Pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick

Statue of St. Patrick on the Pilgrim Way up Croagh Patrick  ©A. Rutherford

Croagh Patrick (Irish: Cruach Phádraig) is a 764 metres (2,510 ft) mountain in the west of Ireland and an important site of pilgrimage. 

Every year more than a million visit Croagh Patrick. On "Reek Sunday," the last Sunday in July every year, over 15,000 pilgrims climb the mountain.

Croagh Patrick has been a site of pilgrimage, especially at the summer solstice, since before the arrival of Celtic Christianity.   

Saint Patrick reputedly fasted on the summit of Croagh Patrick for forty days in the fifth century and built a church there because it was the site of pagan worship of the she-demon Corra.   He is credited with the act of destroying that pagan religion and banishing all the snakes from Ireland.

In actual fact, the early Celts worshipped a stone god in the form of a serpent, so when all the pagan altars to this god were destroyed all over Ireland, Patrick in effect "drove the snakes from Ireland."   In truth, there were never any actual snakes there, and "banishing the snakes from Ireland" is understood as a metaphor.

A seam of gold was discovered in the mountain in the 1980s: overall grades of 14 grams (0.5 oz) of gold per tonne in at least 12 quartz veins, which could produce 700,000 t (770,000 short tons) of ore.   Mayo County Council elected not to allow mining, deciding that the gold was "fine where it was."   So now you know where the leprechuan has hidden the gold.   *grin* 

In modern times, a small chapel was built on the summit, and dedicated on 20 July 1905.

Magnificent views of Clew Bay and the surrounding south Mayo countryside are to be had from all stages of the ascent of the mountain.

Yours truly only attempted the climb once in April 2007 and only went part way up the climb, but enough to have had a wonderful "pilgrimage" for sure. 

Click HERE to view photos of my “pilgrimage” and the beautiful Irish landscape.

Old Irish Prayer

Alone with none but thee, my God,
I journey on my way.
What need I fear,
when Thou art near
O King of night and day?
More safe am I within Thy hand
Than if a host did round me stand.
                                                        -St. Columba

An old Celtic hymn

The Spirit of Place

Plein air watercolor ©A. Rutherford

The spirit of place is strong in the Celtic nature.  In a land of such sublime natural beauty how could it not be?  When Christianity was introduced to the Celts, they took quite naturally to the idea of the earth as full of the sacred creative power of God.  Or as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins describes it:  

“The earth is charged with the grandeur of God . . .”

For a plein air artist, the Irish countryside is indeed heaven on earth.

One of my favorite places to paint out in the open air is the Burren region of County Clare in the west of Ireland.   On one such occasion, I was sitting alone on these rocks looking at the scene which you see in the photo below (which I also took that day) in County Clare,  with my small backpack which contained a 11x14 block of my favorite watercolor paper, a plastic palette, a margarine container to hold my water, and a bottle of water and a sack lunch.  Seasoned travelers travel light!

Click on photo to enlarge

The whole point of working from nature for me is the freedom not to be bound by “studio rules,”  to allow myself to breathe in the spirit of the place where I am working and let it speak to me.   In this instance, I might have indicated with a  few light pencil lines where I wanted the horizon to be and some diagonal lines where I wanted to roughly position the rocks.  After a minimal block-in, I just start painting, first the sky, then working my way down and across the page.   I do the first layer of everything generally/lightly in shapes or areas of local color, then with almost calligraphic brush work I add the details, like the rock fissures, the small branches of the tree, the grasses, and maybe strengthen the darks, if they need it.

Click on sketch to enlarge  ©A. Rutherford

Obviously, if I take the time to draw the scene out carefully or make a value sketch, the composition perhaps will be better, the painting stronger.  BUT the sheer exhilarating joy and excitement of “communicating” with nature for me would be lost in the laboriousness of the careful drawing . . . the immediacy of experiencing the place lost as well.   

