StormThoughts

So our country is in a mess, because bankers got greedy, aided and abetted by incompetent politicians. Building speculators created land values that were simply obscene, and we the tax payers will foot the bill. In the words of comrade Lenin, “we need a few [show] trials” but will we get even one person in front of a judge? It remains to be seen.

The McDermott’s are surviving the worst that fate can throw at them!!! Joe is retired now for 3 years and developing other ideas. Included is some part time work for The Retirement Planning Council of Ireland. His other activities include preparing digital heritage guides, “apps” for smart phones, a departure from writing guide books, yet he continues to prepare a new guide, one that will describe an ancient Celtic route from the high king’s seat in mid Connacht to Croagh Patrick. Hiking n biking are still his favourite activities. And he looks forward to each year’s Sierra trip. An old Sierra colleague, Paddy Colgan passed away this year, Pauline and Joe had visited him just last year, at La Honda CA.

Pauline has just retired and is taking a break. She will be missed as an innovator in Mayo Community Education circles. Now for that fiddle and accordion!!! Thanks to our new cycle track, The Great Western Greenway, she too is back on the bike. Lots of reading, philosophy and new thinking are on her present menu. She recently gave the Sunday address to our Unitarian Church; in fact the McDermott’s conducted the entire service, except for the choir.

Alastair continues to work alone, as with all businesses times are tough, but if he makes it through this recession, well who knows how successful things will be. Rugby and cycling are high on his agenda, still playing social rugby, giving and taking hits!!!

Sinead just finished her Master’s Degree in Community Education. However for some time she has been planning to pursue her interests in complementary healing, counselling and all that goes with that life style. By all accounts she is gifted, and is developing a client base that includes many professionals, medical and otherwise. Spiritwise is the name of her project.

The last year has seen us develop the house; making many changes to layout etc. this is nearly at an end now. Pauline and Joe visited Crete this past summer, with Pauline’s Greek and Roman studies all those years ago at University; it was so much more interesting. Finally we went to Massachusetts in The Fall. This was a great trip, visiting Boston and the early Unitarian Churches there, talking about people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Alcott’s, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. Walking around Walden Pond, reflecting on the ideas of Thoreau was a truly good experience. We were stood on the Bridge at Concorde and Lexington Common too, where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired.

So despite our countries plight at the hands of our incompetents, we had a good 2010. We wish next year to be as good for us and for all our friends and acquaintances.

Slan is Beannacht [good health and blessings be upon you]

I listened to one of our congregation give a Sunday address on the subject of pilgrimage a few weeks ago. In it she referred to members of the congregation who had recently “bucked the trend” and embarked on personal pilgrimages, I was one of those people, together with Sinead and Pauline. We made a journey to Boston, Concord, Walden Pond and other places in New England closely associated with Unitarian thinkers and activists.

Pilgrimage is not usually a term one might associate with Unitarians. One hardly thinks of us outside of the realms of reason and logic. Yet Michael Servitus may have been on a form of pilgrimage in search of personal freedom as he walked from Spain into France and onward.

For me this is a word resonant with life, with meaning, with purpose, with freedom. I am constantly in a state of pilgrimage. A dictionary would refer to pilgrimage as “a long journey or search of great moral significance.” I want to explain explore what those few words mean to me.

I have written and spoken before of the experience of walking the Croagh Patrick Heritage Trail and how it resonated with me as I explored that sacred landscape.

However it is important for me to make clear that that trail is only one of many that animate me with the possibility of the spiritual. I am constantly returning to places, more often long trails where in the words of TS Eliot:

“We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.”

I believe that herein lies the secret of a spiritual life or as near as one can get to that ideal. Exploring the lonely roads of Mayo as Raiftery an file did in the 18th century, I wander along lost in personal reverie. This is but a metaphor for a personal search for meaning.

Recently I walked from Bellacorick [there was a peat burning power station there from 1956 till a year or so ago] to Ballycastle on the North Mayo coast, to Buntrahir bay where the ancient peoples who lived at Ceide Fields may well have come ashore, after their long journey from what we now call Brittany in Northern France.
This was a hike through Ireland’s “Big sky Country” over 26 kilometres of lonely forestry tracks and over open bogland, by Sheskin Lodge where once the Jameson Whiskey family held summer parties for huntsmen and family friends. Today it sprawls in semi ruin, like Shelly’s Ozymandias, and I am “the Traveler from an antique land” who relates it’s tale to himself.

There is reason there is no reason, like a demented Beckett character I mull over many rational and irrational ideas as I traipse along free from all human connection, from responsibility, from all responsibility, from reason, from freedom, from tolerance. From a time I am at one with myself, with nature, with the immediacy of my small universe, I am Unitarian manifested. Do I arrive at any great resolution? No! but the process is all. For me it is my Unitarianism.

This is the closest I will ever get to epiphany, to considering, to accepting that there may be something beyond good and evil, beyond this existence. My agnosticism wavers for a moment and I experience the delight of the instant, the possibility of god….. The possibility that I……….. or more correctly that we …….. are god.

This occurs, where I can walk unhindered, my thoughts unfettered, free to go where they will. This is my pilgrimage.

