I returned this weekend to Glendalough with the Notre Dame Programme for our spring retreat to St. Caoimhín’s 7th century monastery, which we visited first on retreat in October. It was strange to walk those paths again, since it seems like it never changes but I do. There is an enduring peace in that place, which feels like the effect of St. Caoimhín’s long life of prayer there, regardless of the seasons passing. Before going, I looked back on my reflections from our first retreat there. Some of the questions I struggle with are the same, such as the meaning and worth of what I study, and the desire for a real community, and the essential selfishness of being a student at times. Other things have changed utterly: last time I was in Glendalough, my arm was in a sling and one of my chief concerns was how I was going to feed myself for the next six weeks if I couldn’t cook like that. But the most significant change is simply that in October I was just starting my adventure in Ireland, and now the end is fast approaching.
Growing up entails leaving a lot of things behind to be fully engaged in the present. I’ve done a lot of growing up in Ireland. I have had much joy here, and great struggles, and, sometimes, just general malaise. Yet the scenery of my life does not change greatly, just the way the light dapples over it. One of Kevin Whelan’s favourite features of the Irish terrain is not the terrain itself, but how the light plays upon it, constantly transforming your vision. He calls our attention to it on every fieldtrip we take. Today’s trip to Glendalough was typically Irish in this regard: the glen turned from dreary and grey to bright and lush when we least expected it, and the sunbeams fell through the trees and played on the surface of the lakes. We have no influence over whether the sun will come out to illuminate the physical terrain for us, but we do choose our attitudes to the terrain of our lives. The greatest single thing I’ve learned this year is to be always grateful for everything I am sent- the joy, the struggles, the loss, the pain, the dissatisfaction, the restlessness, the malaise, the excitement, the intensity, the peace, the anxiety; every friendship, every relationship, every event, every situation. Every single one is offered with grace if I can just cup my hands to receive it. To me, that’s growing up, because that’s how you engage the present and be present to what you’re being offered in every moment. I don’t want to be wistful for the past or rush towards the future; I want to embrace the moment I’m in, because that’s the only moment to live.
But I have a nagging fear that I’ll fail to bring this attitude home with me. Going abroad was a challenge which demanded a positive, reckless response. The whole year demanded persistence and gratitude. When I was preparing to leave for Ireland, I was afraid that I would never be able to see my life as meaningful, to see Christ in the people I encountered, and to be at peace so far away from Notre Dame. During my last few weeks in South Bend, people were always asking if I was excited to be going to Ireland, and I would say yes, because I knew I was doing the right thing by going. But honestly I wasn’t eager for the journey. I had all those fears, and I knew I would be changed by the experience but I couldn’t envision what I would look like at the end of a year abroad, and I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to live in that person’s skin. I was happy at Notre Dame, not because it wasn’t challenging, but because I had come to see my life there as meaningful, I found it easy to see Christ in my friends on campus, and I had experienced immense peace there. Frankly, it didn’t make sense to leave. I remember calling one of my best friends in tears late on the night before I was to leave, with my bags still unpacked, and my parents already having gone to bed for the 4 AM trip to O’Hare Airport, and being completely at a loss. “Hey, Greer, what’s wrong?” he said. “I don’t know what the Hell I’m doing!” I wailed.
