St. Brendan’s Launch was a great event we hosted every Sunday afternoon for 5 years in the Titanic Lounge of Kieran’s Irish pub in downtown Minneapolis.
People loved the ‘titanic Belfast family’ presence, and our performance with the God given talents of music, dance and story telling.
Mike ‘the Bike’ McCabe, featured in the last blogs, brought his ancestral Irish wit to bear each week, and together we wrote a play called, “Would the REAL St. Patrick Please Stand Up”
It was a fine attempt to strip back the “Green beer and bagels on 17th March.” Americanized version of what it means to be Irish to get to the true heart of this people group…… and featured the transformation of “Paddy” from the drunken brawler to the true saint.
In our recent foray with our local City officials, the main City actors have been proud of their “Irish origins” This has lead me to ponder the question, “So what does it mean to be truly Irish?”
Our son Robin’s genetic analysis confirmed that our forefathers came from a small circumscribed territory on the Scottish and Ulster sides of the Irish Sea, but having committed deeply and lived intimately with the more southern Irish tribe of McAree’s and Murphy’s and Boyles and so forth for many years in Community of the King and beyond, I have realized that we ‘Celts’ share many good traits that were highlighted in our race by the Creator!
I would suggest three of these are, honoring the Creator, neighborliness and hospitality.
To be truly Irish means to honor the Creator.
This carries with it the most fundamental instinct that the bible describes as the Law of Creator’s Rights, asserting how we are not our own property, but we belong to our Creator, and are responsible to Him.
We have been hoodwinked, as my song (copied again below) says, by “The famed and the fortuned” dictating the song….and “our fallen desires” playing us along.
Secular humanism which sees man as “the measure of all things”, arrogantly writes God out of the story with what C.S. Lewis described as “chronological snobbery”.
No one likes to hear they can’t do just what they (think) they want! So “our fallen desires” have us buy into this lawless, God denying narrative not realizing we have just shot ourselves in the foot.
Today’s ‘modern’ secular Irish society is a very recent ‘aberration’ of what is truly Irish. My scholarly Irish speaking friends would affirm that a belief in God is woven through the most fundamental cement of any culture which is the original (Gaelic) language.
Thankfully if you go to the largest annual Irish gathering (no it’s not a pop concert in Dublin, it is the agricultural show in rural Ireland) you will find amongst the people of ‘the land’ that grounded faith is as vital as ever!
Sadly at the local City level here we’ve seen little evidence of this honoring of the Creator or what the bible calls ‘the fear of the Lord’ in the treatment of the vulnerable whose care is repeatedly mandated by our Creator and theirs.
To be truly Irish means to be neighborly.
Growing up in a Belfast suburb as three brothers, it was a ‘no brainer’ that every spare minute was spent playing soccer in the garden. One to cross, one to shoot and one to save….or not, in which case the ball would often end up in the neighbor’s garden. It was a community ‘given’ that it was OK to sneak in and respectfully retrieve the ball with minimal fuss.
When the official from Robbinsdale City pulled up outside our house a year ago to issue us with a warning that we would be prosecuted if we did not radically alter our family make up, we were shocked that a soccer ball in the neighboring yard could have such weighty repercussions!
This again highlights how traditional Irish society is RELATIONAL whereas we have found American society to be LITIGIOUS where the first instinct is not to speak to the person in order to “win” him, as Jesus counseled, but to use the force of the adversarial legal system to “beat” him.
Again rather sadly in our local experience the ‘powers that be(at)’ rather than taking a ‘parental’ posture of seeking to understand and help their kids sort things out, have sought to capitalize on this fear based win/loose mentality, and grab more to ‘line the city coffers’.
To be truly Irish means to be hospitable.
Hospitality means ‘a lover of strangers’. “Come On On On In” has been the Big Green House’s hospitality song birthed out of our native culture, and reflecting the welcoming nature of God toward all.
My American friend Sam Pascoe is often credited with the quote, “Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship; it moved to Greece an became a philosophy; it moved to Italy and became an institution; it moved to Europe and became a culture; it came to America and became an enterprise.”
It is sad that ‘Hospitality’ in America in most peoples minds is now equated with a money making industry. I remember when Hilary was asked by the TV reporter as she worked her way round the tables at St. Brendan’s Launch,”So why are you doing this – what’s your angle?’ they were incredulous at her answer, “We just love people and enjoy getting to know them.”
So we remain ‘strangers’ in Robbinsdale City, for they have rejected rather than received the ‘hospitable’ message that we have been sent to represent and the question I asked way back in the March 24th 2018 blog, seems to have found an answer.
“Yes.” We are now looking for ‘another city’ – both earthly and heavenly.
As I said, it has been two Irish Americans we have dealt with as ‘the face’ of Robbinsdale City. The code enforcement officer who called again yesterday to check if we were now in compliance (with Robbinsdale’s code that is, which is out of compliance with God’s Law) is a ‘Patrick’, and the Mayor I met with is a ‘Murphy’.
I smiled at this, for it reminded me of a friend who is one of the most ‘genuine’ living Irish saints I know, who ticks all three of the boxes above, and embodies all that is best in “Irish”.
Raised in working class Dublin, and now living a very restricted physical but vibrant spiritual life in the depths of the Fermanagh countryside with his saintly wife Bridget (Breda), he emailed me to comment on my recent posts about how we had handled the latest twist in this saga with Robbinsdale City. He had a simple but affirming message for me.
“Godly wisdom indeed!”
Paddy Murphy.
This “Paddy Murphy” is the sort of “Irish”…. “I wish I was.”