“I don’t rejoice in our current scary predicament. Yet I think it not unfair to conclude that there was a spiritual poverty about aspects of our Celtic Tiger experience. The belief took hold that only in the frenetic acquisition of material things lay beauty, happiness, inspiration and joy” Second Reading Fr Kevin Hegarty 
ost visitors to Westport fall in love with it. The English novelist, William Thackeray, visited the town in 1842 and wrote of it in his ‘Irish Sketchbook’. “Nature,” he said, “has done much for the pretty town of Westport and, after nature, the traveller ought to be grateful to Lord Sligo, who has done a great deal too. In the first place he has established one of the prettiest comfortablest inns, in Ireland. Secondly, Lord Sligo has given up, for the use of the townspeople, a beautiful little pleasure-ground about his house.”
The Sligo family also gave the site for Holy Trinity Church, consecrated in 1872. According to the architectural historian, Jeremy Williams, it is ‘the finest’ of TN Deane’s churches. Deane was a leading architect in the 19th century, responsible for several major commissions, most notably the building that houses NUI, Cork. In my opinion it is one of the most elegant churches in Connacht, discreetly decorated by a continuous series of gentle mosaics. I like it a lot.
So I counted it a privilege when the rector of the church, Canon Gary Hastings, invited me to speak at the harvest festival there last Friday evening. They do things well in Westport. The civic pride that animates the town was evident in the official attendance of the Cathaoirleach of the Town Council, Martin Keane. The cordial relationship that exists in the town between the Church of Ireland and Catholic communities showed itself in the presence of Fr Francis Mitchell of St Mary’s presbytery and many members of his congregation.
The centre-piece of the gospel for the celebration was the parable of the rich man who decided to build bigger barns to store his produce. ‘Eat, drink and be merry’ was the motto that directed his life. God, however, put a stop to his gallop.
When I read the parable in preparation for my few words I immediately thought of a story told to me by Fr Declan Caufield, who died two years ago.
Declan was a well-travelled man. Yet his home village of Belderrig remained the focus of his life. He enjoyed the sophistication of Rome, where he studied for six years, but also found it wanting. He believed that truth in its rawest and purest form was found in places on the edge, like Belderrig. Places on the edge were the centres of his inspiration.
It was not surprising that when he decided to take a sabbatical some years ago he went, not to some earnest theological college, but to a small village in Alaska, where he spent a year.
He revelled in his experience there. He learned much wisdom from the simplicity of the people’s lives. He influenced them too. He sang and danced with them and told them glorious tales of Celtic Ireland. They heard too of the house of pain in which Mayo Gaelic football has lodged for almost 60 years. I wonder what they made of that. There is a wonderful photograph of him, arrayed like an old Gaelic Taoiseach, surrounded by Eskimo children, dressed in the green and red jerseys of Mayo, in the startingly white snow.
The story he told me was about a fisherman whom he had got to know well. Halfway through the fishing season the man put away his rod and line. Declan asked him why. “I have no need to fish any more this year,” came the reply. “I have enough to provide for my family for a year.”
It is a thought-provoking story of economic, social and environmental sustainability that, for me, connected with the spirit of the gospel read last Friday. The parable was well chosen for the times that are in it. The Celtic Tiger is now in intensive care.
I don’t rejoice in our current scary predicament. Yet I think it not unfair to conclude that there was a spiritual poverty about aspects of our Celtic Tiger experience. The belief took hold that only in the frenetic acquisition of material things lay beauty, happiness, inspiration and joy.
I went on last Friday to reflect on how our common Christian heritage might guide us on how to live meaningfully. I believe that there is a wisdom at the heart of Celtic Christianity that can speak to us today.
In her poem, ‘To Colmcille Returning’, Moya Cannon claims that the vision of that great Celtic saint is needed in Ireland. We require him, she says, to travel in spirit throughout the country, ‘into the small rainy towns with their supermarkets, their video stores and graveyards, into all the farms with their sprayed barns and Land Rovers, their certainties and their hurt’.
The Celts lived on the edge of Europe, in places of awesome beauty. Nature provided their cathedrals. The best entry into their mindset comes in their prayers and reflections that reach a poetic depth. This world can be contacted in ‘Ár bPaidreacha Dúchais’ by Diarmuid Ó Laoghaire and Alexander Carmichael’s ‘Carmine Gadelica’.
What comes across in these works is that the Celts had a majestic sense, undiluted by tedious pious abstractions, of the presence of the divine in nature and our human relationships. Sensitivity to the vulnerable and care for the earth came naturally to them.
After the service there was tea, rich cake and delicate sandwiches for everyone in the hall across from the church. I already had tea with Gary and Caithríona in their home, so was unable to partake of the goodies. I reflected ruefully the following evening on the home-made chocolate cake I refused when I decided to have coffee and a snack. When I looked in the press all I could find were some dubious-looking jaffa cakes, whose sell-by dates were mildly disconcerting.
