The Apostate Goes to Church

I can take a photo of a Harry Clarke window, but I won’t like it. 

The Last Judgement, St. Patrick’s Newport, Co. Mayo. 

Even photographs taken with professional equipment and printed in books or websites cannot capture what happens to me when I’m with one of them. 

The Last Judgement, St. Patricks, Newport, Co. Mayo. Photo by Jimmy Freeley
jimmyfreeley.ie

I can write about the experience of standing beneath one, but when I read it later it’s a dream journal: wisps of memory without substance or relevance. Scribbles, lots of ellipses, neologisms. 

So I’ll keep my feelings to myself, and write about the faith I find while standing before a Harry Clarke window. 

Stained glass windows in churches are religious pictures with evil intent, a craft invented in the middle ages to trick people into thinking they will find healing and happiness only in self-sacrifice, obedience, and a fixation on the unknown beyond death. 

That’s how I lecture myself as I stand outside a church, anyway.

St. Mary’s, Ballinrobe

Ballinrobe is a small town in Co. Mayo, in the west of Ireland. You probably haven’t heard of it. If you search for “What is Ballinrobe famous for?” you will be directed to the nearby even smaller village of Cong, where Americans filmed a movie a long time ago. 

The outside indicates nothing the inside.  

Ballinrobe’s modest church contains a sublime art experience worthy of coach tours and shuttle buses from a car park at the edge of town. Lucky for us, and for the solace of the people of Ballinrobe, it’s open all day, quiet, and free of charge. 

St. Mary’s, Ballinrobe

The left wall features Irish saints, on the right are scenes from the life of Jesus and Mary. The photos below are from the book you can buy from the church office in the back for €10. (Harry Clarke’s Liquid Light) 

Roman Catholics and the Church of Ireland recognize the same Irish saints. They are not like the mediterranean martyrs in my childhood haigiographies. Irish saints lived exemplary lives, blessing wells, healing the sick. None of them are evangelists, queens, or palm bleeders. 

This is St. Kieran contemplating the transience of life, as you can see from the skull. Light flies from the candle in golden drops,  and a friendly deer tells us he’s in a forest, not a town. I choose not to see the crucifix; it’s gross. 

In some windows, I recognize events from the lives of Jesus and Mary. This one is about where Jesus instructs his followers to provide childcare. 

This window is about that time when Jesus taught everyone to share their lunch. 

This detail from St. Fechin’s window may be a Clarke self-portrait. It’s now known as the Harry Potter window. 

This is St. Bridget, one of three windows at the rear of St. Mary’s. 
Clarke designed it, but died before it was finished by the artists of his studio. 
You can see they were well trained, but didn’t have Clarke’s skills. 

Not too far away from Ballinrobe is St. Patrick’s of Newport. Behind its altar is The Last Judgement. My terrible photo of it is at the top of this post. I can still remember how I felt as I entered the church. I needed to open my arms to absorb it. 

Harry Clarke created his windows during a cultural movement known as the Celtic Revival, c. 1880 to 1920. This period also coincided with concerted effort by the Catholic hierarchy to build new churches—it was only recently legal to do so—financed by donations of the Irish diaspora.

St Mary’s also contains windows by Harry Clarke’s father,
Joshua, completed about ten years earlier. 

The artists, poets, playwrights, and mystics of the Celtic Revival successfully challenged the political power of Britain when they took their dreams and made them real. They believed art could build a nation, and it did. 

The lasting result the Celtic Revival coinciding with a boom in ecclesiastical commissions are dozens of Celtic Revival churches, each of them a celebration of Irish expertise in sculpture, tile, plaster, paint, embroidery, and stained glass. Churches like St. Mary’s,  St. Patrick’s of Newport, St. Brendan’s in Lough Rea and St. Patrick’s in Armagh.  

Churches where apostates like me enter and ignore our catechism, swept away by the power of art. 

What Mountains Say

Last week I was in Co. Armagh for the AE / George Russell Festival. George Russell, known by his pen name of “Æ,” was a friend of the poet and mystic Ella Young. 

I’ve written about Æ before when I wrote about the history of our neighborhood, “History with a Twist.” 

Æ is difficult to describe. He was a painter and poet and publisher. He was a community organizer who established a network of agricultural cooperatives in the early days of an independent Ireland. He promoted other writers; his most successful protégée was Pamela Travers, the author of Mary Poppins. 

Musician Finbar Magee has written a song that tries to describe him, and he released it at the festival. We were the first to hear it. 

During the festival, a monthly event called Flash Fiction Armagh was held in honor of Æ, with the theme of Sacred Mountain. I was thrilled that the organizers chose my story “What Mountains Say.”

I also gave a talk at the festival, which I will post when the video is available.