Let me see if I can explain it better . . . For me, painting nature immediately and intuitively like this would be the same as if I were taking my hands and tracing them caressingly over a loved one’s face to explore it.

When I paint like this, I am caressing Nature’s face.  Nature is whispering back to me in nuance.  It’s like I am saying to the scene, I want to know you intimately, and it reveals itself to my spirit through my eyes and hands.

I am in the environ of the painting, and it is in me.

For me, there is great freedom and joy in painting this way.

Now it hangs matted and framed over the fireplace in my bedroom, where I can lie in my bed, look at it, and be instantly transported to that place, that day, when there was no one for as far as I could see in any direction except me and the spirit of the place.

Irish Compensation 

To make up for the lack of mosquitos, 

snakes and the song of lively insects, 

He filled this land near to groaning with faeries, 

great winged dragons and saints. 

For the leaden low-hung skies, 

He gave vast sage seas rising to meet them 

And low, lambent hills 

adrift with fainéant, cumulus clouds of sheep. 

For the fog that slept low over the land 

He seasoned the air with peat-smoke, rotted loam, salt, 

Cast it with tireless gulls, lonesome hawks 

and the throated melody of thrushes. 

So they would not be wanting for trees, 

He mantled the land with primrose, sloe, gorse and heather, 

Partitioned it with moss-stone fences, 

And jewelled it with low thickets, cairned meadows and ancient bogs, 

For the wanting of grapes, currants, cherries 

and all the fruit of wine, 

He provided gentle. honey-ambered hills 

Thick with oats, grain and barley. 

For respite from the abiding sound of wind, 

and the hissing heave of the sea 

He blessed the people with music, voice, song and poetry 

And inspired them with lyrical places: Ballymurphy, Cork, Tralee 

And to ensure the enduring, endearing solitude. 

Of this stone strewn, virid place 

He hedged it with lonely, castle garrisoned cliffs. 

There to sit and say sonnets to the sea. 

©Christopher Earle

How the Irish Saved Civilization

photo of Ross Castle, County Kerry, ©A.Rutherford

Of course, this week is “Holy Week” for the Irish so I will have to be indulged for a bit of Irish history and lore.

We know that heroes come in all sizes, and that surely applies to nations too.   Otherwise, how could a small, isolated island that even the Romans weren’t interested in, in their quest to conquer the known world, have earned the reputation of having saved Western civilization during a dark period of history when the lights of learning were going out all over that world.  When the Roman empire began collapsing, great hordes of barbarians who did not value all that classical civilization had achieved for human history began to roam freely pillaging and destroying what they did not understand.  Much of what was important for the further flowering of civilization was at risk of being lost.

However, the Romans had brought Christianity to Britain, and the great Christian monasteries became centers of learning because the monks valued knowledge and truth.  In his best selling book How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill tells us the engaging story of how Ireland became one of the last bastions of civilization because it was a tiny outpost on the edge of the world of that day, difficult to get to and viewed as not worth the trip.   

In adverse circumstances, the Irish monks, because they considered it their sacred duty to preserve Truth, diligently and sacrificially worked to copy the great literature of the Western world and preserve it for all time.    Moreover, not only did they protect it from destruction, they redeemed the monotonous work of tediously hand-copying the texts by hand by creating works of Art through their beautifully illuminated manuscripts.  They valued the work that they were doing, and so they took the time and made the effort to do that work lovingly and well.  Cahill makes the case that who knows what might have happened in subsequent human history had the Irish not been faithful to their task?

Read about illuminated manuscripts at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts






From the author Thomas Cahill:

We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage--almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence.   And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance. In this series, The Hinges of History, I mean to retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West. This is also the story of the evolution of Western sensibility, a narration of how we became the people that we are and why we think and feel the way we do. And it is, finally, a recounting of those essential moments when everything was at stake, when the mighty stream that became Western history was in ultimate danger and might have divided into a hundred useless tributaries or frozen in death or evaporated altogether. But the great gift-givers, arriving in the moment of crisis, provided for transition, for transformation, and even for transfiguration, leaving us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they had found.

