A LUCKY MAN
By Clive Geraghty
Twenty years ago exactly I was on holiday in Conamara with my family: Finola my wife, and my two sons; Colm, who was about six, and Johnny who was one and a half. We had rented a house in Renvyle for three weeks, and we had invited Finola’s mother to join us for a week or so. She was to get the train to Galway, and the bus to Clifden, where I would meet her with the car. On the day in question, Finola stayed at home with the baby, and I took Colm off for a few hours fishing before collecting Granny Greta. I had a nifty fly rod, and I rigged up a little spinning rod for Colm. I dug around and found a worm to put on his hook. We spent a while casting and fishing, then Colm said “I think I have something Clive.” He always called me Clive when he was small, but stopped when he got to be ten or so. He had indeed caught a trout, a fine big one as it happened. I with my fancy fly rod never got a bite. We had brought sandwiches and a drink with us, so we had those, then set off for Clifden. I parked the car in the main street, asked Colm if he would like an ice cream. I bought him a cone. He was sitting in the front passenger seat; he had his prized trout on a piece of newspaper on his lap, and his ice cream in his hand. He turned to me and said “Do you know what Clive? This is the best day of my life”. He was six. And I thought to myself, life does not get any better than this.
I have no store of theological theory to guide my thoughts today. I have no knowledge of philosophy. All I have are my own experiences and emotions and instincts. That said I will try not to turn this into an ego trip.
The first thing that I would say about myself, looking back over the 67 years I have been alive, is that I have been incredibly, unbelievably lucky. There were times when I didn’t think I was lucky; there were some awful times, but what doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger. I was lucky with my parents, my teachers, my jobs, my friends and my family. Granted, I never won the Lotto, but I met Finola, and when I met her I won all the Lottos. I never made much money, but I was lucky enough to realise that there are so many things in the world to be enjoyed for which you don’t need much money.
My parents were working class. My father was a bus driver. Neither of them had any education; I don’t think either of them ever read a book, but they were great people. Indeed my father is still alive and well at 91, and as mentally alert as ever. My great legacy from him was the willingness, always, to identify and side with the underdog. I did not get much more schooling than my parents. But I was lucky, I was born with a love of reading, so I read everything, every book in Marino library, all the William books, Little Women, Black Beauty, Christmas Annuals, the Beano and the Dandy, and my sister’s copy of Schoolfriend.
When I was working in the Aer Corps as an apprentice fitter, it was instilled in you that you would have to keep on studying if you were going to work on aircraft for a living, always having to update your skills, when new planes came along. So, continuous education was the norm for us long before it became a catchphrase.
When I started working as an actor, most of the people I met had far more education than I had, but I was lucky to realise that the extent of my ignorance was vast. I knew that I wasn’t stupid. I could learn. I could read.
When I left the Air Corps to work as an actor, again I was lucky. I left a job that I didn’t much care about for one that I loved, a job that not only paid the rent, but stimulated you, made you think, demanded that you memorise a new full-length play every four weeks, made you work with discipline and control. Working as an actor was a dream come true for me, I didn’t think that working class people could become actors, and in those days, not many did. But where the luck came in was, that if you kept your ears, eyes and brain open, you could pick up an education.
For instance, I played in The Silver Tassie in the Abbey, Séan O’Casey’s great anti war play set in the First World War. As well as having the pleasure of playing a great part, I got interested in the poets of WW1, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and others. I read them. I read Robert Graves autobiography, Goodbye to all That, about his experiences in WW1 - a brilliant book. Then I read his I Claudius and Claudius the God, this in turn led on to Suetonius and Tacitus and their histories of the Caesars. So I was picking up an education, little by little, play after play.
Most of my heroes are writers, as will be seen in the course of this talk. I suppose this is only natural, as I have spent most of my adult life getting to grips with the results of their life’s work. As William Goldman, the Hollywood scriptwriter said, “We need our storytellers; someone’s got to get us through the dangerous night when the flames are flickering and the wolves howl.”
