PLAYING THE "BELIEVING GAME" IN IRELAND

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From A Spiritual Field Guide -
Meditations for the Outdoors
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One summer - it was 1975, when I was a willfully drifting college student - I visited Ireland for the first time.  I arrived there after two weeks of hitchhiking in Scotland, a country that completely caught me off guard by its beauty and its history.  Ireland was in some ways disappointing; I had imagined it as being more beautiful than it turned out to be.  It took me a while to realize that, while Scotland's majestic scenery amounted to one symphonic crescendo after another, Ireland is better understood as a sweet but unforgettable folk melody.
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Hitchhiking through County Mayo I arrived
 in the little town of Newport.
  Croagh Patrick, a mountain that is a pilgrimage site,
 stands behind the town.

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I decided I needed to stay put for a few days,

so I pitched my tent in an oak-filled campground that overlooked Clew Bay with its 365 islands.
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My days at Clew Bay were both empty and strangely full;

actually, most of my time there consisted of sitting on the shore, walking around the town, visiting the graveyard, and killing time until the evening when it reached a seemly hour to go to a pub and get drunk.  But it was one of those unencumbered spans we rarely get as adults, or even as young people - a time when the deeper soul can at last have a chance to re-tune itself.  And waiting around at Clew Bay is not like waiting in a bus station or hanging around the airport for a delayed flight, not like waiting with your thumb out for a ride.  The area was charged with a harmony and a wholeness that I have never encountered elsewhere.  I'm sure a hundred places in Ireland make better postcards, but it was, nonetheless,
 a beauty-haunted landscape. 

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I've heard people say of the Greek islands that

if you spend a little time there, you realize that
 some sort of god is present. 
 The same thing was going on at Clew Bay.

In the town, a shopkeeper who sold me an apple said that the early Irish monks had a tradition of going island to island, spending a day in prayer on each one for a whole year's time.  The ghosts of those monks hung in the air and in the light.  That Sunday, I went to Mass.  It was tedious; by no stretch could I claim that I was given faith at that point.  But in this seaside village, some impediment to faith was removed; I was able, as Simone Weil says, to play the believing game.

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Because of that experience, I could not be as dismissive

of the faith and tradition into which I had been born.  I am convinced that a sacred geography was at work.  When I crawled out of my little orange pup tent to spend a day looking at the bay, I was stepping near to something supernatural.

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James Silas Rogers

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