Midlife Irish

by Frank Gannon

  At any rate, crowds started to gather. Many more people saw the statue move. Some said that Jesus himself had appeared next to it. Some said that they saw the recently canonized Padre Pio, the Italian mystic who experienced stigmata, standing right next to Mary. He was moving around too. Wise guys speculated about the possibility of dancing. Does God like disco?

  All of this filtered through the collective Irish mind and produced a lot of jokes. Some were funny. Some were sacrilegious. Some were funny and sacrilegious. The whole thing kept picking up momentum. All around Ireland a lot of statues of Mary in countless roadside grottoes started walking and talking and doing other things. There were stories in the paper of fervent atheists who saw what was happening and changed their minds in a hurry. A statue of Mary walking around and talking to you can do that to you.

  The sleepy little village of Ballinspittle was on the map big-time. They ran charter buses to it. Tourist dollars were made by the grateful Irish merchants of the area.

  But the summer passed, the tourists went home, and the statues stopped moving. Whatever you make of all this, Mary had grown even closer to the Irish heart, while doing her part for the vital Irish tourism industry.

  My uncle John told a story many times in my presence. He performed it more than he told it. His voice would get very intense but quiet. The people around him would lean in to hear him, and he would tell his magical story of the wonders of Ireland:

  “Way out in the West of Ireland, out in Mayo, there’s this little winding country road. Just a dirt road really. You can hardly get a car down it; you may as well walk. You follow this road deep into the woods until you get to this amazing thing. It’s a homemade shrine. There are rows and rows of rocks carefully placed. They’re made into steps, and at the top of the steps there’s a beautiful statue of Mary. It’s all breathtaking and lovely but there’s something really amazing about it. It’s something no one has ever been able to explain. Scientists have been there, but everyone is utterly puzzled. The mystery is in that statue. Because no matter how long you sit there and stare at it—if you sit for days—no matter how many hours you stare at it, it never, ever moves.”

  I heard a strange expression in Ireland: “thin place.” I asked an old man to explain it to me. He looked at me as if it were a hard thing to explain, but he would try.

  There’s this world and the next world. Some people call the next world Heaven or Hell, but no one who is in this world has ever been there, so no one can say what it’s like there. It’s just the next world. The door is shut and you can’t see what’s behind the door. Ireland is filled with very religious people, but no one knows exactly what “the next world” is like; they just know that it is there. That’s the faith.

  But there are certain places on earth that are closer to the next world. There aren’t many places like that. But in these places, you are much closer to the next world than you normally are. You are so close to the next world that you can feel it: You can sense it. You can’t quite see it, but it’s very, very close. You close your eyes and you’re almost there. A “thin place” is a place that is very, very close to the next world. Ireland is filled with little spots they call “thin places.”

  He mentioned some places in Ireland, but for me (and I think a lot of other visiting Americans), Ireland itself is one large, extremely thin place.

  I’m not a very spiritual person. My mom was an extremely spiritual person, but I just didn’t get that gene. I like to think of myself as a rational being. I am not a fan of The X Files. Watching the Ghostbusters movies with my son when he was little is as close as I’ve gotten to anything “paranormal.” Nothing that I couldn’t explain physically has ever happened to me. I’ve never believed anybody who told me about UFOs or channeling or past lives. I don’t even believe Shirley MacLaine exists.

  But I know what that old man was talking about. Ireland. The thin place. That’s a big part of why people are drawn to it even though the food stinks, it rains all the time, there aren’t any beaches, and driving around can be “Death Ride 2000.”

  They go because it’s the thin place.

  In Ireland there are “official” thin places all over the countryside. If you walk down a path in the West of Ireland, chances are you’ll run into a genuine thin place.

  Late in July every year thousands of people climb up Patrick’s Mountain in County Mayo. The climbing day is called “Reek Sunday.” Some years over thirty thousand people make the climb. We didn’t have that many when Paulette and I gave it a shot.

  Patrick’s Mountain is no Mount Everest. The Irish “mountain” is only about twenty-five hundred feet high. Still, it is, as they say, a good stretch of the leg. Thousands make the climb every year because, it is said, at the top of Croagh Patrick there is a bona fide thin place.

  The climb begins at dawn, and people start arriving well before sunrise. The round trip up and back takes about four hours. But people are always eager to make the journey. There’s a chapel at the top of Croagh Patrick. It’s a certified thin place, and a lot of people see the whole arduous journey as a spiritual as well as physical experience.

  Paulette and I took the trip to the thin place. It wasn’t easy. There were lots of falls, and I ripped a kneehole in my pants. It took almost three hours to get up there, but the place was, as advertised, a genuine thin place. How do I know that? You try it and then tell me. There is a little chapel at the top, but even if there was nothing up there but rock, I believe I still would have had the thin place experience.

  But that wasn’t the only thin place we encountered.

  All the time we were in Ireland, we felt the same thing. I couldn’t define it, but it was there. And, as soon as I got back to America, it vanished. When I returned to America and got off the plane at LaGuardia, as I walked to the luggage pickup I saw a little lady who seemed to be in her seventies. She walked up to a large man. He was wearing clothes that identified him as an airport employee.

