integrative essay – ireland in history and memory winter 26, the evergreen state college
Spirituality is an ancient evolved behavioral mechanism that enables the survival of our species—Homo sapiens, otherwise known as humans—throughout the millennia we’ve lived on this planet. As more people articulated across the development of expression and language, like-minds found each other offering answers to questions they were naturally asking. Structure began to manifest itself amongst people sharing time and settling together. Organization via institutions would be a natural blossoming, as natural as the need to find answers that shaped our development. While there is a wealth of beliefs worldwide, this paper will walk us through one of the most dominant systems persisting to this very day: Christianity and two of its denominations. Ireland’s spiritualities through practiced belief predates even Jesus Christ, the originating figurehead of these faiths, and yet Irish Catholicism has rooted so deeply, it is hard to imagine a time where they didn’t hold a cooptative sway over the people of the island. Then, as one island over, faith developed, Protestantism became the folk’s faith of choice. Founded in a resistance to the Catholicism spreading across the Eurasian continent, it would become a co-form of oppression that sparked revolution and escape to empire of a different structure. From the macro of denominational definitions, each country’s practicing of Christianity, the journey across the Atlantic and how faith was the fuel, to the micro of each person’s practice of spirituality within/out religious frameworks and mine own experiences growing up in church, this paper will paint a full spectrum of how power plays out, even when it does not claim such haughty or boastful lays. The lines will be liminally blurred, jumping from time periods and locales, but the throughline persists as boundaries so we do not get caught in currents.
The acts, memories and thereby records of religion are designated a cultural history. As the assignment indicates, religious practice is critical to how societies orientate themselves. Irish folks had such immense and heavy carry-over from the days of myth and magic, that when Catholicism—and writing—arrived with the Christian monks, it had to adapt to belief that pre-dated itself. Despite hailing from Rome, this mutation would come to be known within the 20th century as Irish Catholicism. It held Mary, the saintly mother in priority over Jesus. As mothers who were all-powerful and long suffering, she was their mirror in divine form. This practice of Mary’s holy divinity bled into the other versions of popular culture outputs, like songs, poems, books, and films. The two songs that carry this ethos the most, without naming Mary outright are “Kilkelly, Ireland” and “Hard Times Come Again No More”.
While the first carries us over to America, they both do exactly as Ireland and the nation of emigration destination does: no mention or inclusion of women’s power directly, and yet screaming, or as it were, singing of this in the undertones. “Kilkelly, Ireland”, composed by Peter and Steve Jones in 1984, harkens back to Ireland in 1860, as famine was drawing to an end. Presented as a series of letters from a father to his son, the lyrics share “private” insights to the family. His daughter, and granddaughter are named Bridget, which is a name of double-entendre, as the moniker is a reference to mythic Saint Bridget, who is presumed to be named after the even more mythological goddess Brigid. Throughout the suffering and turmoil, the papa finds reasons to share emotions even when facing crises. Halfway through the song, his wife dies and is buried in the church graveyard, as the saintly mother motif would be reiterated. Catholicism had become ubiquitous with the daily living, naming and dying of the people. The letters consistently ask for John’s return from abroad, which brings us to where he may have been…America.
Here we have an interesting facet of facsimile. America was founded on religious freedom, the separation of church versus state; this would seem an open arm invite to any and all faiths, and yet it was simply not true beyond the wishes of the Constitution. “McNally’s Row of Flats”, constructed by Ned Harrington and Tony Hart in 1882 (a timeframe captured between verse three and four of “Kilkelly, Ireland”), speaks to the drawing-in nature of this nation, and sings volumes to just how tough this country is once you’ve made it. “And it’s Ireland and Italy, Jerusalem and Germany, Chinese and Africans and a paradise of rats.” May chance the reason John couldn’t return home is because he was trapped in these overcrowded slums? Tenements, the place you end up, that welcomes anyone and everyone, when the nation will not see to your success. Until the election of President John Kennedy (an Irish American from a working-class family), Catholicism was a designation that could end you up as worthless rather than worthy. Even upon his election, he had to swear allegiance to the flag and not the Vatican. The fact that even a “lace curtain” Irishman would have to defend his reputation in this way is a stark reminder for those deemed less than. Shame would take on a new form in the enforced mask of guilt as well.
