Patrick Kavanagh - Poet as Theologian

July 29:  While Maeve and Connor are in their playgroup, I head north towards Carrickmacross to visit the Patrick Kavanagh Rural and Literary Resource Center.   For the next three hours I pour through the centre recognizing that there is a message here for me ........


For a number of years now I have wanted to take the side road to visit the center.  Kavanagh ( who died in 1967) is one of Ireland's leading poets of the 20th century.   The centre is in the old church - the place of his growing up years, all the more interesting linking this with his views on religion and spirituality.  For many people of his day- he was scorned and viewed foolish, if not "touched".  He was forthright in speech calling a spade a spade.

His words of wisdom include " we get to our destiny in the end ....our role is to overcome the difficult art of not caring (what others think) ...few people he said have the courage to be themselves.  He said ... courage ... be of courage ...in the name of Father, Son and Mother.

He identified two simplicities - the simplicity of going away ...and the simplicity of returning.  In the final simplicity we are satisfied being ourselves.

What an amazing and awesome start to my returning ............


Reflection for this pilgrim and others on the journey of discovery:   
Kavanagh was a prophetic voice.  He was highly critical of the Irish Janenism - introduced into Ireland by Cardinal Paul Curren (1803 - 1878) after the synod of Thurles.  This religion was not indigenous to Ireland - it was a "continental religion with its missions and novenas" that  had displaced the druidic culture  and turned Catholicism into a religion of "voteens" and "persons obsessively preoccupied with church based devotions, spurious practices and clerical rubics".  He referred to this chapel-based religion as distancing itself from home and farm life, The old gaelic prayers said in lighting the lamp, churning and making bread were no longer given church prominence.

In his book Tarry Flyn - the holy spirit is in the hills, it is a God spirit who delights, and senses divine energy in the  "bedlam of the hills" and pulses through the the day and growing crops.  Kavanagh's indictment of Janenism goes a long way to explain the grip of the clergy and Catholic Church of his day and up to today.  It helps explain why for so long scandals and abuses were not challenged.  He saw the Janenism of his time as joyless, an insidious denial of life itself,  and a betrayal of Christianity.  See his poem on Lough Derg  (1940) - this also connects with Lavery's painting of Lough Derg pilgrims.

He declared that God is feminine, she is the one whose impulse is gentle, generous, and affirming of creativity. His God has the properties of a Celtic Ri: comley, generous bountiful, clothed in a mist of textures and colors.

Kavanagh's spirituality reinstates the local, and rediscovers God in the "bits and pieces".  He constructs a theology from the ordinary - things muddied with honest dirt are part of the iridescence of God ..."in the sows rooting where the hen scratches, we dipped our fingers in the pocket of God."