Today I am going to post a blog about two things: St. Patrick's Day and our class trip to Northern Ireland. So, first of all, St. Patrick's Day!
The day before St. Patrick's Day was very awesome. Firstly, I went to a ceili (pronounced kay-LEE), which was held in the middle of the street right outside St. Stephen's Green. There was a big stage, and lots of people. Bascially, a ceili is a big Irish dance party. They teach you how to do a number of different dances, and everyone does them. Well, about half of the people do them. If you want to see some fun examples of the dances they do, go to youtube and type in "ceili dance" or "ceili dancing." A lot of the results are professional dancers who dance all fancy, but we were just approximating. They had professionals up on the stage, showing us how to do the dances. They also had live music, which was very good. I danced with my friend Kayla (there are some pictures of us dancing together on facebook). Below is the ceili and the big stage:
There were also little fun fairs set up in at least two places around the city. Just in the middle of the road. You know. People don't really need to drive that badly.
The next day, I went to mass in the morning with all the Notre Dame people. The chapel is right by St. Stephen's Green. There were also these beautiful flowers popping up all over the grass.
Here's the chapel. It's very pretty.
Then we rushed to O'Connell Street to catch the parade, which was supposed to start at 12. There were lots of people dressed up.
This girl is so cute! But I hope her dad wasn't too creeped out by me taking the picture.
Here's some military personel marching in the parade. We waited for a long time for the parade to start. Like for half an hour. And then the people in the parade were not very close together. I think something passed us every two minutes or so. But, as far as I understand, parades are a very American thing, so I don't blame the Irish for not really getting it. Besides, this is Ireland, and people don't expect things to be on time. That would be silly.
We had to leave before the parade was over to go to Croke Park, the Gaelic Football and Hurling stadium, to watch a game of each. One of our program sponsors has a box there, so a bunch of us got to use the box and box seats. That was really nice. Here's a really dark picture of me, Kayla, and Melissa in the box with the field behind us.
The crowds were pretty excited. The way the teams work in Ireland is that people have "parish" teams, which means that each church parish puts together their own team. The teams play each other in a tournament, and the finals are played in Croke Park. It's really exciting, because the players aren't all young and perfect: there's some guys with gray hair in with the college-age kids. You feel much more connected to the players, especially because the people cheering for them, actually know them. The players don't get paid anything either. It's purely for fun.
We walked back into the city center after the game. This is a really cool bridge. It's shaped like a harp, which is Ireland's national symbol. (The harp-strings are kind of hard to see).
It took us a long time to decide where to eat dinner. The streets were packed, but finally we found a pub that wasn't too crowded. Andrew, who had recently turned 21 (he saved his first drink for his birthday), got a bit tipsy. He was very hilarious. He decided to wear my black hat with the big flower on it, which I had decorated with Irish ribbon and a little green bug-eyed fuzzy for the day.
During this evening, I tried a sip of Guinness. I didn't actually like it, but hey, what do you expect? It tasted kind of yeast-y, from what I remember.
And that was our Irish St. Patrick's Day experience!
So, that weekend, we took our second class trip, to Northern Ireland. We went to Belfast, Giant's Causeway, and a cool rope bridge. Here's Allison, Kaitlyn, Ashley, and Ryan on the bus.
We stopped at a very cool shopping mall in Belfast for lunch. It has a big glass roof, but it's actually an open-air mall.
We ate at this lovely little sandwich shop. Northern Ireland is part of the UK, so I used my extra pounds that I had left over from our London trip. Unfortunately, the exchange rate has dropped a lot since I got them, and so I was using pounds that were more expensive than they should have been. Oh well.
I had quite an eventful experience at this shop. When we sat down, I took off my purse and hung it on the back of my chair. Bad idea. I don't do that anymore. But there, in that sandwich shop, I did. And as you have probably guessed, I walked out of that shop without my purse.
I realized my mistake as soon as we got back to the bus, and I had nothing to hook on the little hook in front of my seat. Oh no, I thought. And I felt very stupid. But I did not panic, not yet. Even though my purse had many important things in it, including, but not limited to, my ipod, my wallet (including my parents credit card, eek), my debit card, and my passport. It's possible my camera was in there too. So the situation was not good. But I told Joe, our program coordinator / mom, and Kevin, our program supervisor and professor, and ran back to the shop with Melissa, who was providing emotional support.
When we got back to the shop, three middle-school-aged girls, wearing the skirts and sweaters of their school uniform, were sitting at my table. I asked them if they had found a purse, and peeked around the table. No purse was to be found. They looked very sorry for me. I went up to the counter and asked if anyone had turned in a purse. The lady went to the back to check, but she came back with a negative. So, still repressing panic, we went back to the bus. I told Joe that they hadn't found it, and Joe's reply was, "Well, we'll be in this area tomorrow..."
I did not like that answer very much. That answer meant giving up on finding it, and I was still in a state of denial. So I decided to get one of Joe's business cards and bring it back to the restaurant, so if they found the purse, the they would have someone to call. I grabbed a business card and went off running. As soon as I got back to the restaurant, I went to the guy I should have gone to in the first place: the guy cleaning the tables. I asked him, "Did you find a purse?"
And he said "Yes!" and took me to the back of the shop, where he produced, to my great joy, my purse, still bursting full of all my important things. I thanked the guy a lot, and said many prayers that God would bless him. I then dashed off to the bus again, all the while saying, out loud, "I do not deserve your goodness, Lord!" and almost crying with relief. (That is a true thing. I'm not just being sappy. I felt very stupid and knew I would totally deserve it if I had been stupid enough to lose sight of my purse in a big strange city with all those things in it! Once again, God shows his grace.)
Kevin was also very happy for me, and very encouraging. He kept saying, "You did the right thing! Good thing you went back! Nice job handling that situation!"
