by Craig Schaub
For some fifty years, often my bumbled life steps have been marked by the bright keening of Van Morrison. Steps are sometimes numb, but also often taken with misty eyes, and many states in between. Always with slippery intuitions about the bonnie boat, the foghorn, the going into the mystic.
New intuitions never required I peer across Belfast Lough to watch bonfires tar the sky on the eve of July 12, or smell the peat so much like that which Seamus Heaney’s father sliced into with spade, or hear the subtle green siren calling Patrick back, or feel visceral new twists of the appositional myths of Brigid, or see a landscape that reminds of Yeat’s Innisfree. Yet it helps, helps to prime a pump to tap such universal aquifers. Our seeking to darn the open wounds of heels broken by inequity and trouble is not the same as life out of the Troubles. But listening to stories that touch a similar anguish and hope helps. Sometimes the foghorn blows in despair. I now wonder what agreements to a peace process might be needed for our way forward in the U.S.
How often do we sail away in bonnie boats feeling like we’ve lost so much, which is hard truth. Yet we also learned together in community in Northern Ireland, there are ways to reframe the story — spotting abundance, acceptance, even ease, without ever denying the pain. Our gypsy souls are not tethered to the last hurt.
Often, we fantasize that conflicts are resolved, reconciled by heroic figures coming to clean up the mess, when so often from the ground of a slowly shared truth, the slightest turn toward today may be the work worth celebrating. Because we share a longing to all come home. How to hear our adversary’s longing?
We reckon the ways disfigured story and practice within the church has dulled that hearing, stoked the brutality. Yet bodies of Christ, humble and broken and rising and joyful, still channel at least one current toward the mystic. Sometimes the same questions, open and evocative, posed over and again in circles bring us into the flow. Fresh intuitions emerge that might even clot around our collective wounds, not only to heal but to bind us in at least provisional oneness.