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 disciples to fund free 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. 

New to the Parish

I sent the following to the Irish Times, and they ran our story in the Feb 14 issue. 

People often want to know why my wife and I moved to Ireland from Santa Cruz, California.

Sometimes I say we moved for the dairy products, sometimes for the weather. Usually I say we’re here because of the people.

We came to Ireland planning to stay three months, maybe a year if permitted.

That was eight winters ago.

We first rented a friend’s house in Kerry, and when she sold it, we considered staying nearby in the familiar culture of Cork City and Midleton. As much as I love The Oval and Ballycotton fish and chips, because we could live anywhere on the island, we thought we’d try somewhere different. We ended up between Dunfanaghy and Creeslough. We soon met another lesbian woman with a dog that looked just like ours. One evening, she sang “Homes of Donegal” to us at our fireside. We’d found the place where the people’s hearts are like mountains.

We hope we can stay here forever. Maybe it’s their hearts, or maybe the mountains, but Donegal welcomes strangers and the strange. No one we’ve met cares we’re lesbians or don’t go to church. We like the music at The Shamrock, Glenveagh’s flowers, swimming at Portnablagh in all weathers. We’ve made a small circle of friends, watched the neighbor kids grow up, and appreciate what Letterkenny offers besides Aldi.

Then there was the disaster at the petrol station. If you’ve lived through a tragedy like that, you already know what I’m going to say: you learn who your neighbors are. You know the lengths neighbors you didn’t know you had will go to repair, to console, to reflect.

I didn’t think I could love this place more, and I wanted to give something back.

I fell in with a small group of people in Ireland and California who are raising the profile of Irish poet and mystic Ella Young. Young was active in the Celtic Revival; she preserved and retold stories from Irish folklore. After the revolutionary period, she left Ireland forever. She was 58 years old. She taught Irish Mythology at Berkeley and published three books of Irish stories. She brought to America the Irish concept of cóir, sometimes translated as “natural balance.” It’s a common theme in Irish mythology, just in time to influence the counter-cultural movements California is known for.

Like many emigrants, Ella Young is not well remembered in Ireland. Her memoir, Flowering Dusk, has long been out of print, but contains delightful anecdotes of Pearse, Yeats, Gonne, and Russell that you’ve never heard before. I helped sort out the book’s copyright and it’s going to be republished this year. I’m also working on making her other books more available.

Ella Young left Ireland for California about the same age as I was when I moved here. I won’t inspire a cultural phenomenon like The Hippies, but I’m happy to be returning Ella Young to the people of Ireland.

The Auge Well for Everyone

Not too far from our house is the Auge Well. “Auge” is a word that came into English from French, so I suppose you pronounce it “ah-gew.” It means malaria, and refers to its “acute” fever. Besides the obscure name, the well doesn’t have a saint associated with it, which is unusual.

The Auge Well

I’m interested in malaria because many years ago I read a scary book called The Mosquito, A Human History of our Deadliest Predator, by Timothy C. Winegard.

The horror of Winegard’s book stuck with me because of the incalculable suffering malaria (and other mosquito-diseases) inflicted. History would be very different without malaria. Even our bodies would be different. We evolved blood diseases that confer resistance to the malaria plasmodium; sickle cell anemia being only one of them.

Malaria’s probable arrival in Rome in the first century AD was a turning point in European history. From the African rain forest, the disease most likely traveled down the Nile to the Mediterranean, then spread east to the Fertile Crescent, and north to Greece. Greek traders and colonists brought it to Italy. From there, Roman soldiers and merchants would ultimately carry it as far north as England and Denmark (Karlen, 1995).

For the next 2,000 years, wherever Europe harbored crowded settlements and standing water, malaria flourished, rendering people seasonally ill, and chronically weak and apathetic. Many historians speculate that falciparum malaria (the deadliest form of malaria species in humans) contributed to the fall of Rome. The malaria epidemic of 79 AD devastated the fertile, marshy croplands surrounding the city, causing local farmers to abandon their fields and villages. (source)

Some researchers see evidence that malaria arrived in Ireland with the Mesolithic farmers who brought the cows. Maybe it arrived after extensive contact with the Romano-British in St. Patrick’s day. We know for sure the disease really got bad 400 years ago, when thousands of immigrants arrived seeking the health and prosperity that eluded them in their home country.

Between 1585 and 1640, England’s queens and kings established plantations, the same sort of colonial enterprises in Ireland as they did in North America. But in 1649, a civil war resulted in the execution of a king and rule by Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell looked to what the monarchy had started in Ireland and embarked on what is called The Cromwellian Conquest. The  immense destruction and desecration of the conquest remain visible.

But here’s where malaria comes into the story.

At a significant battle known as the Siege of Drogheda, Cromwell contracted malaria. He was sick with it for nine years before he died. In Cromwell’s day, malaria was treated with an early form of quinine, powered bark from the cinchona tree.

According to Winegard:

His doctors begged him to take cinchona powder. He flat out refused. Given its discovery by Catholic Jesuits, Cromwell insisted that he did not want the “Popish remedy “ or to be “Jesuited to death” or be poisoned by the “Jesuit’s Powder.” In 1658, twenty years after quinine first voyaged to Europe on the later winds of the Columbian exchange, Cromwell died of malaria. Two years after his death, the monarchy, under Charles II, was restored. Unlike Cromwell, Charles was begrudgingly safe from malarial death by sacramental cinechona bark.