This quote by Niebuhr is placed at the beginning of How the Irish Saved Civilization as a thematic epigram.

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.  Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.  Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

                                                             -Reinhold Niebuhr

(click)

How the Irish Saved Civilization:
The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role 
from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe

"Without the mission of the Irish monks . . . the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one-

a world without books."  (page 4) 

I highly recommend all the books in the series 

The Hinges of History, by Thomas Cahill, a rich and

engaging way to refresh your understanding of history.

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Ancient Stones

the deserted village of Slievemore on Achill Island, Ireland  ©A.Rutherford

In many, many places all across Ireland, out of all the dreaming, planning and building, living and loving in a place, only the stones remain.

Slievemore is one such village on Achill Island, off the northwest coast of Ireland.  Achill is one of the best places to just go and be in Ireland.  The remains of the village are perched high upon the south slope of  Slievemore (Sliabh Mór) mountain, and consists of the remains of about 100 stone cottages set along what must have been a pathway or road that extends for about a mile.  These cottages at one time would have been thatched, and would have housed a thriving community.  For generations these people lived out their lives amongst the spectacular scenery of this place, until something happened.  No one is quite sure, but the consensus is that the Great Famine of 1845-49, created by the potato blight, caused the villagers to slowly die off from hunger or disease.

Despite its tragic history when you go there today, there is an overwhelming sense of peace.  The village is far from any neighboring towns, yet it is not a lonely place.  It is a place I return to because it is a blessing to me.  For me, Slievemore is one of those “thin places” the old ones in Ireland used to speak of . . . those places in the landscape which are sort of thresholds where two worlds meet . . . the temporal and the eternal . . . the inner and the outer . . . the spiritual and the physical . . . the past and the present.  

The aspect of patience conveyed by the stones and the sky strikes a chord with me.   It's like the earth is saying, "I've got all the time in the world. Be here with me now."   And to connect to that timelessness is either healing and invigorating, whichever one is in need of at the time.

The Deserted Village 

I have come here to this place to be alone,

And for my restless spirit seek some calm.

I lay my hand to rest on ancient stone

And feel the captured sun upon my palm.

My fingers trace the crevices and moss,

The tangled vines speak like some ancient braille.

The softly moist breezes play and toss

Time’s curtain to the side like a veil.

I see mystic forms flit along the lanes

That mark the intersections of their lives.

I hear empty echoes of their joys and pains,

These stones their only vestige that survives.

Ruined houses sit in order row by row,

As if some meaning once was there,

But now between the cobbles grasses grow

And leave the world no trace of their despair.

Each morning mists rise from atop the mountain

Which sheltered life and love along these lanes.

Each evening mist rolls down again,

To rest like a blessing on what remains.

With benediction too I leave this place,

And carry with me memories as a grace.

                                                               ©.A.Rutherford

The Irish poet William Butler Yeats took an old stone ruin near Galway, a square, four storied Norman castle keep, and restored it to a place where he could settle and write, but still be in touch with the continuity of Irish history.  I guess you could say he built his own “ivory tower.”

He created this inscription which was placed on the front wall:

I, the poet William Yeats,

With old millboards and sea-green slates,

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George,

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

That's becoming part of the flow of history, to be sure . . .

Of course, for people of Faith there is a more sure foundation . . .

Psalm 118:22-24 

 22 The stone that the builders rejected
      has now become the Cornerstone.
 23 This is the Lord’s doing,
      and it is wonderful to see.
 24 This is the day the Lord has made.
      We will rejoice and be glad in it.

Isaiah 26:4 
 4 Trust in the Lord always,
      for the Lord God is the eternal Rock.