  “Excuse me,” the old lady said, “I need to talk to somebody who can help me.”

  The guy walked away. “Find one,” he called back to the lady.

  At that moment I knew I was back. Back to the thick world.

  The “otherworldliness” of Ireland also makes death seem much closer. I am in my forties. I like to think I have a lot of life coming to me, but in Ireland I was acutely aware how brief life is, how tentative our hold on this world is. I remember Yeats talking to an old Irish woman. I remember what she said.

  “In this life all you have is a mouthful of air.”

  I never felt that way in America. In America death, like almost everything else, is easy to ignore. In America death is like a flute player in the last row of the orchestra. You can just barely hear him back there. In Ireland, however, death always seemed to be sitting next to me with a program in his hand. In the “thin country” death lives across the field from you in his little white house.

  The Irish personification of death takes many forms: A banshee is a woman who comes wailing from the sky to take your soul away because you are about to die. When you are dead you will be placed in an open coffin while the people who knew you when you were alive stand around drinking and talking, and half of their conversation is directed toward you. The Irish people that stayed in Ireland throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have not only accepted death; they’ve gotten used to him. He’s the bad guest who will never leave. We know he’s here but we’ll ignore him. We’ll talk around him, but we can’t quite forget that he’s here.

  He was here a long time before Saint Patrick. In the evening the wind would rise and the door would be barred and he would sit there next to the fire. When you walk at night in Ireland he’s all over the place. In Ireland they have what they call celi. These are places for neighbors to gather. They go there and talk about what has happened, but it doesn’t sound like something that really happened in the real world, but it did happen. The telling of it makes it sound like a fairy story, which it is, bu
t it’s also the way things are in Ireland, the place where things are different. Is it more real or less real? I can’t say. I can only say that Ireland is in the thin place.

  Ireland has always been a country characterized by deeply held beliefs. Over 90 percent of the people are Catholic, but the Irish people believe in many things that are not outlined in the Baltimore Catechism.

  An Irish poet once told a story of walking around in the West of Ireland talking to the peasants. One particular conversation was with an old peasant woman. This was in the 1920s, but I think you could have the same conversation today, if you tried hard enough. It went something like this:

  Irish poet: Do you believe in heaven and hell?

  Peasant woman: No, of course not. Heaven and hell are just something the priests made up to scare you.

  Irish poet: Do you believe in God?

  Peasant woman: The big man in the sky? No. That’s something for children.

  Irish poet: What do you think happens to you after you die?

  Peasant woman: You go into the ground, you rot, and that’s it.

  Irish poet: Do you believe in the fairies?

  Peasant woman: Of course.

  While we were in Mayo, I felt that it was a good idea to discuss something very close to the Irish heart: fairies. We were seated around a large table at a pub called the Weir House. Several glasses had been emptied. It was a large happy table. Tongues were loosened, and the fairies crept into the conversation.

  The fairies turned out to be a very good subject for round table discussion. Almost everyone had something to say about the fairies. In some areas, it was well agreed that fairies, whatever else they do, generally do five or six things.

  One of the characteristic fairy activities involves marriage. If you married a beautiful woman, it seemed, the fairies came and took her away on your wedding night. This was a pretty well-established practice. So, it seemed, all of the married women in Ireland who were, after all, still around, not stolen away on their wedding night, just didn’t make the fairy-take cut. There was a lot of discussion. Perhaps, a very judicious man named David offered, the fairies’ standards of beauty are much different than the humans’. Therefore, a very beautiful woman, by all human standards, might nevertheless be left behind. David is a counselor.

  “Obviously,” he said looking around the room, “that’s what has happened here.” He smiled and took a well-earned sip of Guinness.

  David, I thought, is a very wise Irishman.

  I had never heard the term “fairy fort” until I was in Ireland. People around the table were using it as if “fairy fort” were a day-to-day word. I had to plead ignorance, and I was told that a fairy fort is a raised circular mound of earth surrounded by bushes.

  “Does nature naturally form them?” I asked.

  “Fairies naturally form them,” I was told, as if I were the slow student in Fairies 101.

  There is a lot of action in fairy forts. If you’re standing outside near a fairy fort, you can hear the fairies busily going about their business. No human has ever been inside one of these things, but everyone at the table except Paulette and me had stood outside listening. Fairies are really noisy. If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you, generally speaking. I had adopted the “suspension of incredulity” look by now, and no one stopped talking to look at me anymore. The collective discourse on fairies continued.

  These fairy forts are taken seriously by the government, which has given them protective status. A house builder named Tommy had actually been forced to move a planned house because it “compromised” a fairy fort location. These things were taken seriously. Paulette and I also took them seriously for the rest of the evening, which was several hours.

  The next day we were taken to an actual fairy fort. I didn’t see any fairies. This was a fairy fort that was newly constructed. I looked around for tiny lunch pails. No luck. Back home in New Jersey the first question would be: Do fairies belong to a union? Then they would see if the fairy fort were up to code.

