On Easter morning the sky was just beginning to lighten over Clew Bay just outside of Westport as I ducked through the doorway and entered the ruins of Murrisk Abbey to attend Dawn Mass.  The jagged walls of the ruins were silhouetted against the purple sky.
            Storms were on the horizon, with thunder and lightning having been reported in nearby Galway, so the priest began by saying he “would not test the Lord” but would move the service along quickly.  Indeed, the sky first lightened a bit with the dawn but then darkened, and as a pelting rain let loose the abbey sprang a new and colorful ceiling, with umbrellas plentiful enough to keep the congregation dry.
            Outdoor Easter dawn Masses are common in Ireland, especially in the west. The tradition reminded me of the continuity of nature spirituality that linked early Celtic Christian beliefs to pre-Christian Celtic forbears. 
            The Celts, of course, were not the first peoples of Ireland.  People began arriving in Ireland at the end of the last Ice Age, much the same as in our own Driftless Region.  As with most indigenous peoples, nature was central to their spirituality.  Neolithic Irishmen built temples cum tombs cum observatories to mark the solstices and equinoxes, possibly linking the practical knowledge of the skies (important to agriculture) to rituals for the dead.
            When Celtic culture arrived around 500 B.C.—likely by migration and osmosis, not by invasion as the Celtic mythologies would claim—the landscape continued to be viewed as spiritual.  Amergin, the first Celtic poet according legend, chants the words of the creator-god:
 
      I am the wind which breathes upon the sea
     I am the ocean wave,…
     I am a sunbeam,
     I am the fairest of plants,
     I am a wild boar in valour,
     I am a salmon in the water,
     I am a lake in the plain,…
     I am the God who lights fire in the brain.
     Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain?
     Who announces the ages of the moon?
     Who teaches the place where the sun makes his bed?
 
            Water, special stones, certain animals, and oak trees were just a few of nature’s key spiritual elements for pre-Christian Celts.  This is not surprising for a rural culture that did not develop cities, as did continental Europe, especially as the latter came under the influence of the Roman Empire.
            But the Romans never conquered Ireland, never attempted to, and even as Christianity came to Ireland (shortly after the withdrawal of the Roman Empire from Britain), the Celtic Christian church retained the rural reverence for nature held by the pre-Christian Celts in ways that the continental Christian Church did not.  Indeed, for the continental Church, even the word for a non-Christian belied the Church’s bias toward the city: the word “pagan” derives from a word meaning a “country person.”
            Holy wells of the pre-Christians continued as holy wells dedicated to saints. Sacred stones of the pre-Christian Celts were incorporated into medieval monastic abbeys.  Animals reverenced by the pre-Christian Celts retained their importance to the Christian Celts. (One need only to hear the legend of St. Kevin, nursing in his outstretched hand a bird’s egg laid there as he prayed.)  The oak retained its importance for the Celtic Christians: the name Killdare, for example, means simply the “church [cill] by the oak [dara].”  Even certain saints like Brigit demonstrated a continuity with the past:  Brigit the goddess had been a patron of poets, St. Brigit a patron of the arts.   