And yeah, I gather stones from various places I visit as mementos . . . I guess no one looking at them sitting on my shelves would know where they "belong" or what memories they “contain,” but that doesn't matter to me.  *smile*

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In Search of Stones

on the beach at Cleggan, Connemara, Ireland ©A. Rutherford

All my life I have had an inexplicable affinity for stones, some sort of visceral response to rocky places, whether mountain side or shore line. Craggy cliffs both enchant me and provoke me to deep thought. As I am a very tactile person, I enjoy their texture and temperature under my hands, and am often prompted to touch them or move my hands across their surfaces.

I think there is something of Eternity in stones.

Beach Boulders at Cleggan

Do they protect the land or hedge the sea,

These ancient rocks that lie along the shore?

Tumbled there through Time, what might be

The mystery they invite me to explore.

Rapport with rocks, such an absurdity,

But something strikes me at my very core,

Some message here for which they hold the key,

So I walk alone amongst them there once more.

Though lying mute through the ages, they speak as silently

As pages filled with words that answer what I quest for.

No, I have no explanation for the stones' connection with me,

But I know there’s something missing they restore.

As Time eddies in and ‘round them, they rest secure,

And bear witness to my heart, it too shall endure.

                                                                               ©A. Rutherford

Of course, at the risk of a very bad pun, Ireland is a "field day" for people who are enamoured of stones . . . stone cottages, stone walls, stone ruins of abbeys and castles, stony cliffs. So many "rocky places" to explore and experience, from the mystery of the earliest Celtic burial dolmens to the vast vista of the Burren to the cozy cottages nestled under their thatched roofs.

Others have responded to Ireland's stony story as well.   John Betjemen, an English poet laureate, describes the stark landscape so well in the second half of his poem "Ireland with Emily."

Stony seaboard, far and foreign,

Stony hills poured over space,

Stony outcrop of the Burren,

Stones in every fertile place,

Little fields with boulders dotted,

Grey-stone shoulders saffron-spotted,

Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds,

. . .

Click photo to enlarge

And they bicycle on together until . . .

Till there rose, abrupt and lonely,

A ruined abbey, chancel only,

Lichen-crusted, time-befriended,

Soared the arches, splayed and splendid,

Romanesque against the sky.

 . . .

Sings its own seablown Te Deum,*

In and out the slipping slates

Todd Davis is a well-received Mennonite poet who teaches creative writing and environmental studies at Penn State Altoona. His poetry emphasizes the importance of place. 

Here are some of his thoughts on making poetry out of stones:

“One of my earliest memories takes place in Connecticut at my maternal grandparents' home. I'm playing on an old stone wall that borders their backyard. A row of cedar trees grows across the way. The green seems almost unbearable when I remember it today: both of my grandparents dead, my own parents growing older. I spy a rose-colored piece of granite three stones from the top of the wall. At this age, I don't understand the way rock latches to rock, holding back the weight of the sky. I slowly wrestle this hard rose from the gray thorns that surround it. Several large stones crash down when I finally pull my prize free, and my index finger is crushed, leaving an indelible impression about the price of beauty. 

Wrestling with words is an equally dangerous act as removing a stone from a wall. Each word precariously balances upon the other, and like a stone wall, the words take on another life when placed together, standing for something that they could not stand for alone.”

But he goes on to say:   

“As most writers will confess, however, I am more than willing to risk the pain in building poems because of my desire to touch others with what I have seen.” 

He speaks of the light that he received from other poets he read and studied:

"whose work spilled out before me like light shining through the canopy of leaves in a maple. With the help of this light, I began to select stones from my own life, carefully brushing away the mud so I might see all of the blemishes and imperfections that make such stones unique and worthy of telling. Soon poems began to appear, their structures unfolding out of the natural world where they were born.  

    Of course, there are still many days when I cannot find the light. I am part of the earth, and the rhythms of sky offer days of cloud, as well as days when sun and moon hang together into late morning. On gray mornings, I try to remind myself of the blessing found in all days - the kind of light that sifts slowly down through cloud and fog - and then begin my work with words. Some mornings this means waiting in silence, but more often I find in the silence some memory breaking in like a fallen branch snapped underfoot, white bottom of a doe flashing back into the undergrowth."

