Midlife Irish (16 page)

I can’t recommend these tours, but it might be “just the thing” if you are visiting Ireland, have some spare time, and want
to look at a big, big house and feel appalled and revolted after lunch one lazy afternoon.

Later, back in a bed and breakfast, I thought about what Robbie Walsh had told me about Americans wanting to buy any little
piece of Ireland, about them paying stupid money for stupid stuff. I thought about it, and it didn’t sound so grotesque, so
pathetic. It didn’t seem like the gross stupidity it had seemed in the pub that night. Now, in the semi-glare of sunlight,
it seemed almost touching. Irish people in America, most of them second- or third- or eighth-generation, know that they are
Irish because people have always told them that they sound Irish. That’s all they have of their Irishness. There isn’t one
tangible thing from the Old Country. They have no “Irish traits.” They wouldn’t be able to identify them if they had. Under
the circumstances, paying twenty bucks for a pile of twigs from Ireland really doesn’t sound bad. The long-lost son cherishing
some fragment from his long-gone past.

I lay in my bed and looked out the window and thought,
It’s good to be a tourist
.

Now, of course, we were tourists. Like it or not, that’s what we were, two Yanks on holiday. I consoled myself with this thought:
Sure, I’m a tourist, but my mom and dad were born here, so I am, after all is said and done, 100 percent Irish. I just had
the misfortune of being born in America. In reality, the blood of Ossian flows through my veins!

I abandoned that thought. To paraphrase a good Englishman: He thinks too much. Such men are a pain in the ass.

We said our goodbyes to the real Irish people and the tourists and walked outside. The sky was as clear as it ever gets in
Ireland. We were ready to go rambling. We knew that later, when we were going to track down my mom and dad, we would have
a definite purpose and a definite destination. But for now we could go anywhere. We walked around talking about where we might
go. We were within driving distances of many, many intriguing places: Bunratty Castle, the ring of mountains they call the
Twelve Bens, the beach of Old Head. We had read and been told about these places that we could go. The Punta was filled with
petrol and, after the breakfast, we had enough carbohydrates to drive to Africa.

“How are you feeling?” I asked Paulette. She was looking up at some sea birds flying overhead. In Ireland you look up a lot.

“I am feeling great,” she said. “How about you?”

I said I was up for anything.

We consulted a little guidebook that we had brought. It had a lot of maps in it. The wind turned the pages so we had to duck
inside the B&B. Paulette looked at the book. She had assumed the role of navigator. I looked out over the ocean. You could
hear the waves. I started to think that the time was right to do something epic.

“Let’s find God,” I said.

I said it as a joke. But, after a minute, it seemed like a good
idea. We knew that this was one of his favorite places. He was hanging around here someplace.

We decided to go to a place where he had been seen—if not God, at least his mother. That is a place in County Mayo called
Knock.

Supernatural phenomena don’t seem that weird in Ireland, for some reason. You don’t hear two farmers talking in a pub about
spirits appearing and statues moving every day, but the general atmosphere is a lot different than in America. In America,
unexplained phenomena like that turn up in the pages of
Weekly World News
. America is filled with people who have had coffee with the postdeath Elvis when they weren’t having sex with aliens, but
you just don’t walk around telling your neighbors about the statue who stole your dog. You don’t want to be one of those people;
you just know that they’re around somewhere. In Ireland, these stories are taken differently.

“We listen to things with a carefully withheld incredulity,” was what a distinguished older gent in Athlone told me. That
seems to be precisely the Irish attitude toward weird stories. I’m listening, the attitude says, but you don’t believe I’m
buying this, do you? Nevertheless, I’ll play along.

If you drive up the coast from Clifden toward Louisburgh, then head inland, you can get to Knock in a couple of hours. If
Knock isn’t the holiest place in Ireland, it’s close. The little town of Knock is in County Mayo. Mayo is a rustic area and
Knock is in the most rustic part of the country. Only one extraordinary thing has ever happened in Knock, but it was very
remarkable indeed. On the evening of August 21, 1879, at the peak of the famine, a little girl looked at the southern gable
of her parish church, the Church of Saint John the Baptist, and saw what she thought were statues of a woman and two men.
She thought they had been newly placed because she hadn’t seen them before, and she was a devout Catholic who went to church
often.

What she saw weren’t newly placed statues. The woman “statue” was a vision of Mary, the mother of Jesus. On either side of
Mary stood Saint Joseph, her husband, and Saint John, the author of the last Gospel. To their right was a plain altar on which
stood a lamb. Behind the lamb there was a large cross. Angels hovered around the lamb.