            This Celtic Christian Church was notably different from the Romanized Church, but was not consciously in rebellion—the Reformation was still more than a millennium away.  Rather, the world was a large place in the fourth century, and communication slow and difficult.  Local differences among Christian communities were to be expected.  But the lack of cities in Ireland reduced the influence of city-loving and uniformity-inducing bishops.  Instead, local monastery abbots held more influence than bishops, and the Irish church went on its merry individual way.
            This would change in steps and stages over the centuries.  The Irish church finally gave in on such matters as recognizing Rome’s date for Easter, how to wear monastic tonsures (Irish monks shaved the front half of their heads bald instead of the more iconic continental monk’s top bald spot!).  The Anglo-Norman invasion/osmosis brought the ascendancy of bishops and continental monastic orders.  The English Protestant Reformation and Penal Laws drove the Irish Catholic Church underground—and in some ways back to nature by necessity, with outdoor Masses at Mass Rocks.  But at the same time, religious oppression drove the Irish to embrace the Romanized Church as an act of resistance against the British.  Slowly the Celtic belief in the goodness of nature was replaced by Roman denigration of the body, denigration of the physical universe.
            But an indigenous spirituality always operated alongside the traditional church in Ireland—walking in pilgrimages, circling in bonfire walks, worshipping at holy wells, tying trinkets to prayer trees.  All of these had their roots in pre-Christianity, and the institutional church gave a nervous, begrudging approval or looked the other way.
            The spirituality of nature has been continuous in Ireland through migrations and intermingling of different peoples, through introduction of new religions such as Celtic Druidism and Celtic Christianity, and through invasions and external threats in ways that did not happen in our own country.  ]In contrast, American culture lacks this continuous, ongoing link to the landscape due to a self-inflicted disconnect dating to Native Americans being forced from the land.  As a result, their stories and spiritualties are largely lost to the rest of us.  (The British, it might be said, attempted to the do the same in Ireland, but didn’t fully succeed.)
            Connections, or disconnections, to the present are more complicated? As Ireland becomes increasingly urbanized, modernized, and globalized, the link of people to place is wearing thin, especially among the younger generations. 
            But the implosion of institutional religion—the Catholic Church’s abuse scandals in Ireland, for example, were even more egregious than in our own, and the Church has paid a heavy price as a result—has left an opening for nature spirituality to re-emerge.  A revival of interest in Celtic sensibilities infused with strands of Hinduism, Buddhism, and various personal flavorings is helping to re-establish the link of people to landscape. 
            Perhaps Laudato Si will put the institutional Church back into the conversation as well.
 
