The first impression I had as I stepped off the boat after a short open-boat journey across the lake was of an island that was a mixture of Alcatraz and an abandoned holiday camp. The sun was gleaming off the darkening waters of the lake, a haven of primitive splendour. The south-west wind rushed through the reeds. The sound of the rocks was a sad one, challenging and threatening. This roar in the background came from the constant surging of the water off the rocks and reefs like the roar of distant drums. Lough Derg or St Patrick’s Purgatory, a lake in County Donegal, is one of the loneliest places in the world.
The purpose of the journey was to sample the old ascetic rigours of prayer, fast and vigil, the dream of ages. We went barefoot over the island’s million stones, did without sleep for twenty-four hours, fasted for three days and recited countless prayers. The diet, or lack of it, of watery tea and unbuttered bread, sharpened the religious appetite. As pilgrims conducted their penitential rounds in bare feet, they underwent a stripping-down in spirit that brought them closer to their Maker.
Historically, Lough Derg has been the Celtic equivalent of the desert. In the western world, deprived of the sandy open spaces of the Sahara, the Celtic monks sought the sea. In biblical times, the desert in scripture was the place of the revelation of God. The elemental experience on Lough Derg was to help pilgrims on this road of faith to go through the desert as the place of struggle and purification.
Light, faint at first, had ripened into the bold yellow of an autumn morning. It was a clear Irish day, white clouds lazy in blue skies, a cool breeze, sunlight on the rolling hills. Although it was late autumn it was unseasonably fine, and springlike. As the cloud shadows racing in the wind flew over my head, trailing ribbons of shade and brightness over the endless blues and brown, I felt an overwhelming sense of aesthetic pleasure, despite my fears for the future. Not for the first time I really appreciated the natural beauty of my environment, particularly the marshy land, with its enchanting blanket of purple heather and bog pools with the black waters rippling and the tufts of rushes bending and swaying in the eternal wind. Lough Derg speaks today of our Celtic past.
Instant Success
The speed at which children of chieftains become monks and nuns is a small indication of how quickly the tentacles of Christianity had spread throughout Ireland. In the early years when Christianity was still in its infancy it did take considerable moral courage for a chieftain to depart from the traditions and customs of his forefathers and allow his daughters to take the veil as Christian virgins. This practice was particularly prevalent among certain families.
Before Patrick arrived there were relatively few Christians in Ireland with no ecclesiastical organisation and no bishop; by his death the Church was solidly entrenched. It is noteworthy that this was accomplished peacefully. There is no evidence of martyrs in early Christian Ireland. Paganism was in a marked decline. Yet some of Patrick’s more enthusiastic disciples were prone to exaggerating his successes. He did not achieve instant evangelisation. Chieftains like Diarmait, son of Fergus Cerrbél, king of Tara in the mid sixth century, and Eógan Bél, king of Connacht, were pagan. They were by no means unique. Indeed, long before the term was fashionable, many chieftains were à la carte Christians. In the good times they called on the Christian God, but in times of crisis they called on the gods of their ancestors. In later centuries this pattern of ‘fair day Christianity’ became commonplace in Ireland.
From the outset, Celtic Christianity developed traits of its own. Throughout the continent, the Church was being built up in lands which had once constituted components of the Roman empire, where the culture of territorial divisions was firmly established; for example, the word ‘diocese’ was inherited from the Roman administrative system. In contrast, territorial divisions were not of primary importance in Ireland where the unit of government was a curious hybrid of kinship groups and ruling families. Irish church organisation adopted a similar structure. Rather than follow the Roman norm and organise the Church on diocesan lines, bishops were attached to particular families.
According to Nennius’s eleventh-century Historia Brittonum – History of the Britons – Patrick ordained 365 bishops. We need to be somewhat suspicious of sources quoted several centuries after Patrick’s death, though Tirechan, writing in the eighth century, claims that Patrick consecrated about 450 bishops. Whereas, in the Roman model bishops exercised great power and authority, that was not the case in Ireland because there were so many of them and the small size of their flocks prevented them from acquiring any significant power base.