Now that shame has married guilt, we must confront the damage this duo presents. While in Ireland past, shame was a powerful tool for enacting change for societal good, suddenly Irish Americans were relegated to classes in harsh ways that trapped, as if they hadn’t been fleeing these very confinements back in their homeland. The racist idea of haves and have-nots was defined by “shanty Irish” (feckless, ignorant, filthy and dangerous) and “lace curtain Irish” (tidy, civilized, successful and can-do spirits). Meanwhile in America, one could come up from the prior, like Kennedy, in Ireland, by the 20th century, the Catholic church had immense power over the institution of government. As such they assigned harmful stakes of “living in sin to die for redemption.” Birth control, divorce and homosexuality were not just against the law, they were a strike against God. The Magdelene Laundries, state-run female prisons in operation from 1765-1996, were a form of deadly containment for the whores and letches of society’s women. Aptly named too, for as Mary is the holy mother, Mary Magdelene was a sex-worker who washed the feet of Jesus with her hair. Of course you can’t have holy without detestable. 97% of the schools were operated by the church, and with this, healthcare, marriage and science were all persecuted. The poem, “A Grafted Tongue” by John Montague, speaks very explicitly: “The [school] master gouges another mark on the tally stick hung about its [student] neck.” Not only dehumanizing, but this poem also harkens the violence children faced by being physically struck. It would seem that the nuns and priests so viscerally concerned with pure and proper populations could not understand how this makes for not open hearts, but hearts hardened.
The fear lived in Ireland would bleed internationally. Maria Monk, a Canadian author, wrote titillating “tell-all” sex novellas that took the image of chastity in the church and presented the nuns, women who are critical infrastructure of a wholly patriarchal organization, as sexual deviants. Books—much like the Bible—became avenues of fear, the offspring of shame and guilt’s tryst. In many ways, Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, does in effect the same. Tracking Frank’s life from Brooklynn, NY to County Limerick, Ireland across 18 years, he lays testament through creative storytelling, how much pressure was exerted on one boy in one county in one country under one all-powerful establishment. Frank interacts directly with sexuality within the church; during one confession being hounded by a priest relentlessly questioning him along lines of have you had thoughts or acted in natures such as impurity with your sister, your mother, the horse and “some class of beast. I never heard of a sin like that before. This priest must be from the country and if he is…he’s opening up new worlds to me.” Of course, Frank would not engage in bestiality, nor did he have a living sister, but the point of unholy inspiration remains. Earlier in the book he makes incisions to Mary, apologizing for “putting her son on the cross” by “interfering with myself”. While these ideas of one person’s relationship with establishment will resurface later, the point remains: there is no better way to invite sin in, than to ban sin outright.
Tracing the rosary around, we can jump back to 1854 when Stephen C. Foster would publish “Hard Times Come Again No More”. The lyric “while we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay, there are frail forms fainting at the door” draws on Irish Catholicism in many even overt ways. The adjectives for what the soul is searching for beacons of Mary in her virginal purity. But the next line reduces humans to forms, which has eerie echoes of the haunting spirits, yet another aspect of faith. This line is transcontinentally liminal. Are we singing of the Great Hunger (1840s), the American Civil War (1860s), impending—and ultimately failed—Reconstruction, or even so far future as the Great Depression (1930s)? The answer is in fact, yes. Like religion, time is less a tool of definition, and a permission structure to persist. People remained persistent within the gilded chapel halls indeed. In Irish America: Coming into Clover, by Maureen Dezell, she recounts via first-hand sharing how church was a chance for unmarried, boisterous aunties to have an avenue in which their abilities were harnessed to not need marriage—even much tonal finesse—for by many of the women serving this role were recognized in their intelligence. The chance for community in sisterhood would be enough to lead a full life of recognition and respect.
