The Quest for Sanity and Sanctity in Irish Literature

                                   St. Michael Church, Wheaton, IL  

                                     Adult Faith Formation Program

                 The Quest for Sanity and Sanctity in Irish Literature  


     February 21—May 8th, 2012; Tuesday evenings, 7-9 PM in the Faith Center  

                                                       Facilitator: Mike Casey

                                      

(Advance registration required: call or e-mail Matt Pozen, Director of Adult Faith Formation and RCIA, at 630-462-5045; or mpozen@stmichaelcommunity.org)

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

   The Quest for Sanity and Sanctity in Irish Literature is a descriptor for the intersection between religion and literature in Irish writing.  Throughout most of the 20^th century, Catholicism and Irish culture were almost synonymous terms.   Also during that period, prominent Irish authors produced work that has become canonical in modern literature.

   We will organize the course around story, poetry and song.  Our approach to the material will explore the ways in which Irish artists create powerful expressions of rage and rapture.  And we will focus on how the energies of Irish voices frequently serve to frame spiritual questions.  For example, Yeats in his early work gives form to what he called the “cry of the heart against necessity”; Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows Stephen in a terrifying confrontation with the suffering and desolation of souls lost in hell; Heaney in Seeing Things and in his Station Island limns the closeness of family and friends, and we see in that portrayal the call to love others as we do ourselves.  Other writers—contemporaries and descendants—Synge and O’Casey, Trevor and Tóibín, Kinsella, and Boland and Beckett will demonstrate the richness of the repertoire.  Along the way there will of course be song and music, emollients Irish culture regards as essential to preserve sanity and reveal the path to sanctification.

   Readings will be completed in advance of our meetings, and each weekly session will consist of brief background lecture and group discussions.

   Come join us.  There’s more to this crowd of saints and sinners than St. Paddy’s Day.

FACILITATOR:

   Mike Casey has been an active parishioner at St. Michael Church for six years.   Both of his Catholic parents were born in Ireland.  While Mike was born and raised in the U.S., he lived and studied in Ireland for a time as a graduate student and has made additional visits to the ancestral homes in recent years.

   Mike has taught literature courses at the secondary, college and adult education levels for over 40 years. Last year he completed the three-year New Wine lay ministry program, and facilitated Adult Faith Formation courses that explored the spiritual themes in literary material.  In November 2011, Mike and his spouse Anita welcomed their first grandchild, a girl who is the first born of her parents who reside in Moline.  The route to and from the Quad Cities is increasingly well traveled.

Giant's Causeway: Myth versus Science

A highlight of our recent visit to the island of Ireland was the time we spent at Giant's Causeway.  It's a stunning geological site . Located on Ireland's north coast is a large area of rock formations.  Circular, columnar, flat and interlocked stones create pavement paths that project into the Atlantic. 

      Everyone who treks the Causeway asks the causal question: how did this place come to be?  The National Trust publishes a booklet that provides two explanations but one account is indulged and the other is valorized.  "Finn MacCool's Causeway" and "The True Story of the Giant's Causeway" are good examples of what are called "competing narratives."  Where the writers at the National Trust stumble is in their use of the word "true" to tip the scales to the side of science. And just to be sure, before they summarize the story of Finn MacCool, they preface it with the statement: "Before there were scientists, myths and legends helped to explain strange landscape features like the Giant's Causeway." 

 

      Clearly, in their view science has ridden to the rescue of humans locked in the lore of unknowing.  But at the heart of the mythic creation story of Finn and the Giant's Causeway is a model of overcoming fear by the innovative use of trickery and deceit.  The Scottish giant Benandonner whom Finn fears because of his superior size is duped and flees.  MacCool is master of his domain. And what does "the true story" tell us?  A lot of folderol about volcanos, solidified lava, and cooling and cracking rock that took place about 60 million years ago.  Who's silly enough to believe that?

  

Admiring Ancestors and Atavism

          We were a small group of Caseys together in Northern Ireland in Cullyhanna, the cemetery of our paternal ancestors.  Stephen was relating how graves had been dug on a site where a previous family member had been interred.   As a young man he joined in that labor.  Few recognizable remains were unearthed because of decomposition and the passing of time.  When some bones were found they were placed in a bag to keep them separate from the newly deceased.  Stephen recalled having his stomach turn when he found a foot, some teeth and clumps of hair.  On the other hand, the pre-eminent poet of the North discerns the dignity in ancient practice: “Our pioneers keep striking/ Inwards and downwards, / Every layer they strip/ Seems camped on before.” (Seamus Heaney, “Bogside”)

 There’s a lot in Irish culture about death and digging. One of Heaney’s signature poems is “Digging.” He reflects on his father’s and grandfather’s skill with a spade.  “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. / Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”  You can find excavation and exhumation metaphors in the poets of the North and in the playwrights of the Republic. Christy Mahon’s father dies and resurrects more than once in The Playboy of the Western World.  

