Iona By The Lake

The triangle dinner bell rang out in the air.  Normally used to call the family from the beach into meals, my father stood on the small cement door step ringing it over and over to let people know we were preparing for our Saturday night liturgy—Mass. 

My parents bought a small log cabin with lakefront property in Sussex County, NJ somewhere back in 1966 or  67.  It had been a dream of my father’s to have such a place to take us from the city on weekends, vacations, and perhaps for my parents to use when they retired.  The latter was never to be as my father, himself, was so attached by relationships to the city that the cabin remained a retreat for them as needed or desired.  It was also available for our entire extended family and friends through the years for their enjoyment.  It is still in our family and my nieces and nephews and their children all enjoy it.

After they bought the cabin, my father’s brother also bought one, and then friends from the parish where we lived in Queens, and their friends, and the circle extended  from Sunnyside/Woodside right up to our weekends in Glenwood Lake in NJ.  It was wonderful.  Along with family and friends, our parish priests were included and often came to relax with the families on a day off or for a weekend respite.  We had, I am certain, the greatest parish priests.  I know all the horrors we read about in the Church, and God knows we have learned of far more in our work in Good Tidings, but our priests were priestly priests, as the Irish say, or “priests’ priests.”  It was good  priests like them that made the later recognition of the reality of bad priests so horrifying to us all!  Our priests were part of the community, and truly welcomed among us all.  One in particular, Father Patrick McNelis was beloved by all.

Father Pat came to our parish newly ordained, a baby priest.  The parish taught him how to be a priest—our school of hard knocks, baptizing our young, marrying our lovers, praying with our sick and burying our dead, and walking with us through each event, rather than simply stepping in for a ritual.  When I was 12, after my Confirmation, I approached Father Pat and asked him to be my spiritual director.  I was not sure what that meant, but I’d read that holy people had them, and I wanted to be a saint—so he was selected to help me!  He patiently and graciously agreed, knowing that I was 12 and totally innocent of all I was saying, he remained available to me for the rest of his life…  He was also available to the rest of our parish and was part of our extended community at Glenwood Lake.  Fr Pat would come to the lake and on Saturday evening after our day of swimming, using my parents huge living room, he would offer Mass for us all around the table my parents set for it.  Family and friends, answering the triangle bell calling them for the Eucharistic Supper came, from beaches, from canoes, and homes, and gathered for worship together.  After praying together we shared a common supper and, being Irish, the night went on to dawn as the ceili continued.  Without ever naming who were were, or what we were doing, the Finnegans and Hourigans, and friends gathered in that little Irish house, a cell community and worshiped as our ancestors did for centuries. 

Years later, when we were living in our home in Pennsylvania, my elderly widowed mother finally moved from NYC and lived her old age with us and our daughter.  She read anything she found in our house, which is like library of theological resources.  One morning she walked from her room to the kitchen, leaning on her cane, with a paperback book in her hand.  She’d just finished reading it.  She tossed the book on the table and looked at me with those beautiful blue eyes and stated, “Well, now we have a name for what we’ve always been!”  The book, LIVING BETWEEN WORLDS, by Philip Sheldrake was an introduction and explanation of Celtic Christian spirituality.  She, as I had earlier, recognized ourselves in the book.  We had preserved and had lived by many of the “old ways” without naming it or discussing it as distinctively Celtic.  We simply were who we were, who we always were.  We remain who we are!

Mom

My mother, at the age of 80, stood with me by the sliding door of our dining room, on November 2, 1997, All Souls Day, looking out into the woods where we live.  All Souls Day, continuing the Feast of Samhain, the Feast of the Dead was always a sacred time in our family.  I chose that day deliberately so my ancestors, easily passing through the thin veil, would celebrate with me.   We were preparing to leave for the Church for me to be ordained a Catholic priest by consecrated Old Catholic and Independent Catholic bishops.  She held my hand while looking into the woods, and said, this is the day God has been leading you to all your life.  This is what you’ve been searching for all these years, into the convent and out of it, into community life and out of it, in your ministry with priests and now finally doing what it is that God has wanted all along—becoming a priest.  This is what God wants.  I love you, and am so happy to be part of this in your life.”