As yet another minority, people would also reach the upper echelons of power within colonial Protestantism. The most potent example, Douglas Hyde (1860-1949) became Ireland’s first president, the figurehead representative of Ireland nationally and internationally. What is so striking about this man is that while practicing the Anglican faith, he wrote a manifesto in 1892 titled “The Necessity for de-Anglicizing the Irish Nation”. Taoiseach Eamon DeValera, an American born revolutionary whose birthplace protected him against execution by the British, would see Douglas Hyde as a power bridge between a national sect and a two-finger salute to the empire they had loosed. To add worse to worse, upon his appointment, Hyde gave his Presidential Declaration of Office in Irish, setting a precedent for leading-by-doing for each elected president serving after him. The British offered no media coverage of his appointment.
Tensions mounting, a Holy War between Protestants and Catholics would wage for a defined 30 years, known colloquially as The Troubles, in which the terrorism was not so simple as faith denominations against denominations; instead, it would become something for everything, much like the Famine was: financial, nationalism, political positioning, class disparities and even further down, what each person felt they needed. While outside of the scope of this paper’s focus on Irish in America, it bares mentioning as America was a powerful player in this massive international conflict. History, like churches and nations, has an uncannily unstated ability to be extremely reductionist which does damage and disservice to the people living and forming history. Despite this, so many names of so many people have shown us that the picture is bigger than a few words in a few books; it is breathed every second of every day until halted to remain no more.
Now we begin to further draw out faith within the two countries of context. We will start in America during the Civil War, a battle between a nation with stakes of ethics, finances and how belonging manifests under the Constitution. Banished Children of Eve, by Peter Quinn, tracks the lives of a cohort of people who share a world of intersecting roads and stairwells in burgeoning New York City during this conflict. While summoning the Old Testament in Eve, locationally, the book brings us across the continent, a macro application of microcity, the people making it through trauma. Like this essay, the timelines and locations are blurred, creating an impressive text. While not as overt as “they prayed in church” the characters face something that religion avenues, the creation of self. Spiritual forces play out, Jack Mulcahey has the ability to sense death in people by their aura. This vibe is found about Squirt, a young African American boy who assists actor queues with black-face minstrel stage productions. Squirt would be killed in the 1863 Draft Riots, a cruel reality that ought to remind us of the cost outside of words. From the text, we sense the church’s role of the pearly gates above in “He knew who its [death] victims would be, the judgement was already sealed.”
In the book we have Harriet Beecher Stowe stake the morality of enslavement as she gives commentary amongst community groups before publishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Again, this is how the church works silently within the legal frameworks of the United States. Legal definition supplanted yes, and yet, as a colonial nation using kidnapping and enslavement, it is simply impossible for the impacts of church’s direction in ethics to not hold major power over each of us. Those of us born here, and those of us incoming. An immigrant arriving from Ireland faces stark realities in the poem, “The Emigrant” by Richard Tillinghast. “Two places only there were: here, and America. The four corners of the farm and gone-by-the-sea.” As the western waves welcomed the newcomer, he would land in this era of America’s history and be bombarded by the chance to belong. Conscription side-stepped meaning by inviting. “Oh, you’re a Malone? We’ve got twelve of yous over here on the Confederate side.” Or “Ahaaa a Nolan, well guess what, three hots and a cot could be yours without trouble by defending the Union!” During the war, upon emancipation, the Irish became white by contrast. If you could perform in obvious painted on black face, then you could reveal yourself to be in fact, very white. Or, more so, white enough. Stepping one rung up the ladder meant that you had to step on those below. This is an issue persisting to this day by white ethno-nationalists.
