It's not every day you do something you've been wanting to all your life. But yesterday I arrived in Ireland and I honestly can't remember a time when I haven't wanted to come here.
Pretty much all of my friends who have been here before gave me the impression that Dublin is not the place to give most of your time to. So I only gave it a few hours and had only one goal - to see Kilmainham Gaol.
By the time I was approaching the end of the long walk, I was starting to wonder if it was really worth the sore back and cold ears to stand outside an old jail for a few minutes.
It absolutely was.
I listened to the song "Grace" and almost cried. I felt the weight of my own grief and felt it also as a kinship with Joseph Plunkett and Grace Gifford and all those, stretching back through time, who have loved and grieved.
(If you don't know the story, go listen to the song, but also look up the backstory. In brief, it's about Joseph Plunkett, one of the leaders of the Easter Uprising, who married Grace Gifford in Kilmainham Gaol hours before he was to be executed.)
I went to a Church to pray afterwards and found out at the end that it was where the priest who married them came from. I was praying about the memory of grief and how confusing it is to say in the same breath to God "how could you have done this to me" and "thank you". Because "what is grief if not love persevering?". And while I wouldn't have chosen the loss, I wouldn't exchange the love and the way it changed me for anything. And even the grief, much as I didn't want it, has formed me and freed me and made me more myself.
I was thinking about this and how there are still scars on Christ's resurrected body. The wounds made by love shouldn't merely be erased. Healed, transfigured etc. but not erased.
I think the scars of Ireland's history are like that too. And I'd like to think that something of the contagion of Irish culture and the beauty of their music is rooted in those scars - their fierceness and their love that they held to no matter how much oppressors tried to beat it out of them.
There's a lot more here and I will continue to process as I continue to explore "the old country".
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