I was in Crete when Paddy finally succumbed to his illness. I have known this man for almost twenty years now. We had great times together, as we hiked the hills and trails of Ireland. Paddy hailed from Birr in Offaly but spent most of his life in California and as an activist in the Sierra Club, somehow when we last rambled together around his home near La Honda, last year,I felt that it might be the last time. So it was, jovial, witty, carefree with his time and company, he was a giant among men, ni bheig a leithid ann arais.
Though Paddy was not what you would call religious, he was a deep feeling person, his humour…. crude at times hid that sensitivity.
Perhaps he would enjoy the irony of my choice of poem for his valedictory, I choose Gerald Manly Hopkin’s poem Felix Randal: Just see Patrick Colgan for Felix and I think you will understand, this is from all of us in Ireland who loved this man.

FELIX Randal the farrier, O he is dead then? my duty all ended,
Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome
Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it and some
Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?

How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

On June 16th 2009 at the James Joyce Centre North Great Georges street Leopold Bloom considers the humble potato.

As I stood there at the old thorn tree I reconfirmed to myself the spiritual value of the open mountain, the running stream, the heather clad hillside.

I thought about all those  with whom  I had hiked,  down the years,  in rain and wind, snow and sun. This is a sacred trust.

So let us continue.

What brought you to Unitarianism?

I think I always was a Unitarian.  My parents were traditional Catholics who espoused education, wherever it would lead.  There was always lively debate in our house, I was the oldest and I suppose I led the way in radical thought.  I then drifted along for years living I by my own ‘light’ Then, many years ago I met some American Unitarians and they identified me as Unitarian. I eventually set out to find Irish Unitarians and here I am. Other people such as my Northern Presbyterian friends, [from adult local history courses I taught in Derry], they were an influence as well.

What was your first impression of the Dublin Unitarian Church?

I felt I belonged here.

What is your idea of the perfect sermon or address?

One that holds my attention whatever the topic. Remember I came from a tradition that did not espouse preaching as the centrepiece of the service.

Do you have a word for what is ultimate?

Read the rest of this entry »

Many years ago I was hiking with some American friends from the Sierra Club, we were discussing Ireland in the context of it’s religious dispositions. After a while I stopped talking about the Irish and their religious perspectives and asked what of my American friends. We went around the group and various people explained their views, their religious positions, it was enlightening, open, not the fundamentalism I had gleaned from American TV. The last person to speak and I suspect that he deliberately waited till the end, simply said, “Oh me, I subscribe to the same view as you,” this left me wondering what did I subscribe to?

Later on I got the chance to ask him, in a round about way, what did he think I subscribed to. His answer was simple; “you are a Unitarian, everything you say, in debate or discussion leads me to believe that.”

So off I went to find out what was a Unitarian, seeing that I was viewed as one. The undertaking led me to eventually join the Dublin Unitarian church, [web site http://www.unitarianchurchdublin.org/  ] and to a philosophical position that has left me immensely content.

One of the first things you learn as a Unitarian is that truth is not set in stone, that it can evolve, that there is no one universal theology, that there is no one true church. You learn three valuable rules to live by:

Freedom
Reason
Tolerance

There is a fourth that we do not speak of

No two Unitarians agree for longer than it takes to have a debate.

More on this anon

I am currently engaged with a project to create a 35 mile hiking trail in county Mayo. It will start in Balla a small town in mid Mayo and finish at Murrisk at the foot of the Reek, or Croagh Patrick, as the holy mountain is known outside of Mayo. It will be called the Croagh Patrick Heritage Trail.

Some months ago, in late March 2008, during that lovely period of cold clear sunny weather, I walked the last section of the trail. Across the face of Croagh Patrick from Boheh of the Rolling Sun toward Murrisk I trekked.

A lot of thoughts jumbled through my mind as I hiked along…… ideas about sacred place and the naming of place, ideas about the time of year that I was journeying here.

For instance Croagh Patrick has a much older history than the Christian one more recently ascribed to it. Formerly it was Cruachain Aigle – Eagle Mountain – most likely a Druidic ritual centre. Indeed there are some who believe that there was once an older pre Christian pilgrim path that reached from Rath Cruachain, near Tulsk in County Roscommon, home to Queen Medbh, [she of the Tain Bo Cuailgne] all the way to Cruachain Aigle. All around me as I walked were the archaeological remains of Bronze Age, Stone Age and Early Christian times. I experienced a deep sense of age old calmness, a serenity that recharged my spirit.

Along the way I met a hill farmer, and we talked of the impending lambing season. This led me to reflect on February – what an interesting month. Beginning with La Feile Bride, or St. Brigid, that most pagan of Celtic Priestesses, [now beatified by Christian tradition] linked to this feast is the festival of Imboilc – a term which refers to the lactation of ewes – the flowing of milk – the return of life giving spring.

Incidentally Februum was also a Roman festival/ritual meaning purification. Last Samhain I related how the Celts used Fire for purification at Samhain, here again the idea recurs. The Christian churches have designated February 2nd as Candlemass day, the day when all candles to be used in liturgical celebrations, during the coming year would be blessed. Again and older tradition overlaid with a newer dispensation.

As I meandered along I mulled over these ideas, the interconnectedness of all things, unfortunately I did not have anybody to share these thoughts with – till now.