Because of malaria, Cromwell didn’t live long enough to establish a viable successor. If he had been healthy, the monarchy may have never been restored. Instead, under Charles II, the political and economic power of the Ascendency began.

For the next 200 years, Ireland experienced a real-life Scouring of the Shire. The plantation system developed Ireland’s natural resources into industries: textiles, agriculture, mining, fisheries, shipbuilding.

This is where malaria comes in again. The Planters found a labor force among the farmers of the England’s southeastern fenlands. Their behavior could be regulated from the same prayerbook. Unfortunately, the southeast was also England’s malaria belt.


According to Winegard: 

The current partition of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland is directly tied to the settlement patterns of these malaria-fleeing English Fenland farmers of the 17th century. …

The mosquito forced over 180,000 thousand Protestant English farmers to Catholic Ireland, where they settled among the landed English gentry, and Protestant Scots who had fled the English Civil War that raged from 1642 to 1651. This motley crew of Protestants created what became to be known as the Early, Munster, Ulster, and Later Plantations during the 16th and 17th centuries. Their immigration, presence, and territorial expansion ignited a nationalist racial and religious war…. These plantations have had obvious and profoundly violent effects on the history of Ireland ever since.

The woods above the Auge Well, mid-day Winter Solstice

If it weren’t for malaria-induced emigration, perhaps the new landlords of Ireland would have had to work with the locals to build their new industries, and together they could have built a more integrated society. This integration process of immigrants had been successful in Ireland’s past. 

I wonder if the Ague Well was so designated at the time of Plantation of Ulster 400 years ago. That would explain why it has that particular cure, but not a saint. At this time, many Irish people emigrated, but some remained, perhaps as crypto-Catholics, as evidenced by the Mass Rocks in the neighborhood. Regardless of their faith or family, ancestors of my neighbors suffered from displacement, immigration, and malaria. Anyone could visit this beautiful well, and take what comfort they could.

The Ague Well is described in the Irish Folklore Collection.

The well is situated on Cashelmore hill nearby two miles from Creeslough, County Tirconaill. It is in the vicinity of Doe church. This old church is still in use.

The well is situated in the Ards Demesne which formerly belong to the Stewarts but now belongs to the Irish Land Commission and to the Capuchin fathers. Ards house is now a Capuchin monastery and situated along the shores of Sheephaven Bay. There was a little whitethorn bush beside the well. Little fir trees have been planted around by the Irish Land commission in 1932 to 1933. There is a mass rock beside the well.

The patron saint of the well is unknown. It was blessed by a priest now unknown. There is no annual pattern. The well is usually frequented by people going to America, who take bottles of the water with them to prevent them from taking the ague. There are no special rounds. There are no pebbles used. When people frequent the well, they go round it two or three times and say any prayers they wish. There are no special prayers. The water of the well is used to cure the auge, and to prevent people taking the auge. The water is drunk and carried away.

The pieces of cloth or tape are tied to the little bush beside the well.

The well never gets dried up. It was known to cure people that many years ago of the auge. A little distance from the well is a mass rock where the priest often said mass in the penal days.

Mary Colhoun, Massiness Girls’ National School, Creshlough, Co. Tirconaill. 20th of June 1934. Dúchas.ie

This is my transcription. At the link, you can see the original handwritten account.

Photo from few summers ago. 

People I’ve asked about the well didn’t know what the name means. I know I didn’t. They are surprised to learn that malaria was once endemic here. The last malarial outbreaks in Ireland were in the mid-19th century. Globally, the suffering continues; malaria infects 200 million people a year. But post-Covid advancements have led to new malaria vaccines. If we’re lucky, the whole world will be free of malaria soon.

I don’t believe the Auge Well ever cured malaria, but I do know that holy wells offer a sacred site for everyone. I find offerings at the Auge Well, some obviously Catholic, some not. The Ague Well is a place that—like malaria—doesn’t care what your faith tradition is.

Another source on Dúchas.ie records that emigrants took Auge Well water with them because it cured homesickness. If I ever had to leave this place, I would definitely keep a bottle of its water on my mantle. It would be a balm, as homesickness comes on like a fever, sharp and cyclical, just like malaria.

Traditionally, holy wells cured diseases of the mind and heart, as well as the body. An “eye well” might sooth eyes irritated by the smoke in a poorly ventilated cottage, but might also help the person “see” the resolution of a dispute.

The Heritage Council published a brochure last year about Ireland’s Holy Wells, and describes several of these multivalent cures.

There’s a well in North Kerry called Tobar na nGealt with a cure for mental illness. A while ago, the water was tested, and it contained lithium. So maybe there is something medical to these cures.

But there doesn’t need to be. A walk in nature, with intention, and formal words, said aloud for your own ears to hear: these actions can be self-transformational, the only true magic. You only have to believe in yourself.

Winter solstice trees at the Auge Well

I wrote about the Auge Well a few years ago when it comforted me during cancer treatment.