Now I can’t imagine myself without this year. I’ve become the person I couldn’t have envisioned standing on the other side, and all I can be is grateful. And yet, the anxieties I had in September return: I am happy in Dublin, not because it isn’t challenging, but because I have come to see my life here as meaningful, I find it easy to see Christ in my friends in Ireland, and I have experienced immense peace here. To be happy and free in Ireland, so many of my former beliefs, attitudes, and attachments had to be broken down. What if that leaves me disenchanted with my old life, or jaded about returning to Notre Dame? I guess that’s the real test: can I bring my attitude of gratitude back to Notre Dame with me? Can I realize that the most piercingly beautiful moments of the year were so transcendent precisely because they were expressed by but not bound to particular places, people, and events? Realize that in fact the greatest moments were the ones in which I felt consciously united to the truth of the world, utterly transcendent love, and we’re made for everlasting life? Sitting on the bank of the lake in Glendalough, I remembered the deep thrill that went through me on the last night in the Vatican looking up at the statues of the martyrs encircling St. Peter’s, the conviction that we are meant for eternity, not to be bound to Notre Dame or South Bend or Dublin or Rome, or family or friends, because we have to leave all those behind. “Take, Lord, and receive... all my memory...” I can’t cling to what I have here, or my memories, or the people whom I will miss, but rather take up the essence of their transformative presence in my life, and go forward. Ultreia. I hope I’ve learned deeply, and will feel it when I need to feel it, that the richness and goodness of life are not bound to these people or places, but to Christ, who goes where ever I go, like we met Him where ever we turned on Holy Thursday night, chapel crawling through the streets of Rome.
Christ be near at either hand
Christ behind, before me stand
Christ with me where ever I go
Christ around, above, below.
“He’s going to be an awesome priest,” I concluded. My Irish flatmate Jess just stared at me, and then started laughing, hard. “What?” I said, totally nonplussed. “It’s just that this flat is the only place I would ever hear someone say something like that. What does that even mean? Awesome priest? How do those words even go together?”. So I enumerated for her the qualities of an awesome priest, and why I thought they applied to my friend Chris, and some other awesome priests I’ve known in the Congregation of Holy Cross, for which Chris is a seminarian. The conversation arose because Jess had asked about my plans for the weekend, which included a three day visit to Leuven, Belgium to hang out with my friend Chris who was in Old College at Notre Dame and has spent his whole junior year studying in the American College seminary of the Catholic University of Leuven.
My favorite aspect of travel is getting to see other ways of life and getting a taste of the culture of other communities. I didn’t get much of a sense of Belgian culture this trip- Belgians are quite reserved, the nation is a political creation dating to 1830, and all Belgians are at least trilingual (Dutch, French, and English), so it’s a complex culture. The joke I was told this weekend was “How do you tell when you walk past an extroverted Belgian rather than a regular Belgian? He’s looking at your feet instead of his own.” But I loved being taken into the seminary’s culture for the three days I was staying at the American College. I have rarely met such warm, welcoming people in all my travels. The priests in charge were all really down-to-earth, friendly people, and the seminarians were absolute gentlemen and really fun, intelligent people to hang out with. More than anything, they were very reverent, respectful, prayerful people. It was a beautiful thing to see.
I was fortunate to be able to arrive early Friday afternoon, in time for a special Mass they were having this week in which a bishop was visiting to confer a half dozen of the seminarians with two of the old minor orders- lector and acolyte. Chris met me at the train station in Brussels and we got to Leuven in time to walk around the city and see the famous Town Hall and the spectacular University Library, rebuilt in the medieval style after being burnt down twice during the twentieth century on account of the World Wars. Then he showed me around the American College. We wandered down to the chapel, where the little choir was practicing for the Mass. Myrna, the pianist, smiled at us and immediately asked if I wanted to join the choir. I said yes and eagerly jumped in, feeling right at home- they had a full complement of Gather books for the congregation! I hadn’t sung the Mass of Creation setting since September. It was great. I don’t resent European liturgies anymore, but it was really nice to feel like a dorm Mass had been transplanted into the city center of Leuven, Belgium in the American College’s chapel. The music was beautiful- one of the seminarians who became a lector had his sister and brother visiting, and they played violin and sang too- but more beautiful was the visible reverence and joy that all the seminarians and priests had for the liturgy. Of course you’d hope that would be true of a seminary, but I don’t take it for granted, especially in people not much older than myself.
