

The opposite of “gnothach” is “saor”. “Saor” can mean “free”, “cheap” or “off” (as in off from work, which is what I am today as I write this). The term for what Americans call “vacation” is “laethanta saoire”, which literally means “days free.”

Recently, I attended a conference for clergy anticipating sabbatical leave and our facilitator asked us to give up the use of the word “busy”. He suggested that it was a word which implied victimization! When one says, “I’m busy” there is an implication of negativity, as if one didn’t want to be doing the things that fill one’s day. (And, I must admit, that there are few of those sorts of things that fill my days … isn’t that true of all of us.) Most of what keeps us “busy” he argued are things we choose to be doing. And if we choose them, should we complain about them, should we be playing the victim because they are filling are day?

Rather, he suggested, we should abandon the word “busy” and instead describe our days as “rich and full.” I think he has a point … so even as I struggle to speak Irish (and it is a struggle!) I will abandon “busy” and “gnothach”.

Níl me gnothach; tá mo laethanta saibhir agus iomlán. (I am not busy; my days are rich and full.)

Preaching on Teen Suicide

October 10, 2010 / eric / 0 Comments

The following is the text of an email I sent to some friends with whom I am part of an on-going internet community of some duration – an “email listserve” that has been in existence for several years.

This is long, but I have to write it down and share it with someone. And I apologize in advance for what I know to be offensive content below. It offended me – and I protested to the sender.

This morning I preached about the rash of recent gay teen suicides. I want to share the experience with you all. I preached ad lib with only a few notes.

I began reading John Donne’s Meditation XVII (“No man is an island, etc….”) and said that we had all been diminished recently by the suicides of Tyler Clementi (18 y.o. freshman at Rutgers), Asher Brown (13 y.o. middle school student in Houston), an unnamed 11 y.o. child in California, and Sladjana Vidovic (a Croatian immigrant student at a high school in Mentor, Ohio, age 16). Each of these children was driven to commit suicide because of bullying, teasing, oppression aimed at them because they were perceived as “different”, as outcasts. And the fault lies with each one of us because we have all participated in behaviour which has made such bullying permissible in our society. We have all sat by silently as jokes or political comments or gossip which was racist or sexist or heterosexist were uttered in our presence; we may even have told those jokes or made those remarks ourselves.

I then exegeted the lesson from Jeremiah and talked about how the Jews were the foreigners, the “other” in their exile in Babylon, and how although Jeremiah seems to be counseling assimilation, he is actually telling them to be proud of their heritage in a way that is respectful of those who are their oppressors, to pray and work for the welfare of the society in which they find themselves because in its welfare they will find their own wellbeing. And I noted how when they returned from exile, they hadn’t learned the lesson of what it is like to be “the other” in a strange society, how they had excluded the “Samaritans” from participating in the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple and how the Jews continued, some of them even to this day, to practice religious intolerance and an exclusionary theology, noting particularly how it affected groups like women, gentiles, tax collectors, and the chronically ill (lepers) in Jesus’ day, and Palestinians today. I then moved on to the Gospel and focused on Jesus’s last words to Samaritan former leper – “your faith has made you well.”

I argued that it is our faith which can make our society well, if we will simply live up to it. Basically my message was “Stop it!” – do not in anyway participate in jokes, comments, conversations, that promote racism, heterosexism, sexism, or any other exclusionary ism. If you are with someone …who starts that kind of talk, tell them to stop it!

I made note of the fact that I had heard members of the congregation criticizing and making jokes about the President in the vilest and most racist of language, that I had heard men in the congregation make jokes about their wives or other women that were not fit to repeat, that I had heard women in the parish make jokes about gays and lesbians that were decidedly unladylike … and that I had said nothing when I had, but fair warning – no longer – if someone from now on says anything of that nature in my presence I will tell them “Stop it!”