A consequent major distinction between the Roman model and the Celtic one was that in Ireland the real centres of religious importance were monasteries rather than episcopal sees under the jurisdiction of a bishop. These monasteries were not compact groups of stone buildings. Instead they were effectively tiny towns, mapped out in streets, with a small stone church as the focal point. Large numbers of monks lived and worked and prayed together under the control of the abbot, who was normally elected from among the family of the founder.
Sign Language
Perhaps one of the reasons why Patrick was such a success as a missionary was that he considered himself a country man and spoke in a country idiom so that his message might be better understood by his audience. Equally he appreciated that to really engage people he could not rely only on words. Patrick used the shamrock with its three leaves springing from one stem to show that God was Tri-une; that is, a three-personed God with life and love expressed by Father, Son and Spirit bound together. Patrick had a keen appreciation of the importance of symbols to Christian catechesis.
Of course he was not unique in this. For instance, in one of Patrick Kavanagh’s poems, ‘The Great Hunger’, there is a beautifully economic and evocative portrayal of the centrality of the Eucharist in the Christian life where he argues that ‘in a crumb of bread’ we discover the ‘whole mystery’.
It is noteworthy that Kavanagh’s star is rising internationally. In 2010 Russell Crowe quoted his poem ‘Sanctity’ – in which he describes the intense heartbreak of being a lover who has the singular talent of repelling all women and to be a poet without knowing the trade – in his BAFTA acceptance speech. In 2015, Barack Obama quoted ‘let grief be a fallen leaf’ from one of Kavanagh’s most famous poems ‘Raglan Road’ when he delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Joe Biden’s son, Beau. Kavanagh recognised that symbols give us our identity and self-image; they are our way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. Symbols determine the kind of history we tell and retell.
The masterstroke of using the shamrock showed how Patrick appreciated that people’s faith needed to be nurtured on the sensual as well as on the intellectual level. Have we forgotten this tenet of Celtic Christianity? In our haste to rid ourselves of some of the baggage of the pre-Vatican II Church, have we gone too far and too easily got rid of our sense of ritual and too readily dumped our symbols? In our search for relevance and accessibility have we sacrificed our sense of mystery? Is this too high a price to pay? Do we live in an age of imaginative emptiness?
O Lord, it’s Hard to Be Humble
Thanks to writers like Frank McCourt we are all au fait with the literary memoir. Fifteen hundred years before Angela’s Ashes, St Patrick produced an autobiographical work called Confessions. Patrick was the first to admit that it is not a work of great literary merit. ‘Anyone can see from the style of my writing how little training in the use of words I got.’ The book is a happy one, a celebration of a mind and soul journeying to God.
As is the fashion today, Patrick describes himself ‘warts and all’. When he writes, he opens with incredible honesty and humility: ‘I am Patrick, a sinner, the most unlearned of men, the lowliest of all the faithful, utterly worthless in the eyes of many.’
The Ireland of Patrick was a very stratified and paternalistic society. There were a lot of slaves. Patrick, though, acted in a deeply countercultural way by treating slaves as equals. He had no time for people who acted sanctimoniously or who loved pomp; he felt that humility was the bedrock of the Christian Church. Down through the years this kind of humility was often lost as the Christian Churches became shackled with the trappings of institutionalism. In the light of many recent traumas and scandals, the Christian Church needs to rediscover Patrick’s sense of humility.
For this reason, Patrick’s writings ought to be required reading for all those in charge of the Christian Church in Ireland today.
In the Celtic tradition, autumn is the season of the harvest. It often started with great hunger as people relied on berries and fruit until the crops were brought home. Then came the first fruits of the harvest and a time of plenty as the good earth yielded its bountiful treasures in the form of new corn and new potatoes as darkness was overtaking the earth.
The primacy of the harvest was one of the reasons why the Celts had such reverence for the aged: they were an invaluable resource because of their wisdom. Nothing is of more value in the Celtic tradition than wisdom.