            The rain let up as the Easter Dawn Mass came to end, and we all closed our umbrellas, gave our thank-you’s to the priest who had served us through the downpour, and ducked down to exit the ruins.  Clew Bay was at high tide, and several of us paused at the shore to watch small waves gather in the breeze.  To the west, Croagh Patrick loomed, its peak just barely visible in the squall still emptying on the mountain.
            This is an old, old land, I realized, but no older than my own in the Driftless region.  Earth land has stories.  That’s what makes it spiritual to believers and nonbelievers alike.  The deeper the stories—geological, religious, historical, personal—the more spiritual it is.
            But people can lose connection with the land.  It may happen through genocide, through which an indigenous people’s stories are lost.  It may happen through modernization, which offers a false impression that we can with impunity trade physical places for virtual ones..  Even modern ecology can ironically dissociate us from spiritual landscapes if there is no room to consider the stories of the land.
            Even so, about a hundred people had gathered in the dark at Morrisk Abbey even with the threat of immanent rain on Easter morning. They could have slept in, gone to church some place with a roof and heat, or ignored the ancient feast altogether. 
            Somehow I think those gathered did so to keep alive the stories of that place.
            That is a spiritual event. 

Bog Blog #3:  Glendalough
 
          Stone-slabbed tombstones and weather-beaten Celtic crosses lean askew like jumbled toothpicks among the ruins of the monastic city.  The tumbled walls at Glendalough proclaim the rise and fall of Ireland’s Golden Age of Saints and Scholars.  But I have not met anyone who hasn’t felt this place curiously alive today.
Glendalough, located 30 miles southwest of Dublin, means Valley of the Two Lakes in Gaelic.   The ruins rest at the end of a narrow, glacially sculpted U-shaped valley flanked by 500-foot tall semi-forested ridges, an oasis of green in the rocky and bog-strewn Wicklow Mountains.  Just beyond the edge of the monastic city lie the lake shores of the Upper and Lower Lakes with their clear mountain waters reflecting the sharp slopes of the cliff walls.
           St. Kevin, or Coemgen (pronounced Cave-Yin), chose this valley for his monastery in the sixth century.  A lover of nature and solitude, Kevin himself frequently retreated to a cave high above the Upper Lake, known today as St. Kevin’s Bed, where he lived as a hermit for long periods before returning to the monastery proper.  Still, even in his solitary retreat he welcomed guests and friends, provided they could reach him in his steep, cliff-faced dwelling.
           But the monastery he founded was anything but hermetic, and in the centuries following his death Glendalough grew to become a major center of religion and learning, a “monastic city” of monks, lay peasants, and surrounding landed patrons.  
          Just a few generations removed from St. Patrick’s Christianization of Ireland, monasteries were popping up across the island like mushrooms.  Some, like Skellig Michael off the southwest coast, were built on wind-battered rocks where monks subjected themselves to nature’s harshest tunes.  Others, like Glendalough, drew their energy from nature’s lavish abundance.
          This was Ireland’s Golden Age, from the fifth to the ninth century.  After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 400’s, continental Europe found itself in a state of chaos amid the power vacuum.   Since the Romans had never set out to conquer Ireland—having peered at its shores from England and writing it off as Hibernia, the Land of Winter—Ireland didn’t experience Rome’s sudden withdrawal. 
          From such monasteries came learned men and women of the Golden Age.  They were the secretaries and printing presses of the day, writing histories of the pre-Christian Celts and copying Christian holy books with exquisitely scrolled artwork.  Over the next few centuries they effectively re-Christianized the continent, re-establishing monasteries, churches, and places of learning where ruins had been left in the wake of the Roman departure.
           But changes lurked on the horizon.  Vikings sacked the monastic city for gold vessels and other treasure several times between 900 and 1100 A.D..  Glendalough survived these plundering expeditions, but finally met its end at the hands of the Anglo-Normans.  The armies of King Richard II destroyed the monastery in 1398, fearing the potential power of an Irish center of learning amid the spreading and thickening Anglo-Norman seats of power.
           Then Glendalough entered its long sleep.  Locals buried their dead among and within the decaying walls.  Today the Round Tower, St. Kevin’s Church, the Gateway, the Cathedral, and several other structures serve as reminders of the Golden Age.  Some are mere sections of remaining walls, while others have been reconstructed.
But the forested hills and the clear lakes keep Glendalough alive.  An off-shoot of the 80-mile Wicklow Way hillwalking trail traverses the mountainside, and a three-hour ridge trail encircles the lakes on boardwalk spanning rock, bog, and forest.  A mountain stream cascades through Poulnass Falls.  
          One such side-trail in the upper hills leads to St. Kevin’s Cell, another removed but less severely hermetic site than his cave bed.  Here the story is told how Kevin cradled a nesting blackbird in the palm of his outstretched hand for weeks until her young hatched and flew away.  The apocryphal story no doubt points to his love of nature.
          But the poet Seamus Heaney imagines Kevin dissolving into the landscape itself throughout the ordeal:  “For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird / And on the river bank forgotten the river’s name.” 
Ireland’s medieval monastic Golden Age long ago fell into ruins alongside the weathered stones.  But at Glendalough it still feels present and alive.  Like St. Kevin nursing his blackbird’s nest, the stone walls of the monastic city dissolve into the lush forest and clear mountain lakes, and go on living. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
             
 

