My ancestors sought the sea as others once sought the desert - that lonely expanse, that drifting horizon, that long voyage to the holy.
I woke up this morning thinking about my ancestors, the Christians who lived in Ireland for hundreds of years before making their way across the ocean to escape famine and disease. They washed up onto these American shores, stumbled their way into the Appalachian Mountains and set to work as coal miners and steelworkers. That is where my father was born and raised, dirt poor, and where much of my family still lives. Every time I travel home to see my parents, I cross those mountains, through the forests and dark valleys and tunnels carved into the rock. The mud and dust of those hills are in my blood, even as the green, soft turf and peat fires of Ireland are in my bones.
Yet there is also deep ambivalence there. The history of coal mining in central Pennsylvania haunts our modern conversations about clean energy and alternative fuels. I see billboards advertising "clean coal" and wince at the lie. And in the same way, I think of the lost history of my pre-Christian ancestors, the stories I will never hear, the art and music I will never know, because of the Christian imperative to evangelize and spread their religion to the ends of the earth.
How are these connected: the abuse of the land, the dangerous work and struggle for livelihood, the dreams and desires of civilization, the silence of the dead, the loneliness of the voyage west across an ocean, unimaginable void dark and churning, dividing the past from the present?
St. Patrick's Day is almost here. Regardless of what others say, I honor the day as a day of sacred ambivalence and the lessons of acceptance and forgiveness. Patrick in the field kneeling on the soft, green turf to pray; Patrick slipping away across the sea to find freedom; Patrick returning to the island where he had been a slave.
If we can't learn these lessons of our ancestors, how can we hope to listen for the stories so much more lost to us than these?
) The search and process of true-self authenticity, as he claims is the purpose of any religion, is located in the ever-present moment of wholeness and interconnection, and is in this way spatial, in Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism; whereas Western religious traditions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, conceive of the authentic self as a work-in-process, a being-becoming, so that at any given moment we are only a fragment of our whole selves along a linear journey towards an ultimate end. What we need, he says then, is a balance between the two, and more specifically to restore the balance in a Western society too overly focused on the temporal and linear, which has sacrificed the sacredness of the here-now immediate moment for the sake of some indefinite, idealized future.
Before braving this post, I wrote a ridiculously long and dull account of the Sequence of Events™ for my personal journal, to help organize my thoughts and give me some sense of having already begun (a blank page at this point being the most intimidating thing). But it occurs to me that, in my account of the weekend, I left out one telling detail about my visit with my brother for the two days before.
Christmas is coming. Amidst the noise in my brain this afternoon, that song wends its way through. "Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat...." It's strange, but Christmas is one of those holidays that make me feel the most Pagan. Maybe it's all the greenery brought in from outside, the whole-hearted unabashed singing and celebrating and decorating, especially with the simple old-fashioned trimmings of ribbon and candles and holly and bits of shining tinsel. During the Christmas season, my parents' house itself becomes a kind of walk-in shrine to Yuletide Cheer, and I've inherited my fair share of holiday decorations that find themselves strewn about my apartment each year, a simple nativity scene still taking a privileged place atop the armoire in the living room. The green and red and ribbon and fire and shiny things, all this raging against the dying of the light, is all very Christmas-y to me, though. Alban Arthan, the solstice, remains distinctly quiet, reflective and dark, the new-born sun like a small, cold seed of potential light still to be planted, hidden away, unripe and unready. Yet it seems more obvious than ever that both of these are necessary, both moods relevant and revelatory each in their own ways.
I cannot imagine a more perfectly beautiful day than today. As I walked to the local park, my calves tensed and flexed, my toes struggling to relearn how to grip in loose leather sandals, and the breeze sometimes raised ripples of goosebumps across my bare arms, only to drop suddenly and leave my shoulders and neck bare to hot cascading sunlight. I wasn't exactly comfortable, but I was walking and involved in the work of walking. And this was good.