           And in the grim memorials of the Troubles that stand as headstones and wall murals in and around the Falls (Catholic) and Shankill (Protestant) roads in Belfast, one can hear an unceasing keen for the fallen.

John Montague wrote about the “the old people” who “trespassed on my dreams” in childhood, “[u]ntil once, in a standing circle of stones, / I felt their shadows pass/ Into that dark permanence of ancient forms.”  The circle of stones referred to are “dolmens” which is the famous comparison in the title/first line of his poem, “Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people.”

 

The dolmens are portal tombs, dramatic in appearance. A capstone is supported by columnar pillars.  The burial chamber is within and below.  So also is the storehouse of the past, within our elders and below the surface of our present living.

          It may be that all humans are haunted by the past in one form or another.  For the Irish, the force of the past is often historical or genealogical.  In the North religious rage and political difference fed division.  While overt violence ended with the Good Friday agreement in 1998, memories of mutual atrocities endure.

          The pull of the past and the lure of ancestral lore both partake of atavism. But to state that is not to contemn or condemn.  The word itself is unjustly pejorative (especially in its adjectival form, “atavistic.”)  The core denotation of atavism actually cites genetics rather than the domain of the troglodytic in explaining the recurrence of form in an organism further back than one’s parents.  There is a conviction that sages will instruct and edify us so that we can increase knowledge of self.  To rewrite   Santayana: “Those who do remember and understand the past are privileged to learn from it and use it wisely.”

          Retrieving what is remote from us is not an easy endeavor. You “got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.”   And for Johnny and I that required journeying to the ancestral homeland (again).  But in our dotage, steadied by our female custodial companions, we made our way to the farm our father grew up on over 100 years ago; visited the gravesite of our grandfather, our aunt and uncles; received very helpful information from Crossmaglen native Michael McArdle; and unmatched hospitality from our cousin, Stephen Casey.  My brother, the first son of John Casey and the namesake, recalled how Dad had provided the headstone in the cemetery.  He bantered about having a claim on the space for himself.  At our leaving the deal was sealed.  Johnny left beaming.  That’s an Irishman for you.  Got to scope out the plot before you plop into it.  At least someone else will do the digging.

"When they killed Mick. . . "

            I am first generation Irish. My father was born in Northern Ireland, County Armagh, in Crossmaglen, “where there are more rogues than honest men.”  My mother was born in the South, in the Republic, Gort, County Galway, adjacent to Coole Park, the demesne of Lady Gregory. My parents were emigrants. Growing up, I heard mention of figures such as Yeats and Lady Gregory in a rudimentary literary context.  They were the big house folk who started the Abbey Theater.  A family keepsake that hangs in my home is a picture of a 1904 performance of Lady Gregory's "Spreading the News."  A handbill announcing my grandfather's public auction of meadowland is affixed to the wall of the stage set.  Whether this is hem of the garment stuff or an accidental souvenir I really don't know.  I do know that I have always remembered my father's terse hand-washing explanation of his disenchantment with Irish nationalism: "When they killed Mick Collins, I was done with the lot of 'em."  That statement intrigued me as a boy although I did not understand it. Now that I know something of the history and the principals, I can appreciate the social and political conditions in Irish culture that created the need to both valorize and revile heroes, specifically Michael Collins and Charles Stewart Parnell.

Within a span of forty-five years an emergent Irish nation saw the rise and fall of two compelling public figures, Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891) and Michael Collins (1890-1922).  Parnell's career as parlimentary "obstructionist" leader on issues of land reform and home rule impacted the imagination of James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist and "Ivy Day in the Committee Room."  Yeats also drew upon the promise of the "uncrowned king," most fully in "Parnell's Funeral."  The response to Michael Collins has been different.  Even though the actual accomplishments of Collins as Director of Intelligence during the Anglo-Irish War and Commander-in-Chief of the Free State forces during the Civil War would be seen by many as surpassing Parnell, it is a puzzle that no major Irish writer was sparked to shape a lasting literary response by Collins's career.  Nonetheless Collins's reputation among “common people” is strong, and is sustained in popular fiction, verse, story and song.  The successful feature film, “Michael Collins,” directed by Neil Jordan, is a case in point.

            Why then did Parnell, whose effect on the Irish social order constituted only potential and promise, stir more formal literary response from Ireland's writers than Collins, whose impact is still felt today in the republic birthed by the treaty he shaped and signed?

            The literary and popular responses to Parnell and Collins may serve as benchmark representations of the Irish hero.  Why do we idolize and why do we revile?  Do public figures become iconic through the influence of literary response?  Are literary responses themselves determined by political allegiance?  These general questions are germane to most literary inquiry.  But they seem to have a particular cogency in Modern Irish Literature.