Where will my countrymen find transcendence now, asks Michael Duggan
In the middle of the last century, whenever they needed to experience the good, the true, the beautiful, most Irish people would have turned to the Catholic Church as the primary and unquestionable source of all three. How times have changed. Marie Collins, the campaigner and sexual abuse survivor, said in the run-up to the recent visit of Pope Francis that the moral authority of the Church in Ireland had been “completely destroyed”. The Catholic case for what is good and true was certainly scorned by vast numbers of the Irish in the recent referendums.
And what of the beautiful? It is not perhaps an association regularly made with Irish Catholicism. For reasons we needn’t go into here, though they are fairly obvious, Ireland did not keep pace with the continental Church in producing religious art and architecture of the highest order. But the Irish always had a reliable well of beauty to draw from nonetheless – the prayers they recited.
A love of recitation was something that seemed to characterise the Irish not so long ago. There was always a chance that you might have been able to stop someone in the street who could recite the words of an embassy or messenger arriving at court in a Shakespearean history play. But there was every chance that whoever you stopped would have been able to declaim these words of royal salutation: “Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy! Hail, our life, our sweetness, and our hope!”
These are the opening words of the translation of the Salve Regina, a prayer that still, just about, echoed around my 1970s childhood in Cork. Prayers such as this were, first and foremost, necessary tools in the ongoing, never-ending work of devotion and salvation. But they were also small, hidden schools of poetry. Here ordinary men and women – people like my father, who, to use a phrase never far from his lips, only met the scholars coming home – might intuitively and instinctively come to know, and feel the magic of, inversions of word order, syntactic repetitions, synonyms and metaphor: “To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve,” the Salve Regina continues. “To thee do we send up our sighs, mournings and weepings in this valley of tears.”
This prayer – and so many others like it, such as that other great Marian petition, the Memorare – allowed the faithful to enter into language at its most heightened and most expressive, to use heavenly words in the midst of their everyday lives.
Despite our reputation for being talkative, there is a strong streak of shyness in the Irish when it comes to articulating deeper or finer, more elusive feelings. The traditional prayers were, in this respect, a godsend. I am reminded of what Roger Scruton once wrote about the language of the King James Bible and the English: how perfectly attuned it was for use by a people who believed that holy thoughts needed “holy words, words somehow removed from the business of the world, like gems lifted from a jewel box and then quickly returned to the dark”.
And what of the poets of Ireland? Did they take note of this poetry that from day to day, and even from hour to hour, went coursing through the lives of so many of their compatriots?
The great Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) certainly did. Kavanagh was frequently unflinching in his depictions of the Irish Catholic peasantry caught under what he called “the sharp knife of Jansen”. But he seemed also to grasp that when “A schoolmaster from Roscommon led / The vigil prayer”, or when “Hail Queen of Heaven” was sung at 12 – when, that is, ordinary Irish Catholics appeared to be simply going through the motions – something quite out of the ordinary might be afoot. In his poem “Lough Derg”, he wrote:
[…] Prayer
And fast that makes the sourest drink rare,
Was that Saint Paul
Riding his ass down a lane in Donegal?
Christ was lately dead,
Men were afraid
With a new fear, the fear
Of love. There was a laugh freed
For ever and for ever. The Apostles’ Creed
Was a fireside poem, the talk of the town
“Something that is Ireland’s secret,” Kavanagh speculated, “leads / These petty mean people.” Through prayer came “The day of a poor soul freed / To a marvellous beauty above its head”. A Castleblaney grocer could go about his humdrum daily life hearing “News from a country beyond the range of birds.”
It will be fascinating over the coming decades (perhaps grimly so, at times) to see where the Irish will go in order to give daily life its measure of beauty. For now, though, for many, it seems that the old wells have been covered over, sealed off, and left to ruin.
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