To read the essay from which these excerpts are quoted, go to

Looking for the Light: Making Poems from the Improbable

Nota Bene:  One reviewer said of Todd Davis:  

“I love the integrity, sincerity, and wisdom of Todd Davis’s poems. He is unafraid to write out of a deep faith—both religious faith and faith in the natural world. In a poetic landscape that often seems biased toward the cynical and clever, Davis’s poems unapologetically strive for the mountaintop. They make clear that the natural world still has a few things to teach us, or remind us of things we once knew but have forgotten. They sing with imagistic intensity, and their hard-hitting rhythms accentuate the world’s natural pulse. The restraint and humility of these poems belies their underlying passion and commitment. They are pure and sharp, so sharp they cut.

                              -Jim Daniels, author of Show and Tell, 

Winner of the Brittingham Prize

*Te Deum -The Te Deum is an early Christian hymn of praise.   The title is taken its opening Latin words, rendered literally as "Thee, O God, we praise."  The text has been set to music by many composers, among them Haydn, Mozart, Verdi, Dvorak, Britten, and John Rutter.

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Lost in Wonder

                       View from Minaun Heights, Achill Island, County Mayo one special night

                                                © A. Rutherford      See photo notes below 

When we move with poetry and the imagination

when we deal with symbols and images,

we become people who are happy with mystery

and open to discovery.

To deepen the mystery.

to embrace complexity is risky.

We need to have courage

enough to be ready for an unveiling

which can be a startling process.

                           -Rowan Williams

Solitude, silence, beauty, wonder—

these are things that are intangible, ephemeral, ethereal, ineffable really . . .

"soft" things . . . 

yet they can "steel" the soul for when those times come that demand more courage 

than one thinks one has and provide a cushioning, an embrace if you will, that comforts . . . that then allows one in turn to embrace the mystery that is at the heart of life 

in spite of circumstances which would keep one earthbound.

It is important to understand that poetry, art, music, imagination, creativity all are gifts that if accepted help us to transcend the things of this life that hurt, confuse, dismay, disappoint.

These gifts are symbols .  . . they point to the sun that is always shining above the clouds no matter the weather on earth below them.  

Recently there has been a time of heavy weather in my life, but my soul, my spirit, can rise above the clouds to that place where I can dwell in Light . . . at least in my heart and my mind, even if no one else around me knows that in my secret place, God is at work. 

In the Celtic Christian tradition, Celtic saints were peregrini, wanderers.  They set off in their small fragile boats to go wherever the wind of the Spirit might take them, and the goal of their journey was to find "the place of their resurrection," by which they meant their true selves, the resurrected self—the secret self known only to each of us and to God and perhaps to an Anam Cara, the Gaelic term for a soul friend.

They didn't care where they went on their pilgrimage because they were motivated by their love for God, and they undertook their journeys to come closer to Him.  They knew that their true journey toward the precious thing they were searching for was really to be found within themselves.  So the outward journey was a way of expressing the inward journey they were making.  What did one achieve at the end of such a quest?  One achieved stability of soul and gladness of heart despite all circumstances.

At the end of the journey was Joy . . .

Photo Notes:  Achill Island is off the western coast of Ireland, and is one of my favorite spots on earth.  Can you imagine standing atop the third highest elevation on the island late one evening as the sun goes down and suddenly before you the world takes on a transcendent glow?  A scene of magical, breath-taking beauty . . . other-worldly in its aspect.  I didn't think my camera could possibly capture the mystery of the beauty stretching before me, but I was blessed in that it did. 

Psalm 121:1-2 (NLT)

A song for pilgrims ascending to Jerusalem

I look up to the mountains—

   does my help come from there?

My help comes from the Lord,

   who made heaven and earth! 

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