To read the post in its optimal format please go to the Just A Thought website.
“Rise up, oh dead of Ireland, and rouse our living men. The chance has come to us to at last win our own again. Life springs from death and from the graves of dead patriot men and women spring living nations.” ~ Pádraig Pearse
St. Patrick’s Day is around the corner and I can’t help but think back to my visits with my grandparents at their house on Beacon Hill in Seattle.
Turns out those visits had a lasting effect on me.
My Grandpa was a singularly important figure in my life, helping to form me into the person I became.
He did so by illustrating a very important lesson — that one’s highest calling is found in the pursuit of a good and noble cause.
He found his in the fight for Irish independence — he lived and died an ardent Fenian.
“Ireland Forever”
My grandparents came from a land that had been subjugated for a millennium, stripped of its talent, resources and opportunity. Their lives mirrored the land where success was measured in the simple joys one took from surviving one day to the next.
They left Ireland in 1910 and came to America with only the clothes on their backs.
They were not poor, for what they lacked in material possessions they more than made up for with a wealth of:
- faith
- family
- culture
Their own history had taught them to hold in check dreamy thoughts of the future, to always draw their water from the well of reality. To that end they kept 100 pounds of potatoes stored away in the basement, just in case…
The memory of the “Great Hunger” was never far off.
It was this ferocious will to survive that fueled their passion.
“Le chéile a mhaireann muid, is le chéile a fhaigheann muid bás.”
“We live together, we die together.”
This truth was lodged in the marrow of their bones.
In it, they found passion, meaning and purpose in their lives, and because they did, the trajectory of my own life was formed.
These were not complicated people.
My grandparents taught their grandchildren NOT with high-minded pronouncements but with stories from the “old country.”
One memorable lesson took place at one of Grandpa’s birthday parties when I was about nine. These were wildly festive affairs with an abundance of laughter, stories — and maybe a little too much Irish whiskey.
But such as it was when the Irish came together.
On this occasion I noticed grandpa seated by himself, away from the activity, listening intently to a song playing on the phonograph.
He was crying.
I went over to him, put my hand on his shoulder and whispered, “What’s wrong?”
He said, “Paddy, I always tear up when I’m reminded of ‘the troubles.’” He went on to describe the story behind the song, The Minstrel Boy with his “warrior’s harp,” memorializing when many Irish boys were killed by British soldiers.
He rehearsed again the Irish history:
- a nation in chains,
- a populace subjugated,
- a culture oppressed.
How Ireland had lived through a perpetual state of rebellion, led by the United Irishmen, fighting to forge a republic based on the revolutionary principles of America.
These principles were living, breathing, motivating realities for him.
I was young and had never seen someone crying over such a cause. I thought this must have been a battle in which he himself had fought.
I asked, “What was it like to be there?”
“Oh no, lad. I wasn’t there. The battle was from a great uprising in 1798.”
Yet for Grandpa — emotionally — the battle had happened just yesterday.
My grandfather never lost his youthful, patriotic idealism, a sentiment he took to his grave.
“Ní síocháin go Saoirse.”
“No peace without freedom.”
Now I have reached the age of my grandfather and I have a nine-year-old grandson who looks at me as I once looked at my grandfather.
I ask myself, what does he see?
So much of my youthful passion has been drained away.
Irish independence is not my cause. But I pray to Almighty God that I might find again my own passion for a good and noble cause, that I might play the “warrior’s harp” for my grandchildren as my grandfather played it for me.
Just a thought…
Pat
*****
Listen now to the “Minstrel Boy,” the music that roused the heart of that passionate old Irishman.
To hear the music, please go to the Just A Thought website.