I really can’t say enough about how kind and welcoming and humble everyone at the American College was. There are only around a dozen seminarians, and it’s clearly a tight-knit community. At the end of Mass the rector introduced us visitors to the whole congregation and said emphatically how important and meaningful it was to them that family and friends could join them for the occasion. After Mass we had a banquet, and when we finished each course, all of the priests, including the rector himself, got up to clear away everyone’s dishes and bring out the next. I’ve never seen that before. It was small but it’s important to me, because it displayed a genuine attitude of service and humility. At the end of the evening, half of the seminarians, including Chris and myself, headed to their favourite bar, across the street from the Philosophy Faculty where they spend so many hours in class. The bar owner is very fond of them and was sorry that he was unable to attend the Mass himself, because he had to keep the bar open, so he invited them to come celebrate there. He gave everyone a couple of rounds of excellent Belgian beer, and we spent three hours sitting outside in the warm spring air talking about the philosophy of Catholic education, the current situation of America’s Catholic universities and seminaries, and our hopes and fears about the future. Each of them had a different viewpoint and we didn’t agree on everything, but everyone cared deeply about it and thought deeply and intelligently about it. It was so refreshing to be immersed in that.
On Saturday Chris and I took a day trip to Bruges, another quaint city in the Flemish region of Belgium, with lots of canals and pristine medieval streets. We walked around all day in the blazing sunshine, visiting the still functioning convent, eating Belgian waffles (unlike anything I’ve ever had. They bake cubes of sugar into the dough- not batter, dough- and drizzle it with carmelized sugar. phenomenal.), touring a reconstructed grain mill, picnicking on the canal, and wandering into every church we walked past. The afternoon couldn’t have been more idyllic.
Bruges is home to the relic of Christ’s Holy Blood, which Joseph of Arimethea is said to have scraped off of the cross, and which is famously processed through the city annually. We visited the Basilica of the Holy Blood, which was beautiful, but I liked the Church of Our Lady a few blocks away even better, because of the energetic way it tried to engage people as pilgrims instead of tourists. I’ve never seen such a vigorous attempt. They have large placards of prayers along the aisles, and large posters with glossy pictures of all of the sacraments being celebrated there in the church, and they played the story of Christ’s passion on a small flat screen TV in the back of the church. The best of their efforts was outside of the adoration chapel they had a large prayer inscribed in several different languages, welcoming all pilgrims and tourists of all beliefs and declaring that everyone who visits has a home here because the love of God welcomes all. To me, that church had a greater presence even than Notre Dame in Paris.
We returned to Leuven in time for a city festival going on that weekend which showcased the most unbelievable acrobatics and fireworks displays I have ever seen. This was performance art, altering my perception of what is possible. After sunset, a huge crane lifted a large frame of a sphere hundreds of feet into the sky, with 8 acrobats attached to it by bungee cords. They proceeded to dance on it, tumble off of it, and flip and twist while hanging from it for half an hour, with strobe lights and smoke and singing going on below them, timed in sync with their dancing. At one point they were hanging from the bottom of it and holding onto each other to form a double helix dangling from the bottom of the sphere. And the sphere wasn’t stationary- they did all of this while the crane swung the sphere from side to side and up and down. It was insane. It was beautiful, and mind-blowing, and there were no safety nets.
After that the entire town sedately strolled several blocks to watch a fireworks performance in front of the University library. They weren’t just blowing off fireworks, it was a drama. Five people in protective suits came on and destroyed the stage while setting off the first pyronic volley. There had been clay bells and things hanging from a frame on the stage, but the performers just took sledge hammers to them and smashed them while setting off these incredible fireworks. Then they started playing drums and electric guitars while setting off more. Then they started playing percussion with construction tools, while setting off more fireworks, with lights to turn the thick clouds of smoke different colours. Destruction and construction; fire, light and darkness, and color- I’m not really sure what they were trying to say, but it was clearly aesthetic, and intriguing to me. Plus there were random tightrope walkers in the park that night, magicians, clowns, free hats, and lots and lots of Stella Artois beer tents. It was exactly the sort of spontaneity and randomawesity that has been missing from my life this year, 3700 miles away from kids who string tightropes between trees on North Quad to tightrope walk during lunch, who juggle outside of the Rock on Sunday night, and who tie-die t-shirts during An Tostal.