Bill told us, in a very moving way, some time ago, what it was like to be told that he had only a short time to live. Thank God the prognosis was wrong. Bill advised us all to become a Self Appointed Inspector of a Trivial Pursuit, to pass pleasant unstressed moments of our lives. Bill’s talk that day reminded me of a TV program. One of the greatest things I have ever seen on TV was an interview recorded by Dennis Potter shortly before his death. Potter was dying, of liver and pancreatic cancer. He had been given three months to live by his doctor, but he agreed to be interviewed one last time. During the course of his chat with Melvyn Bragg on camera, he sipped from a hip flask of liquid morphine to kill the pain of the cancer. But he was also plagued with psoriasis. He had suffered from head to toe psoriasis all his life, a side affect of which is a severe form of arthritis which had clenched his hands into misshapen fists, with just enough flexibility to allow him to light and smoke a cigarette. He referred to his tumour throughout as ‘Rupert’, after the owner of most of the media of the western world.
All aspects of his life and beliefs were probed by his interviewer. He was asked about his religious beliefs. He said that in his view, religion was too often the wound, not the bandage; that he was not interested in a religion that was practiced because of a fear of death.
He said that man was the only animal that knew it was going to die.
He grieved he said, for his family and friends. Impending death held no terror for him, but what it had given him was an acute awareness of the beauty of life, the nowness as he called it. “The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous; things are both more trivial than they ever were and more important than they ever were, and the difference between them doesn’t seem to matter,” he said. He went on to describe a plum tree that was in blossom outside his window. He said, “I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be. And I can see it”. The gift he had been given by approaching death was to see life in the present tense. He surmised that maybe death meant that one was in the present tense, always.
His doctor’s prognosis was accurate, he died shortly after the interview.
Of all his writing, - The Singing Detective, Pennies from Heaven, and loads more - my favourite is a television play, Blue Remembered Hills. If you ever get a chance to see it, take it. He got the title from a poem by A.E Houseman, A Shropshire Lad:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows,
What are those Blue remembered Hills,
What farms, what spires are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went,
And cannot come again.
I envy great writers their ability to use language so clearly; when words are clear and fresh it’s like water, it sparkles. As someone said “Simplicity is the glory of expression”.
And we hear so much of it here every Sunday, big thoughts in small, elegant packages, like, “If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is thank you, it is enough”. Or “Here dies another day, during which I have had eyes, ears, hands, and the great wonder of the Universe”.
The brevity and clarity are breathtaking, particularly in this day and age of hype and exaggeration. I mean, is there a model left in the world? Nowadays they are all supermodels. Nobody has a heart attack anymore; we have massive heart attacks now.
Thinking about words brings an old friend of mine to mind, the late lamented Séan Mac Réamonn. Séan was the last of the Renaissance men - multi talented with a wonderful turn of phrase. He was as witty as he was wise. He was polyglot. I don’t know how many languages he spoke, but he taught me to sing Sasban Vach in Welsh. He was a lay theologian who described himself as “The Catholic Church’s loyal opposition”. Séan was once asked how he was on a day when he wasn’t feeling too good, and he replied “I’m like the census; I’m broken down by age, sex, and religion”.
Many years ago, when I was known to take a drop, and I was a self appointed inspector of alcoholic beverages, Seán introduced me in a pub to a man called Herbert McCabe. Herbert was a Dominican priest, a philosopher and theologian. He had been editor of the renowned magazine, New Greyfriars, but was dismissed from the job, I believe, at the behest of the authorities in Rome for exposing corruption in the church. But I didn’t know him as a man of the cloth. He was just a drinking friend of Séan’s. Later I read a book he had written, God Matters, in one chapter of which he addresses the convoluted (and for us irrelevant) question of transubstantiation and the real presence, “Christ is present in the Eucharist,” said Herbert, “as the meaning is present in a word”. With that answer he should have been a Jesuit! It is brilliant. He was asked once, “How do I offend against chastity?” He replied, “By disliking sex”. It is a pity that neither Séan nor Herbert ever found their way here. They would have felt very much at home.
How did I find my way here? Lucky again. A very circuitous route, like most of us I suspect. The usual Catholic upbringing, walking away from it in my twenties, heading back towards it with the birth of my children, for their rites of passage. From time to time I went to my local Church of Ireland services in Clonsilla, which didn’t seem all that different from the Catholic mass, except that they were twice as long. But the Protestants were much better singers.
Some years ago I was on tour in England, in Plymouth, and one day, when I was out sightseeing, I came upon a church that had been restored after having been gutted during a bombing raid in WW2. I sat down in a pew to enjoy the midweek quiet. Beside me was a copy of the Book of Common Prayer. One section was devoted entirely to a history of the Reformation. I started to read. It was fascinating. I knew nothing about the Reformation - why it was deemed necessary by a huge part of Christendom to dump the accumulated liturgical baggage of centuries. An hour later I was still reading; a great history lesson in an unlikely setting.