The Irish in America are not innocent in this modern development. Anti-Chinese policies were enforced by Irishmen one ladder step up, in the role of union and ward organizers. Denis Kearney and Tom Desmond are two of these effective and equally guilty men. While only 0.002% of the population, Chinese folks were blamed ubiquitously for low wages and job theft. The empire designed by this became a permission structure for oppressed to be oppressors. In an act of survival for those stepped upon, intermarriage between Irish and Asians cooccurred, creating, as in The Liverpool Diocesan Review, a Catholic publication, termed the “half-caste”. The full quote says “The white man is necessarily decent because he is white. The ‘half-caste’ is indecent because of existing in an in-between state.” And here, plainly, we have the Catholic church at work. From 1850-1990, both in the US and Ireland, the population of priests per person had steadily trickled up. 85% of these North American priests were Irish. 1850 had a ratio of 1:1,000, 1900 1:200, 1950 1:600, and then almost at the next 50-year marker, the child sex abuse scandals ripped the world apart. By 2015, the ratio was lowest as it had ever been 1:2,500, with most leaders aged over 70. Now, as the church and Irish Americans faced this reckoning, it is a solemn responsibility of us as learners to recognize that a nation built of immigrants, must find ways to keep their legacy intact, without furthering institutional harm across laws and incantations.
Taking a look at the medium of film, we see, literally, how to do just as was urged above. In the movie Songcatcher, Professor Cyrus Whittle is burned out on blatant sexism in her career and takes a vacation to the Appalachian mountain range to visit her sister. Upon meandering through the passes, she uncovers the keystone of a Scots Irish community: treasure troves in lyrics and paintings. She hears songs of a new type, folk ballads (love songs, as they say in the film) that impart meaning of ethos, even if under gritty details. Without a solid church building, we would expect nothing less from humans. By saying, “Oh, I simply can’t accept these…they weren’t scientifically collected.” she enacts the same harm her institute enforced on her. Through the loss of her phonograph, she has the ego realization that even without a proper framework, these songs are doing what institutions like church and academia cannot; allowing people to stay morally defined without strictures made inaccessible. As the poem, “The Emigrant Irish” by Eavan Boland, puts so profoundly plain: “And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.” This very Scots Irish mindset of “stick to our own, and our own stick together” is softened by the idea, what is there to lose against what there is to share?
Trauma has a tenacious tendency to harden people. The Field shows us this very firmly. A mother and father have lost their son to suicide at 13, and it has left Bull and Maggie McCabe speechless, literally not speaking to each other for 18 tough, long years. The first time Maggie speaks in the film is after Bull, and her son Tadhg, get into a fight over the inheritance of the land his brother killed himself over. As they leave, she hushes the hearth fire with ash, a method of preserving warmth from the times of ancient, drawing a Brigid cross and uttering a blessing so quiet you would have missed it as the men in her life did. Here she shifts from an absent mother to one who values the old ways of blessing and the new ways of prayer together, garnering the status of saint practically. Taking trauma, and softening it after the requirement is fulfilled of a body for protective firmness, she transforms not just herself within the structure she believes, a Catholic whose son’s sin of taking his life in his own hands instead of trusting God, his body buried outside the Catholic graveyard, and says “It is time to begin again where I am.”
Instead of remaining placed, another trauma reaction is to leave with hope that elsewhere will be better than herewhere. This is how America and Ireland meet over the years…ships crossing the Atlantic. While songs earlier referenced speak to motivations (“Hard Times Come Again No More” and “Paddy’s Lamentation”), this is where poetry becomes the how of faith giving fuel to hope to survive one of the globe’s most treacherously dangerous oceans. The shadow narrative hung low and heavy over Ireland. One couldn’t help but breathe in the air anger, leading to bitter isolation, bodily encroachment, and obsession with sexuality against the expectation of purity, all detrimentally reinforced in atmosphere by the church. Protestant and Catholic evenly guilty, even as the prior blamed the former of being loose with moral expectation. In a backwards seeming placement, we start with the poem “Going Back” by Eithne McKiernan. Suddenly, it is not a fear of God that moves, but a fear of the world he created. “Here it must be where you stood, one hand raised to shade your eyes against the harsh Atlantic grinding shoulders with the rocks below.” The journey begins with physical overwhelm, blinded eyes and grinded shoulders, waves smashing against a harsh coastline of rocks. “With ribboned wakes a deeper green, and each new ship a promise you couldn’t keep.” In these lines, the cost of coast is made clear in the deep green promise of what America offers, savings “guaranteed” via the tantalizing hope for money.