Sunday was Pentecost. We had another beautiful Mass, and I sang in the choir again. There was coffee after Mass and people stuck around to talk like they should. The chapel was packed. There were lots of cute, well-behaved babies. More old Gather favourites. It was lovely. It was another gorgeous afternoon, so we walked across town to venture into the Meerdaal Forest, an intact medieval forest, with the medieval roads lined by tall trees still cutting straight through it. I love Ireland’s rural landscape, but it felt great to be surrounded by trees again, and it was neat to envision Ivanhoe or Robin Hood walking down roads like that. It felt exactly how a Sunday should feel.
But the best aspect of the weekend was really getting to talk to Chris so much about his study abroad experience in Belgium and mine in Dublin. We’ve been immersed in entirely different cultural situations, in terms of language, nationality, and community life, but we’ve had so much in common in the challenges we have faced this year, the ways in which we have grown, and how we look at our return to Notre Dame. It was so good to talk about how much we both love the Congregation of Holy Cross and Notre Dame, but also how much our perspectives on them have changed this year. It’s not as much about the details of our experiences, but the attitude we brought to them, and it was refreshing and encouraging to hear someone voice the same attitudes I’ve had this year, the same enthusiasm, struggle, diligence, patience, and gratitude. We both wondered out loud whether we feel like we’re being constantly transformed over here because the study abroad experience is itself so powerfully transformative, or whether it’s our attitudes that studying abroad has elicited to the experiences of life that has been so transformative, and therefore can continue to be even after we head home in a month. We think and hope it’s the latter. Now I feel as though I’ve come full circle, since Chris was one of the first people I saw in Europe, when our train arrived in LeMans in September for Blessed Fr. Moreau’s beatification, when we were all anxious and couldn’t fathom what we had gotten ourselves into. It has been a rich year, and it was so good to reflect on its richness for a weekend and think again about how my heart and mind has been educated this year, just as was promised in LeMans.
Last weekend, after getting back from Belgium, my flatmate Megan asked if I’d go to Donegal with her for one last long goodbye to rural Ireland. I told her that I wanted to, but time and money made it seem like a poor decision. I studied pretty hard for three days, and only finished about 2/3 of what I wanted to get done, as usual. The pace is picking up in Dublin, with final exams two weeks away and the Dublin Programme’s big Ten Year Anniversary celebrations beginning in five days. But I decided that you only get to spend your junior year in Ireland once. So we hopped on a bus for Dunfanaghy, a tiny village far in the north of Donegal, with very little information to go on. As it turns out, I don’t think we could have found a more pleasant or interesting corner of Donegal in which to spend the weekend.
Dunfanaghy is located on the west side of Sheephaven Bay, joined to Horn Head, a peninsula which must recently have been an island. After a nearly 5-hour bus ride from Dublin, we felt like stretching our legs, so after dumping our packs off at the hostel two miles from the village, we took a little ten mile hike around the countryside.
We cut westwards through some cow fields to reach Tramore Strand, the most pristine, solitary beach I’ve ever seen, with a clear view of Tory Island. We were the only souls on the two mile stretch of pure sand and perfectly clear water. It was then that I decided that nothing that occurs during my last three weeks in Ireland is going to stress me out. I dove for the sand and engaged the terrain of Donegal by lying flat on my stomach on the softest sand I’ve ever felt, under a warm sun and a gentle breeze, with the sound of the waves in my ears and the smell of salt in my nose for over an hour.
After our rest on the beach, we went exploring over the dunes towards Horn Head, looking for some of the notable geological features mentioned in the guide book. After scrambling up the dunes towards the north for a couple of miles, we finally stumbled upon McSwyne’s gun, a deep sink hole near Horn Head which makes a loud gurgling noise that really sounds like heavy artillery fire. The coast was mostly sheep fields and granite rocks (we can recognize the rocks now even without Kevin Whelan, after all those fieldtrips!). We also spotted the remains of an ancient Celtic ring fort.