           On Sunday I took a second guided hike in the Wicklow Mountains, led again by mountaineering expert Russ Mills (Mountaintrails.com).  This time we were joined by Dr. Tom Davis (Loras Biology professor who is faculty director for this year’s group of Loras students studying in Dublin), his wife Barb, a twenty-something American couple stationed apart from each other in Texas and Germany, and a young French midwife. With younger blood to spur us on and two experts on mountaineering, plants, and wildlife, I hit the jackpot for learning about the bog.
          Hike #2 also began from Glendalough), but this time went south of the monastic ruins (I’ll talk about the Glendalough monastery next time).  We hiked for about 9 miles in 5 hours, climbing through the bogs of Derrybaun Mountain to Mullacor and descended to the Spinc, a bluff trail that edges the bluff high above Glendalough’s mountain lakes. 
          I’m slowly learning about bog plants and Wicklow Mountain wildlife.  Only sphagnum mosses grow in the actual bog pools.  Not only are they one of the few plants that can survive the wet environment, but they also turn the water acidic so that no other competitor plants could grow there.  As these mosses die off each season, they only partly decay in the anaerobic water, and the partially decayed plant matter builds up season after season forming peat, which when cut, dried, and burned, is called turf, which used to be burned like firewood.  Indeed, any organic matter tossed into the bog—including ancient “bog bodies”—never fully decays.
But there’s lots of life as well! Frogs like the bog. Tom scooped handfuls of frog eggs for us and commented on their developmental stages.
          Sedges and rushes are two other kinds of bog and upland plants.  Tom taught me the difference between the two:  Rushes are Round and Sedges have Edges! The tubular rushes—used in making thatched roofs—remind me of horsetail plants without the segmentation.  Sedges are grasses that grow in small clumps.
         Wildlife in the bog and wet uplands includes foxes and mountain hares and peregrine falcons.  The Irish mountain hare was thought to be a subspecies of the continental mountain hare, because the Irish version did not turn white in winter.  Until a few years ago, that is, when a succession of hard winters brought more snow than usual to the mountains and turned the Irish hares white for the first time since biologists had recorded them.  Scientists were amazed and had to reclassify the hare as being the same as the continental version.  But if scientists were surprised, what about the hares?!  They must’ve thought they’d all gone prematurely grey!
          In the end, though, it is the history of the Wicklows that most amazes me.  One quick story:  In 1592, Irish rebels Art O’Neill and Red Hugh O’Donnell escaped from a British prison in Dublin Castle on Christmas Eve, made their way through town, and then, under cover of darkness fled up into the Wicklow Mountains toward the stronghold of the rebellious O’Neill clan.  But Art had been more severely weakened by imprisonment than the younger Hugh, and he died during the night on a mountainside in view of our hike.  
Dubliners still commemorate his escape with a 53-kilometer charity hike from Dublin Castle to the Wicklow Mountains every January!
          The Wicklow Mountains were both bane and refuge for Irish rebels over the years.  In the end, the British resorted to building military roads and barracks in the mountains, and deforesting the landscape (no hiding in the trees) to try to scout them out. 
          Even during the Civil War that followed independence, the Wicklows became a hideout for republicans who wanted to fight on to include Northern Ireland in the Republic.  In 2012 I went bicycling by myself in the Wicklow Mountains, and off in the distance along a mountain road I noticed a monument halfway up the mountainside and a pathway leading to it.  Curious, I dropped my bike and walked up the pathway, only to discover a monument to a republican fighter, a member of the IRA, who had been murdered at that site by his own countrymen who had undoubtedly fought at his side for independence. 
Ireland isn’t my home country, but I couldn’t help feeling the loneliness of that place, far from any human companions. 
          Nothing fully disappears in the bog.  Memory always lingers on.
 

I arrived in Ireland on Tuesday, March 8.  On Wednesday I signed up for a guided Wicklow Mountain hike, given by Russ Mills of Mountaintrails (I highly recommend him!).  I was the only hillwalking customer for the day, but Russ picked me up anyway from City Centre and took me out to Glendalough, where he led me on an individualized, four-hour guided hike of the Brockaghs, a set of rounded peaks in the bog-laden mountains just north of the medieval ruins of the Glendalough monastery (founded, of course, by St. Kevin in the 6th century).
         Russ’s undergraduate training was as a geologist, so he may have been surprised at how many geology questions this English professor asked him.  I learned a lot about shiny mica schist, which in the Wicklow Mountains is metamorphized from mudstones and sandstones when the sea bottom was uplifted and raised into mountain peaks.  Glaciation, however, rounded off most of Ireland’s peaks and formed great U-shaped valleys, such as the valley which hosts the two lakes of the monastic city.  (Glendalough means the valley of the two lakes.) Higher up the mountain side we came across the line—almost as if it were etched across the landscape like a border—where the schist gave way to the granular granite. 
         Russ also told me about historical features of the Brockagh region, such as the trail where the British soldiers used to march in training and on the lookout for Irish rebels in the 1798 rebellion.
      On Sunday I go out on another hike with Russ, this time on the southern flanks of Glendalough.