Fourteen other people reported seeing the same thing. Two ecclesiastical commissions investigated. After considerable examination
of the witnesses and the site, the commission found that “the testimony of the witnesses, taken as a whole, was trustworthy
and satisfactory.”

Their conclusions permitted the establishment of Knock, like Lourdes, as an official holy place and a site for “Marian” pilgrimages.
The Knock Shrine Committee was set up in 1935, and a folk museum was built at Knock in 1973.

Today there is a huge church where the little girl saw the apparition of Mary. Near it, there is a vast basilica. Near that
there is the museum, which tells the story of the miracle of Knock, along with a sort of capsule view of rural Irish life
through the past few centuries.

Although Lourdes is the more celebrated miracle, Knock is a vital part of the worldwide growth in devotion to the Virgin Mary
in the twentieth century. In Ireland it was a big part of what was called “the devotional revolution,” a sort of re-establishment
of a direct emotional response between Ireland’s Catholics and their faith.

I knew about Knock when I was a little boy because my mother told me about it many times. My mom, who grew up near Knock,
had a little white book of prayers that she read silently, at the kitchen table in our house, every night of her life. When
she went on vacation she brought the book with her. I looked at the book closely when I was a kid. There was a “Prayer for
People in Purgatory,” a “Prayer for People Who Don’t Believe in God,” a “Prayer for the Dying,” a “Prayer for Sinners,” a
“Prayer for People Who Mock Religious Faith.” A prayer for everybody.

My mom, unlike my dad, who was a voracious reader, never, as far as I know, read anything other than that book. You would
see her looking at a newspaper or a magazine every once in a while, but you never see her reading another book. One time I
asked her why.

She looked at me as if I had asked a question that had a very obvious answer. Then she said something I always remember.

Me: Why is that the only book you read?

Mom: What else is there?

When they are saying mass at the church at Knock, the priest’s words are amplified and sent to the huge speakers they have
mounted around the church and basilica. So no matter where you are in the town, you can hear the mass. I watched a guy pumping
gas while around him I heard:

Lamb of God

Who takes away the sins of the world

Have mercy on us.

Later, I saw a man outside drinking a Guinness and eating some dry roasted peanuts while this was in the air.

May the peace of the Lord be with you always

Let us now share a sign of that peace.

I looked over at a fat guy having some sausages at the table next to me. We nodded at each other. I wished the fat guy peace
and he did the same, I guess, to me.

Knock has had a long-standing, Lourdeslike reputation for cures, and the sick and the crippled visit the shrine every day.
When you walk around in Knock you are likely to come across a man or woman walking with a cane or a metal walker, head down,
whispering the words of the Our Father or the Hail Mary or some private prayer of their own composition.
It is impossible to spend any time in Knock and not feel the presence of…something.

Ireland has always had a particular love of Mary, the mother of Jesus. My sister is named Mary, and in an Irish phone book
the first name “Mary” in front of a last name like Kennedy or O’Brian will take up a page or two. To use the phone book to
call Mary Kelly of Dublin is a life’s work.

A few years ago Mary appeared in Ireland again, in 1985. In a little village in Cork named Ballinspittle there is a little
shrine with a statue of Mary. The shrine itself is not unusual. Irish people often have a shrine to Mary in the backyard or
nearby. If you drive randomly through the Irish countryside the odds are good that you will encounter a shrine to Mary on
the side of the road. We passed several of these driving around in the west when we weren’t looking for them. When we saw
a particularly striking one, we got out of the Punta to investigate. Some of the shrines are amazing things with painstakingly
erected steps and kneelers and carefully planted flowers of all sorts.

But in 1985 a particular statue of Mary started to move. This movement was witnessed by at least ten people. When news of
this appeared in the papers, some Irish wise asses drove around putting little signs on Mary statues with messages like
INSERT COIN HERE
and
OUT OF ORDER
.

But other people took the moving statue very seriously. Many interpreted the animated Mary as a sign of Mary’s displeasure
at something topical. Mary’s appearance was attributed to whatever axe was being ground. Some op-ed pieces said Mary was appearing
now because of abortions in America. Others said it was a sign of Mary’s pleasure at something the pope said or the recent
peace efforts in Northern Ireland. More than a few said Mary’s appearance was an authentic miracle, but it was Mary herself
attempting to help tourism. These observers seem to embody the sacred and profane in a particularly Irish way.

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.