Boy Is My FAITH Red

I have an entry written up for Dingle and Doolin, HOWEVER as I am on borrowed internet at the moment I cannot do photos properly, and I think I want to hold off on posting that entry until I can include the appropriate images. It's particularly important for Great Blasket, but nevermind that now. For the moment, just know that Dingle was very cool and Doolin was relatively unremarkable, but I've been meeting lots of interesting people (more on that in the next entry). Instead, I shall now post a bit of an...essay, almost that I wrote up last night after exploring Inisheer a bit. Enjoy!

Tune in tomorrow (or maybe the next day) for ramblings on Dingle, Doolin, and the rest of Inisheer!

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As you may or may not know, I was raised Roman Catholic. My mom and her family is Catholic, but my dad (to my knowledge) is agnostic – he wasn’t raised with any particular beliefs, and as such he stepped aside so that Mom could raise my sister and I in Catholicism. For the majority of my life, it was just a fact of life. I was never unhappy with it, but at the same time I was never particularly inspired by it. I just was. Catholic, that is.

In mid-high school, I was convinced by a classmate to attend The Edge, a local non-denominational youth group (with a slight unofficial Baptist slant). I really enjoyed the experience, and I began to go regularly. For a time, I was a much more religious person than I had been. I started paying attention to the things that were happening during mass; when I prayed, it was more of a conversation than going through the motions; at one point I started to read the Bible. I even “accepted” Jesus, which to my Edge friends was more important than my previous confirmation and whatnot. However, I still always felt like I was missing out on some big secret; almost everyone there had this incredible fervor that I simultaneously admired and feared. I yearned to have that kind of conviction, but at the same time the intensity and lack of control unsettled me greatly.

At some point I began to be more disturbed than impressed by the fervor. At the same time, I was reading things in the Bible that seemed paradoxical, and began hearing things – both at The Edge and in regular mass – that sounded an awful lot like intolerance and denial. I stopped attending The Edge and began to back away from religious life. For a time, one that I’m not at all proud of, I didn’t know what I believed, and I projected that insecurity on everyone else in rather contradictory ways: I thought religious people were sheep for their blind faith, atheists were cocky for thinking they’d figured it out one hundred percent, and agnostics were wishy-washy for not picking a side. It…doesn’t make sense, I know. I think I was a freshman or sophomore in college before I finally accepted that I’d moved on to agnosticism.

I’m sorry, Mom. I really am.

So at this point in my life I am an avowed agnostic – whatever that means. I still won’t say definitively that there’s no unexplained force in this universe, nor can I pretend that I haven’t had feelings of spirituality, but I am far from accepting any organized religion I’ve come across. On Facebook, my religion is a quote from actor Gael Garcia Bernal that I found relevant to my own upbringing and subsequent belief shift: “culturally Catholic, spiritually agnostic”. Hell, whenever someone in a Star Wars movie says “May the Force be with you”, my mind always follows it up with “And also with you.” Obviously that’s not the only way it manifests, but it helps show that I have been thoroughly shaped by that Catholic upbringing. Thus, coming to the currently, historically, and intensely Catholic Republic of Ireland has been interesting for me.

Tonight, after the sun slipped under the horizon, I left my hostel and revisited a small cemetery that I’d seen earlier in the day. In the center of a lot of relatively contemporary headstones lay the ruins of a 10^th century church, entirely recessed below ground level. It was constructed by Caomhán, the patron saint of Inisheer. I returned because, later in the evening, I found out that Caomhán’s grave site was very close to the ruins and was said to have healing properties. I figured I would check it out while there was still a bit of light in the sky. There was nobody around as I approached, and when I arrived the gate to the cemetery was shut for the night. I opened the latch and the gate squeaked open. The tall grass between the headstones rustled in the wind. It all sounds like a stereotypical “creepy” graveyard scene, but I actually found it very moving.

I walked past the church ruins, having explored them thoroughly earlier. Instead I went straight to Caomhán’s grave site. There is a small hut – I hesitate to call it a mausoleum – sticking maybe two feet above the ground and with a small window on the front looking inside. As I got closer, I was surprised to see a set of stone stairs going down into the hut – apparently it was human-height after all, just set into the ground like the church. I followed the steps down and ducked inside. The window was at eye-level now, and in the floor in front of me was a roughly human-sized rectangular hole going even deeper. The light was dim enough that I’m not entirely sure what was in it, but a sign by the ruins implied that the grave itself had been covered by sand. As I stood in that little building, looking down into Caomhán’s grave, I felt a powerful energy that set the hairs on my neck to attention. I wasn’t scared, but I was, again, unsettled. I didn’t spend long in there, but I’m glad I went inside after all – especially at that time of evening.

It’s hard for me to say that things are “holy” or have some power given to them by God. However, a thought that’s occurred to me in the past – one that came back full force tonight – is that by believing something to be sacred, we ourselves imbue it with some kind of power.

When I walk among the ruined cathedrals and even more ancient Celtic archaeological objects, I feel reverence. Reverence for what? I’m not sure. But these places, used for centuries as religious sites, have an atmosphere to them that I don’t feel many other places. Even stepping into a still-used cathedral – or a more humble contemporary church, or a cemetery – I feel like something about it is different. Consecrated ground, they say. Perhaps it is consecrated after all, just not necessarily as clearly and intentionally as the priests would believe, and not by their hand. I get similar feelings with artifacts or stories that I know to be holy to various faiths. To give it a more dorky yet down-to-earth slant, the book American Gods by Neil Gaiman shows us a world in which gods and legendary figures are kept alive and manifested in the real world by the continued faith of their followers. If people stop believing in them, they become mortal and die like anyone else – permanently. Maybe it works somewhat like that. People believe, and the power of their faith transfers into the place in question.

It comes down to how skeptical you are, really. You could claim that an object or place literally retains some kind of energy conferred to it by the will of its faithful followers, if you believe in energies of that sort. You could just as easily claim that it’s a subconscious psychosomatic response, claim that due to your knowledge that a place was believed to have power, your mind tricks you into feeling something powerful. For all I know, these feelings are merely the remnants of my Catholic upbringing telling me I should be respectful in a church. But standing in that mausoleum, I didn’t feel like my mind was playing tricks on me. I didn’t feel that I was in the presence of God, but the sensations I had were indescribably different from walking through town. Make of that what you will.

…I saw a t-shirt once that I really liked. It showed a stylized drawing of Stonehenge with the sun rising behind it, and underneath in a Celtic-inspired font it said “GIVE ME THAT OLD TIME RELIGION!”

Food for thought, maybe.