Then a few years ago I read an interview in the Irish Times with Doireann Ní Bhriain. She mentioned in it that she had become interested in Unitarianism. Now I had no idea what that meant, it was just another black hole in my store of knowledge. Out came the dictionary which said: “a person who believes that God is not a Trinity but one person: a member of a religious body maintaining this and advocating freedom from formal dogma or doctrine.” That whetted my appetite but left me still in the dark. Then I Googled Unitarianism and found what I was looking for. I read many articles from these webpages over the next few weeks. I found Chris Reed’s website particularly informative, “Unitarian? What’s That?” with it’s question and answer format. Anyway, reading all this material over a period of months, thinking about it, I said to myself at last “I am a Unitarian, I have been for the last twenty years, but I didn’t know it”.
I saw the Church notice in the Irish Times one Saturday, giving the time of the service, came in the next day, and wasn’t disappointed. Art Lester took the service. It was during the summer, and he did the next few. Then one Sunday morning, to my utter astonishment, Denis Conway, a fellow actor was the man in charge of the service. Well, I thought, these are great people. If they will let an actor loose in the pulpit they have a very deep faith indeed! I spoke to Denis afterwards, congratulated him on his performance, told him I had been coming for a few weeks. He said “So you haven’t been at one of Bill’s services? Well, let me tell you, you ain’t seen nothing yet”. And how right he was.
A few years later I was accepted into membership, the same morning I remember as the late, much lamented and missed Carmel White. Why do we come here, or why do I come here every Sunday? For solace, enlightenment, knowledge on how to live and how to die. And more. A character in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town says, “I guess we’re all searching for a way the diligent and sensible can rise to the top, and the lazy and quarrelsome can sink to the bottom”. An honest man, no doubt, but not a deep thinker, and definitely not a Unitarian.
We want more than that. We want to be given the means to get to grips with the harsh realities of our lives, how to live in a society where the commonest form of death of men between 15 and 35 years of age is suicide. Where the head of a bank gets €4 million for his years work. Where Senior Politicians didn’t think that they had to pay tax on dodgy financial gifts from dodgy businessmen. Where our public services stutter along from crisis to crisis, and are depressingly bad value for money. And the realization that, generally speaking, those who care don’t matter, and those who matter don’t care.
I don’t know about you, but my visits here give me comfort, spiritual comfort, food for thought, challenging theories to get to grips with. And a great deal of humour. Where would we be without it? We all know the old saying: “Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone”. Well, that’s not the end of the quotation; there are another two lines, “For this old earth must borrow its mirth/Enough sadness it has of its own”.
We can’t fix the world, all we can do, each of us as individuals, is to make a small contribution throughout our lifetime to the store of goodness in the world. And coming here always gives me hope for the future.
So, from all the experiences I have had, from all the wise words, sermons, bon mots, I have heard and read, am I now better prepared to face old age and it’s inevitable conclusion? Or am I like the old guy looking back over his life in Hugh Leonard’s play Da who says: “Everything I once thought I knew for certain I have seen inverted, revised, disproved, or discredited. Shall I tell you something? In seventy years the one surviving fragment of my knowledge, the only indisputable poor particle of certainty in my entire life, is that in a public house lavatory, incoming traffic has the right of way”.
No, without a doubt, I am better prepared. And in line with Bill’s suggestion a few weeks ago, that we should find a pastime that had no commercial benefit but which pleased us, I am now a Self Appointed Inspector of Beautiful Words and Phrases in the Irish Language
When the wonderful Cathleen Maude knew she was dying she wrote a poem called A Dhé, ‘O God’. She was only forty. She was a poet, an actress, a teacher, a wife, a mother, a civil rights campaigner for the rights of people living in the neglected Gaeltacht areas of the west, tireless in her energies on behalf of the Irish language, and now she was heading for an early grave.
She wrote of her impending death, and these words are the ones that won’t be far from my mind when I am going to meet my maker a long, long time from now,
A Dhé, Bí ann nó as,
Táimse ag triall ort.
Which roughly translated says
God, whether you are there or not
I’m making my way to you.
Clive Geraghty
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