Turning southeast, we attempted to find the path to the village, but the dunes stretched endlessly in front of us, with Dunfanaghy presumably hidden behind them. The only paths to be seen were sheep tracks. So we strolled through farm fields and gingerly climbed over barbed wire fences until there was nothing for it but to cut across the dunes in the general direction of the village. The diversity of wildlife that flourishes on those dunes was staggering- moss, wildflowers, insects and birds of all kinds, which Megan identified for me by their song because she just got back from a week of zoology fieldwork in Glendalough. Most notable was the marram grass- thick, tall reedy clumps of grass that look beautiful flowing in the wind but feel like thistles through your jeans and on your arms. When we were nearly over the dunes, we finally found a path that seemed to begin out of nowhere, which lead us past some horse pastures, through a small pine forest, and out onto the absurdly long bridge over the nearly dry inlet. The landscape was gorgeous and diverse, with spectacular views of the mountains in the distance, and rolling farmland reaching down towards the ocean, but we were really curious about the dunes and the grass and the dried-up inlet. It just seemed a little unusual, and as it turned out, it is.
On Saturday we visited a local museum which was a work house during the Famine and now preserves the history of the Great Famine in Donegal and offers information on the ongoing, severe transformation of the topography of Horn Head. Into the twentieth century, Dunfanaghy’s harbour served as a center of transportation and fishing, but about a century ago the Irish cut down vast stretches of that rough marram grass, and as a result the landscape completely changed. A single stalk of marram grass creates enough roots to vertically support a 25 meter sand dune, which would otherwise be blown away. Therefore, when the locals cut down the grass, all of the sand dunes started shifting, so that sand began to cover the church and the school, the harbor silted up, the river dried up and became narrow, and the western end of it was cut off from the inlet, creating a new freshwater lake and submerging fertile farmland, while a sandbar formed between New Lake and the old harbor. You can still see the old sea wall peeking up out of New Lake, and the farmers’ old stone walls and pastures go straight down into the water, as if they built them too close to the edge. The harbor is now too shallow for serious shipping, but the young dunes and the New Lake have become a wildlife preserve, especially for rare birds in Ireland and Scotland. The marram grass is flourishing again and the sands’ movement seems to have slowed down.
I thought the whole story of the land was fascinating, and it was neat to have noticed these features as unusual in Ireland during our hike on Friday and then to discover on Saturday that our observations had been correct and to discover the reasons for the way the landscape currently looks. We got our long goodbye to rural Ireland- we were among as many cows, sheep, and horses as I’ve seen all year, with their rich smell always mixed with the sea salt on the wind, and hardly any people to be seen or heard. The town only has 850 citizens, and while it’s not a Gaeltacht, there were lots of signs in Irish, left untranslated, which I always like to see. I’m going to miss that a lot.
I always wanted to go to Donegal just because the name sounded so magical, and the terrain fit the name perfectly, even though I couldn’t tell you quite what I expected it to look and feel like before I went. Climbing over a rock when we were looking for McSwyne’s Gun, and I had lost track of where Megan was, I remember thinking that the solitary, desolate beauty of the place made it feel like a Famine ghost might walk up to you there in the broad daylight and start talking, and it might be unsettling but not exactly surprising. That’s just how the land felt. It was an odd combination of so many other elements of Irish countryside I’ve seen this year, so it brought on vivid flashbacks to County Kerry, and Clare, and Brey, and Connemara, and the Aran Islands, and the Northern Irish coast, but it also had something special of its own, some vague wildness and desolation. Ireland is a small island, but the diversity of its landscapes never ceases to amaze me. No two places are quite alike, but Donegal made me miss all of them all at once, already.