These days, some secular folks call it manifesting, but to sea the hope of a dreamed financial future through, one raised in church would call those murmurings prayer. I can only imagine, doing history the credit of belief, that as the person in a prior poem (“The Emigrant”) “fell asleep to the groans of oars” those creaks and splashes would be coming led with whispers of prayer, “please Lord let me make it another day” until weeks later he “awoke to a diesel thrust and sleet over mountainous seas.” Even on a boat, 5.2-meter waves would be enough to strike terror in the bravest of hearts, let alone meeting a storm mid-journey where 19-meter towers have been recorded. Why wouldn’t you invoke the higher power of God divine, which culture taught as the supreme protection? Even without deep belief, for the sake of survival, any one of the future Irish Americans could spare a prayer.
In songs, waves are made even more real than our poems have. “Trasna na dTonnta” puts lyrics to physics. “Trasna na dtonnta dul siar, dul siar, slán leis an uaigneas is slán leis an gcian, geal é mo chroí agaus geal í an ghrian, geal a bheith ‘g filleadh go hÉirinn” as a curfá gives us denominationless hope. Since spirituality is an evolved coping mechanism, hope first gave birth to this ability for belief. You cross the ocean both ways, making where you need and want home. Back in Ireland, “The Rolling Waves” is composed to the rhythm of waves crashing whether as fuel to leave or permission to come back. Meanwhile, inland on a train, once again waves are featured in “Leavetaking” by Greg Delanty. As the poem ends and love is lost, “both of you waving, eternally to each other”, serves a reminder that as time and life is spent, waves will keep crashing. Once more, Irish Americans are welcomed home, one by one in “Going Back”. He is back in Ireland, closing with the stanza “a stranger in both countries, I cannot make my roots take hold; can only stand and hear the sea.” bringing home poems and ghosts gifted by grandma, the spirits that guide when God won’t.
While peppered throughout the body of this paper, it is of critical importance we take close look at individual belief and make it personal. You can’t have a church without congregants in the pews, for these people are what make the institution as powerful and pervasive as they indeed claim to be. One of the most impactful examples of these people is found in the pages of Angela’s Ashes. As Frank has learned to priest-shop around Limerick, like many in his position of doors slammed again and again would be taught themselves, there is relief found in a priest who gives him human-to-human permission to not even pray one Holy Mary for a sin Frank will hold himself more than accountable. The one trained to keep his parishioners holy via guilted shame, in real immediate time says, “I see a boy here that needs the grace Jesus offers each of us…I will send him away free of damnation, for this is what the blood has done for me.” This moment of divinitive kindness mattered so much to an author coining the genre creative nonfiction, that he framed it so the reader could not miss it.