I noted that in our Epistle Lesson, Paul warned Timothy of the power of words, of wrangling over words, and that’s basically what we have to deal with — the power of abusive, exclusionary words, of taunting and teasing and “making fun of” (a terrible euphemism if ever there was one). I made mention of James’s letter in which he notes that the tongue is a flame which can start a conflagration — and that is what we have – a conflagration of youthful suicides which result from words being spoken abusively, in a social climate which makes that acceptable behaviour. It is NOT acceptable and so we must stop it! So from now on, I will speak up and protest when I hear it. I will not do it myself … and I begged them not to do it and to speak up when they hear it.

Jesus told the outcast (the leper) that his faith had made him well – only our faith can make our society well – but that faith must be public and vocal – we must tell those who make an atmosphere of abuse acceptable through their racist, sexist, hetersexist jokes and snide remarks to STOP IT! And we must do it because that is the only way to be faithful to Jesus Christ!

That was my sermon, in a nutshell; it was longer, but that’s enough for here for now.

I expected a negative reaction from some, and I’m sure there was some. Mostly those who agreed with me told me as much, and those who didn’t avoided talking with me at all, even those very conservative members who usually do exchange pleasantries didn’t do so. Oh well….

Anyway, I came home … had lunch … checked my email.

So now I need to explain that we have a men’s group loosely affiliated with the church. It started as an attempt to create a men’s fellowship, but devolved into a poker and Scotch-sampling group and includes men whose families, for whatever reason, have left the Episcopal Church as well as members of the parish. This group meets on the 2nd Tuesday of the month and though I am usually unable to take part, I’m still on their email list. Tuesday is the next meeting and so several emails have been exchanged about where they are gathering, who’s hosting, the need to replenish the stock of various labels of Scotch, and so forth.

One of the men whose family are former members of the parish (now worshiping in a Southern Baptist church because of the couple’s very strong right-wing and Christian conservative feelings) … sent this email which I found in my in basket this afternoon:

Sorry guys, if any of you are offended by the attachment below, just couldn’t help it.

This will be my daily routine, through to 2012.

HOW TO START EACH DAY WITH A POSITIVE OUTLOOK

1. Open a new file in your computer.
2. Name it ‘Barack Obama’.
3. Send it to the Recycle Bin.
4. Empty the Recycle Bin.
5. Your PC will ask you: ‘Do you really want to get rid of ‘Barack Obama?’
6. Firmly Click ‘Yes.’
7. Feel better? GOOD! – Tomorrow we’ll do Nancy Pelosi.

Could there have been a more timely email, a better example of exactly what I was talking about? This offensive drivel was sent to about twenty men, mostly members of the parish, at least half of whom were in church this morning.

I sent this reply to the same recipients:

I am offended. This kind of nonsense is precisely what is wrong with this country. It comes from both sides of the political spectrum and it has to stop. This country and our society will only get worse if this kind of disrespect continues.

If anyone is tempted to send me anything of this nature, whether it be from the Left or the Right — Please don’t. And think about what you are doing and take my advice … don’t send it to anyone.

Stop this! Stop it now before this country sinks deeper into the abyss of incivility.

The sender very quickly sent a one-line email to the same list – “I apologize to everyone.” And I sent a quick one line, “Apology accepted. Thank you.”

It has to stop … it is this kind of incivility to those perceived as “other”, the demonizing of those that are different from ourselves, that has brought us to the point where 11 y.o. and 13 y.o. and 16 y.o. and 18 y.o. children are killing themselves because they are the targets of this sort of thing. It has to stop.

We have to stop it and we can only do that by standing up to it and demanding it stop.

Category: Friends (Page 6 of 7)

Another Walk through the Connemara

A Drive Through the Bog

My Typical Day in the Gaeltacht

Travel Frustrations

Visiting Wilmslow

St. Edmundsbury Cathedral

Connections: Friendship, Stones, and Walls

Spelling, Grammar, Punctuation … and Grace

Gnothach

Preaching on Teen Suicide

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