“Is ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine”~“People live in each other’s shelter” is the Irish proverb which has greeted me every time I walked into the O’Connell House this year. In my waning days in Ireland, I am confronted by that reality more strongly than ever, with gratitude. I am a weeper, and it has been a weepy week. There were many goodbyes already this week, and the hardest ones are yet to come. But I hope no one minds the tears which inevitably fall, because they are truly tears of joy and gratitude, not sadness. I have been touched most this week by the gratitude expressed for me from others, which I can never quite comprehend, since I feel as though I have been given so much by them. Notre Dame conferred an honorary degree on Sean Cardinal Brady last weekend, and in his moving speech on Catholic education in the contemporary world, and Notre Dame’s Programme in Dublin, he insisted that he believes as much as all of us students receive in our transformative experiences studying abroad, Notre Dame gives Dublin more than that in sharing some of her students with Ireland for a year. I know the Cardinal meant what he said, but in the face of everything I have experienced and received this year, it is hard to comprehend.
One of the hard goodbyes occurred on Thursday, my last day at Youth Horizons. I get the sense that what meant more than anything I ever said about medieval guilds, castles, the history of the papacy, the International Eucharistic Congress of 1932, and the importance of the full stop (their term for “period”) and inverted commas (quotation marks), was simply my presence there, week in and week out, volunteering to enter into my students’ lives, how ever briefly. But truly in my mind, any impression I made on them or the lessons that would hopefully stick, pale in comparison to the ways in which they have opened my heart and mind this year. I am blessed to have known them, to have seen them grow this year, and to know that they will continue to be challenged, to grow, to suffer, but all without me to see. I am a person who grasps fiercely after words, the right words, to express my gratitude to those who have affected me so powerfully. But John, the director of Youth Horizons, did it for me with the simplest words: “Your willingness to chip-in and become part of our community this year was truly inspiring. You have represented Notre Dame well.” It is humbling to be told that my presence was worthwhile, when the overwhelming realization for me has always been that their presence in my life was so valuable.
And again, this morning, at the last 8:30 AM Trinity College daily Mass of the term, Fr. Kieran prayed in thanksgiving for the visiting students of Notre Dame at TCD and what we have contributed to the life of the College. As I left, he made a point of telling me that my presence in the Chaplaincy had been wonderful this year and I would be missed. After weeks of thinking about all of the things here that I will miss so much, I had not stopped to reflect that I might be missed here, even after the new students come in and get settled. To have represented Notre Dame well and to have been a person or done something that contributed to my communities in Ireland in a way that will leave a noticeable absence when I am gone- those are the two greatest things that I could have hoped would be true after a year here. From the beginning, I wanted to dig in deeply here, but in the Fall I could not yet really see myself on the other side as having been more than a transient presence.
The readings at Mass this week have been very appropriate. I was especially struck by Peter’s moaning on Tuesday morning in Mark 10:28-30: “ ‘Look,’ Peter said to Jesus, ‘we have left everything and followed you.’ Jesus said, ‘In truth I tell you, there is no one who has left house, brothers, sisters, mother, father, children or land for my sake and for the sake of the gospel who will not receive a hundred times as much, houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and land- and persecutions too- now in this present time and, in the world to come, eternal life.” That is very much how I felt leaving Notre Dame and my family nine months ago, but now I am staggered by how richly I have been blessed in this journey. The hardest times have been the richest, even when I could not feel so, but only have faith, in the midst of it.
The Gospel this morning was equally appropriate: “I tell you, therefore, everything you ask and pray for, believe that you have it already, and it will be yours.” [Mark 11:24] I keep praying that I will be ready to leave when my plane takes off at 9 AM Thursday next, and I believe I will, but it’s hard on days like today when the sky is blue and the sun is warm and bright, and a strong breeze from the East brings the smell of salt to your nose from the Irish Sea. I’ve only just begun to realize that not only was I being sheltered, I was sheltering those who sheltered me.