Ordained

My mother was a happy, good-natured old woman who grew old gracefully enjoying her life with us.  She easily shared laughter, but was never one for talking emotionally or wasting precious words.  Those words were saved for the moments that were sacred, and I will never, as long as I live forget receiving her blessing that morning, as I stepped beyond the restrictions of the Roman Catholic theology stating that women cannot be priests.  My mother recognized my priesthood.  My mother blessed my priesthood, even as she had dedicated my life to Mary the Mother of God at my baptism, and deliberately named me after our patroness, Catherine of Siena, raising me to be a strong woman in her like.  A couple of hours after that, she walked with me to the altar, faced the three bishops at my ordination and presented me to be ordained a Catholic priest in the

Celtic Christian Church.  We had found our Celtic home.  We never rejected Rome and all the beauty it preserved for us.  We simply re-embraced our Celtic heritage, our Celtic expression of that treasure which is our Faith.  On her deathbed she blessed my husband Joe telling him that he was “a good husband, a good father, a good son-in-law, a good priest, and a good bishop!”  On her deathbed she asked me to say her funeral Mass.  This old Irish-American woman, daughter of immigrants who themselves had been profoundly affected by their ethnic and spiritual history in Ireland, had preserved and passed to me my greatest heritage.  Her legacy to me was love.

I was not able to celebrate her funeral as a priest.  I was so struck with grief when she passed that I hardly remember the entire event beyond her actual death, a beautiful and peaceful death in our living room as she gazed upon the twinkling lights of our Christmas tree.  I also knew that if I had done so, many in my extended family would have been confused and felt guilt-ridden to receive Communion because most were still practicing Roman Catholics.  Charity demanded I allow them their Faith expression at such a time.  Nothing diminished my own.

Looking back, knowing Church history, and my ethnic history as I do, and knowing my family history, I recognize that our cell community, both at home in our apartment in Queens NY, and in our little log cabin on Lake Glenwood, was truly our preservation of our Celtic center of Faith, our Iona located by the little lake in Northern New Jersey.

Generations in Search of Iona

My mother and her own mother were not overly “churchy” Irish women.  Some Irish women are just the opposite, you know.  Some carve out clerical careers for their sons or daughters while the children are still in the cradle, living vicariously through them and placing on them such life burdens.  Not my mother!  Oh, I dare not say she never attended Church because she will most certainly haunt me and let me know I should not exaggerate her “home Church” inclinations!  She did go to Mass on Sundays and holy days, most of the time.  I don’t remember my grandmother doing so, but I am only guessing that was because by the time I was around checking up on their ecclesiastical obligations, she was already past that age where it was no longer required by Church law for her to attend weekly Mass.  At least, that is what I remember her telling me.  I will have to do the math on that later.  Let’s just say Mom came by her inclination to pray at home quite honestly. 

My grandmother, Ellen Farrell Daly, known to her “tousands” of nieces and nephews as Auntie Nellie, to her friends as either Nellie Farrell or Nellie Daly, was renamed by her first grandson, my oldest brother Larry as “Nin” and that was way before the rock group, who I believe took her name! She became “Nin” to all my generation and our friends, and future generations. Nin’s prayer schedule, intermingled with her housework, and her favorite radio or later, TV shows, would rival that of any nun vowed to stability. Prayer was constant. “Pray always” we read from St. Paul. They did. We did. Prayer was our prayer, and work was our prayer. Family time was our prayer. Play was our prayer. It was real, so real. It was what I call our spiritual foundation and formation.

Nellie Farrell was born into a large Irish family in Edgeworthstown, County Longford, the home to the Farrell clan in Ireland. All my young life I heard the stories from her memories. She was one of 5 boys and 3 girls. She fell in line toward the last three children, with a brother 5 years younger than she, and an infant sister who died while in infancy. Her dear mother had died giving birth to that last child, and Nin told the story to me with tears in her eyes for as long as she lived. She loved her father with the great innocent love of a little girl. She talked about being in the fields with him as he worked the farm…Her stories captivated my own young heart and I cannot remember a time when I didn’t long to visit our family home. I promised her that when I was grown up I would take her back again.

She’d been home several times since her first passage across the Atlantic in 1897. She came to the United States with her sister Brigid. Nellie was 13 and Brigid was 15. It was not their choice to leave Ireland. As she told me poverty and England ruled and that dictated all choices that families made regarding survival. Always my heart broke when she’d look down at me sitting by her knee listening to every word and say “Imagine how you’d feel getting on a huge ship with hundreds of strangers, just 13 years old, and leaving your home and family forever.” I could not really imagine. I tried, but it made me cry. It still does. She never truly understood all that was taking place.

However, she knew that her maternal uncle, Canon McCabe, a Roman Catholic priest was “to blame,” as she told it. He took her and Brigid from their widowed father and sent them to their mother’s family in America to live. The choice, as Nin, explained was to leave home for America, or leave home for St. Mel’s. She always talked of St. Mel’s cathedral, but not the school. She lived wondering why she could not have simply gone to St. Mel’s, and remained near her Da. She died wondering that as well. On her deathbed, she told me her father had come to her to ask her forgiveness, and her prayer. She could not understand why. Then she died.