In Banished Children of Eve, we meet grace again, even against all belief to the contrary. As Eliza is being granted room and board by sex working, she is warned by the community around her that even one kindness will not go uncalled and uncashed. In her rides around New York, the man who could claim her body, offers her a chance to breathe air in the hustle and bustle, riding with good company on a good cart with a good horse, without calling in the payment society is training folks to exploit. Furthermore, the priest in On the Waterfront, recognizes his power to call on those who committed murder on behest of the Union mob bosses, to focus on each other’s humanity; even as his church is over his shoulder in inescapable shadow, and the bosses are darkening the entire scene below from their hawk-eye view! Empowerment generates bravery when enacted, in a way that maybe even God does not. We can’t control how others respond, this priest being egged mid-sermon, but we can control how we prompt and react, whether that be question and response A or B or C or Z, that our situation demands. My character in the play, Philadelphia Here I Come by Brian Friel, Con Sweeney uses the gentle guidance of “Honey…” to help his exuberant wife Liz stay checked in her extravagance, much like the Holy Spirit speaks softly in our hearts. The voice isn’t commanding as God the Father’s, and nary is religion in this play at all, but as the scathing Private Gar acts as a devil, it is critical that harshness have an out in gentleness. I can imagine Con expanding his role to Liz’s nephew, as they prepare their lace curtain home to welcome the maybe-he-will, maybe-he-won’t pressure Gar is feeling.
Finally, we have me. I was raised as a nondenominational Christian, whose parents shopped and returned churches until there was no “good enough” choice but to start their own. Faith has wholly coded me to who I am today. While I knew that growing up that my parents could start a church if they wanted to, it wasn’t until I escaped their authoritarian, abusive enforcement of faith, at the cost of two NDEs over 18 years, that I learned how much trauma danced with faith in the back of the auditorium. The fact that DMT prompted a hallucination of Jesus, was a moment of pride for M, my too present, self-sainted mother, is a stark reminder of how dangerous personal faith, organized religion, and shared power structure can be toxified.
While I had so many lifelines through the policing structure of church, music was one that has ever drawn me back through chapters of adulthood, even as I don’t profess this version of faith anymore. My parents believed that children belong in the sermon and not kids church, and this attempted control showed me a woman who would literally dance during the worship service. Her movement by music gave me a structure that would be life long, and I have now grown to not just freestyle at home, but study ballet in college. I remember the plays Evergreen Christian Community would put on with ASL interpreters, showing me that spirituality is in fact an embodied experience. This is why I know that between wave splashes and oak groans, prayer-to-sleep is what people do. History wouldn’t bother to remember this, but as a historian, I will and have.
For the sake of our emotional wellness, I must end this paper with smiles and laughs. Lucy as a character, and Lucille Ball, her real lifelong liver, was such a critical source of getting by as I faced danger daily. The factory task master, a Protestant to Lucy’s implicitly Irish Catholicism opens the scene of repeat failuring, giving our beloved ladies one last chance to keep their jobs. The scene opens, “Alllllll right girls. This {slaps conveyer belt} is the wrapping department.”, and I can’t help but start cracking up. A minute and a half later, the bellow of “Let ‘er rollll!” and the game is over before its even begun. Condemned to hell, we have to laugh because as Lucy puts it—in reference to vitameatavegemin, not the more eaten-than-wrapped chocolates she consumed— “it’s so tasty too!” How true is this for the intoxicating nutritional bitterness of life survived?
The planet Earth is huge, and as our biology urges us, we have to survive. Not so diminished as science frames to reproduce, but to be present for each new meaning discoverable. This paper has shown how by two sects of faith in Ireland and America and an ocean in betwixt, religion has been a force for relief, guidance and life-ending rejection. None of this as absolute as right or wrong, that is where the damage is done, but gray like spirits and ghosts and gods, sharing, it is only appropriate to keep asking questions and to find those answers in spirituality as an avenue. It is my hope that despite the length, there have been new offerings of the perspective of micro in macro offered as not lessons, but reminders that so long as we continue to organize together in parishes and mass, we also will continue to do what we do best, create art across media’s medium, and words to apply meaning where abstracts like faith and hope fail us.
archival note: This essay reflects my research, education, interpretation, and lived relationship to its subjects at the time of composition. I preserve it here as part of an evolving body of work rather than as a definitive historical account. there is undoubtedly room for growth, as experienced through and across seminars, lectures, coursework, and reading materials. this is one step in that process.