  There was a house twenty feet away. It wouldn’t bother the fairies over there. You don’t want to bother them. They are touchy and vindictive. But that’s just their nature.

  It might seem odd, at first glance, that the most Catholic country in the world persists in these odd old beliefs, but after I thought about it for a while, it all seemed to make perfect sense.

  I have spent a lot of time in big Catholic suburban churches in America, and I never got any kind of sense of collective belief or any kind of spiritual sense at all from the people standing around me. I felt that the center of the service, the part that everyone was focused on, was almost always the collection. And the second collection. And the brief third collection right near the end.

  I used to joke with my sister that her big Catholic, suburban New Jersey church with “interesting” architecture should be called “Our Lady of the Property Values.” If it didn’t have a sign outside, you would never think it was a church. It looked like a planetarium.

  I couldn’t imagine getting on my knees and praying in that church. It would be like kneeling in the frozen food section of Kroger. But in Ireland, in every little town we went to, we would walk around, check out the standard pub/B&B/chemist/produce line of freshly painted store fronts, and then we would walk over to the church. It was always open. We would go inside and kneel. It seemed the natural thing to do.

  In Ireland, more than anyplace else I’ve ever been, the people have not lost their souls. This has to do with a lot of factors, a lot of history. But I think a lot of it has to do with just the place itself, the natural state of Ireland.

  In Ireland, I was reminded of something I read in an American history course in college: Seealth, chief of the Squamish, talking about nature. The natural world is sacred.

  You have to fall in love with Eriu, “the most beautiful woman in the world,” and she’s right outside the door. The spiritual world is the real world. And the real world is the home of the fairies.

  I learned a lot about fairies that night in the Weir House. The fairies are very fond of mushrooms. They use the mushrooms mostly, it seems, as furniture. Fairies are all very different, but the one thing they do not like, the one thing they really frown on, is someone who doesn’t believe in them. That guy, the nonbeliever, is in for serious trouble, a hard road, a tough lot. Pity him, because he’ll suffer, that one.

  A very pervasive fairy activity is stealing babies. A fairy will come into the nursery at night and steal the baby. This fairy story stands in for the truth—the high infant mortality rate in rural Ireland. Fairies, it seems, are more apt to steal male babies. That’s why very young Irish males wear dresses. So fairies can’t tell they are boys.

  There are fairy stories in virtually every country in Europe, but the Irish fairies seem unique in that they have quite individual traits and personalities. Alfred Nutt, who wrote widely on the subject, believed that each locality in Ireland had certain very specific rituals associated with farming and agriculture. So it seemed natural to give the fairies associated with one area distinctive traits.

  The two types of fairies that seem to be distributed all over Ireland were the banshees and, of course, the leprechauns.

  The banshees have escaped America’s schlock machine, but the poor leprechaun has been captured by America and forced to appear on cereal boxes and in those horrible movies, which are so bad that they keep making sequels. My son has Leprechaun in the Hood on DVD. That fills my heart with joy.

  “Leprechaun” comes from the word “Lu-chorpan,” or “Wee Bodies.” The leprechauns in ancient stories are shoemakers. If you capture them, they will tell you where their crock of gold is hidden, but leprechauns are pathological liars, and they are very deceptive. As a result, no one ever finds the gold.

  The banshees don’t have a trade or a home. Their only function seems to be to appear when someone is about to die. Banshees are selective, however. They only show up when a person with a Gaelic name is
about to die.

  I did not get out of Ireland without an encounter with the fairies.

  One night as I walked back to my bed and breakfast near Spanish Point, I got close to the fairies. It was a cold night, and the sea air was gusting. I had to walk through some trees because they were working on the road and you had to take a little detour. So, not thinking of what might await me, I walked into the dark Irish woods. I am a boy from Camden, New Jersey, and I am not at home in the woods, even for just a couple of minutes, but it wasn’t very far. (For the record, I had consumed two [2] pints that evening, far below the level where I begin hallucinating.)

  I stepped carefully. This was thick wood, and I could only see a few feet right ahead of me. There was a little meandering path that seemed to go where I wanted to go. It was very quiet in the woods. But not completely quiet. You could hear something. The light from the moon shone through the branches and you could see the individual leaves as they caught the light. They seemed very, uh…vivid. Somewhere inside me a little voice said, “This is getting a little weird. And you’re not reading a Stephen King novel.”

  I made my way through the woods. It was only a couple of hundred yards, but I am very bad on directions, and I started to doubt myself. Was I still going the right way? The voice in my head got harsh. I could see myself getting lost in the damn Irish woods. Two hundred yards and the American idiot gets lost. I could hear my mother’s voice: “God save us, he’d lose his head if it wasn’t screwed on.”

  I used the moon as a direction finder, but it still seemed like a long two (or was it three?) hundred yards. It seemed like a mile and a half, maybe. I tried not to feel that I was getting lost, but it was getting difficult to avoid that thought.

  I began to sense that I was not alone. There was someone near. I could sense it. It was like when you know there’s someone at the door before he knocks. So you open the door and there he is with his fist raised to rap on the door. That happens all the time. Now it was happening in Ireland, but there was no door. Just stupid Irish trees.