Some things God does in one’s life are never clear in this lifetime. Some things only become clear as generations continue, carrying their legacy and heritage, and making sense of it as we age ourselves. That’s what has happened regarding my relationship with Nin, and her sad history. Only after going to Ireland and talking with family there did I hear the complete story of Nin’s pilgrimage to America.

Her father was not faithful to her mother, and her mother died in childbirth because Nin’s father was with another woman on the night of the birth. By the time her brothers got him, and he got the old doctor, a storm had washed out the tiny foot bridge onto their farm, and my great-grandmother had bled to death before her children, infant daughter in her arms. Nin’s older brothers never forgave their father. The oldest left for England and never came home. Nin was only 7 and didn’t understand all the details and never heard them—OR never shared them with her own children and grandchildren. She died still wondering why not St. Mel’s.

Canon McCabe was never highly regarded because the stories of little Nellie Farrell became the stories of adult Nellie Farrell, and Canon McCabe was the culprit blamed for breaking up her family, and forcing her to come to America. She never forgave him.

Several years ago, the story of the Magdalene laundries became public in Ireland and throughout the world. The notorious industrial schools begun in Victorian England, and transported into Ireland and the colonies to house the poor became virtual prisons when the Church and the English government became business partners. Children from poor families, families with no mother were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to these “schools” where they worked as free labor for the Church. Young girls like Nellie Farrell were fodder for such schools, and such young girls were regularly rounded up by parish priests and transported to these factories that produced victims of many kinds of abuse. Canon McCabe was well aware that St. Mel’s was one of many such schools. That was the alternative to America and being raised by her mother’s sister.

Canon McCabe became the hero, in my eyes, after the complete picture of my family history and recent Irish history was revealed. Some things are only clear in hindsight. Canon McCabe saved my grandmother and her sister from the RC institutional slavery and, in keeping with an ancient passionate loyalty to family, which her own father lacked, Nin’s uncle, a priest saved her, saved her children, and her grandchildren, and today—her great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren. Nin’s story continues in the continued journey of a family which only exists today because one priest was faithful to his own family and saved them from the Church.

Two of the holy ones.

I have wondered recently how much Nin actually knew, or surmised over her long lifetime of reflecting on all this. She was sincerely loving to the many priests and religious who frequented our home as I was growing up in Queens, NY. Yet, she was unabashedly anti-clerical in her words and beliefs. She loved the individuals but hated what she knew of religious life and how it demanded one turn one’s back on family. What she had was a love of the religious while in our home… our home extending hospitality and religious as part of that. That was to make sense to me only many years later as I came to understand more clearly the foundations of Celtic Christian spirituality, kindred spirits, and cell groups. I came to recognize this is what I was passed quite naturally, and it was only when that was challenged by the institutional religious obligations that I became fierce in my allegiance to family, faith, and heritage. Nin was put on a ship for Iona, which made its passage to America first…only to stay the course for two more generations.

Each of my parents, and Nin, had a specific affect on my young life and my understanding of God and my Faith, i.e. my theology!  They began teaching me theology when they began telling me about God, and what I needed to do about God… that is, talk with Him—all the time, which I did.   My mother taught me about God Who hugs—all the time, and God Who will ALWAYS protect and forgive me.  My grandmother taught me about God walking through life with me, no matter where I lived, or what I did, or whether I was rich or poor.   She was an immigrant after all, she knew.  And then there was my father’s lessons, perhaps the most influential, but who knows?  That's another blog!

Many nights, because we had an extended family and a tiny NYC apartment, I would sleep in the big double bed that my grandmother had in the apartment above ours. There, she would “hear my prayers” and teach me more, and talk to me until I fell asleep in her arms. She talked about God, and the love that never, ever, ever ends no matter what we do, just as my father stressed downstairs.  She talked about what it meant to be Irish, and told me all about our own ancestors, filling my head with the family history, which I treasure to this day.  She taught me songs and poetry, which I treasure to this day as well.  Nin was my second mother, and I near to worshipped her when I was a kid.  It was all part of who we were, who we are—and was a major factor in who I have become and am becoming. 

My beautiful daughter and I.  

All I want in life is to pass her this rich heritage and our passion for our Faith and Family!

PS  Nin's story can be heard in song by clicking the music icon and listening to "DA" which was written when my daughter turned 13 and I wondered about Nin's feelings at that age, leaving her father.