We then went to Stormont, which is the parliament building. It's a pretty cool place.
The main hall.
I especially liked the ceiling. Red, white, and blue. I think the White House should consider it. The chandeliers were also very cool.
One funny story about Stormont is that during Word War II, they were worried that it was going to get bombed. It's a big white building on the top of a clear hill, with the roads running towards it making a convenient X for any passing bomber. So, they coated the whole building in manure. It turned the place black (they showed us a picture). They were hoping moss would grow on the manure and disguise the building as green, but no moss ever grew. I think cow manure is pretty toxic.
We were then off to Giant's Causeway. It's an World Heritage Site. The entire beach is made up of these hexagonal pillars, which were lava at one time. When a certain type of lava is allowed to cool in a certain way, it produces the hexagonal structures.
We had a lot of fun.
It's me! I'm happy.
We climbed a trail, and these big guys were protruding from the side of the cliff. Melissa is the one waving her arms.
Legend has it that there were once two giants, a Scottish giant and an Irish giant. The Scottish giant was taunting the Irish giant from across the sea, and so the Irish giant, wanting to go over to Scotland and get his revenge, started to build a bridge by throwing down all these pillars in the water. He wasn't able to make it very far though.
Next, we drove further down the coast and went to the rope bridge. It was not very scary, though Kevin was kind of scared. It's very secure. The bridge went to a small island that stuck out in the middle of the ocean. The tide was low, though, so there wasn't actually water under the bridge. Just sandy beach. Apparently, shepherds used to use the bridge to take their sheep to the nice grass on the little island. I don't know how they got the sheep to cross that bridge.
And this was what was on the other side. Understandable that the sheep would like it. It was extremely windy, but somehow that just added to the peace of the place.
It's me!
Another view of the bridge:
Then we went to this very impressive and important building in Belfast to have some lunch. I was a bit silly, and I ordered dessert from the restaurant, not knowing that we were about to get free desserts. Oh well. Nothing wrong with two desserts. :) One was a chocolate muffin, and the other was a strawberry tart.
Next, we picked up a man who was going to give us a tour of his neighborhood. His name was Peter (I think), and he is a Catholic who grew up during the Northern Ireland troubles. He started off the tour by telling us the story of his father, who worked in the Belfast shipyards for the major ship building company. The company only hired his dad, a Catholic, so that they could say that they did not have 100% Protestant employees. One day, the company decided that they didn't need the Catholic anymore, so they beat him to death and threw his body in a ditch.
The Belfast neighborhoods were segregated back then, and they still are now. Peter said that when he was a little boy, at school at recess the children would dare each other to run across the street into the Protestant neighborhood, and see how far they could run before getting caught. If they were caught, they were beaten.
The police were all Protestant, and they only helped the Protestants harass the Catholics. The first place we went was this memorial, near where Peter grew up. The faces you see in the ovals are pictures of the people who died when a Protestant gang, protected by the police, burnt down Bombay Street, a street in the Catholic neighborhood. You can see, behind the memorial, one of the peace walls, the walls separating the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. They are still in place all over Belfast, and residents, Peter says, really would rather they stay in place. They feel like the walls have kept the city safer and the violence down. Also note the Irish flag flying at the memorial: this is Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK. The British flag is the official flag of their country.
This billboard is painted on the end of the row of houses, next to the memorial.
Peter remembers that day, and remembers helping the people farther up on Bombay Street move what few belongings they could out of their houses before the fire reached them.
The memorial was for anyone from that neighborhood who died as a result of Protestant violence. You can see some of the ages of the people who died, in parentheses: Anne at age 5 and Mary at age 4. Peter says the IRA, whatever evil it turned to in its later days, was originally formed because Catholics really felt like they didn't have any other way of defend themselves.
Peter doesn't deny that the IRA committed terrible crimes, and wasn't saying that the Protestants deserved everything the IRA did against them. He wasn't even saying that the Protestants started the violence, or that it was the Protestant's fault in any way. He made it very clear that both sides did horrible things against each other. But, it was easy to see how things escalated, hearing Peter describe what it was like to live in that time. People were living in fear.
The Belfast neighborhoods were very quiet, very empty. The houses, built wall to wall, in rows, looked all nearly uniform. Occasionally there would be a dog in a front yard, or a child's toy, to distinguish one from another. And then, on the sides of the rows of houses, would be murals like this.
It was very frightening, seeing the violence celebrated, the killers honored as heros. But that's what they were to these people who saw their houses burnt, their own family members killed: they were the ones who stood up to the oppressors and fought for freedom, however misguided their actions sometimes turned out to be.
Before our class went to Northern Ireland, Kevin had warned us that it was possible we might be heckled by Protestants (being a group from Notre Dame, after all). The violence has only recently ended, and some parts of the country were not safe for tourists only five years ago. I had joked to my friends about wearing a t-shirt saying "I love Martin Luther" or something like that, just so I would be "safe." I imagined situations in my head of us encountering angry Protestants, but me telling them quickly, "No, it's okay, we're not all Catholic! Look, I'm a Protestant. I come from a Catholic family, and I go to a Catholic school, but my religious beliefs are Protestant. We're all a mix here. It's okay."
You see, I thought, in some sense, that I would be like a bridge between the two groups. I could walk with both crowds. I could move in both circles. I thought that since I had connections to both sides, I could connect with both kinds of people. No matter where I found myself, I could claim allegiance and be safe: Catholic or Protestant, I would be acceptable to both.
How wrong that feeling turned out to be. As we moved through the neighborhoods, listened to Peter's stories, and began to understand what people were like back then, what the mentality was like, I realized that things were exactly the opposite of what I had imagined. I began to realize that, because of my double ties, neither side would have seen me as a friend. To all I would have seemed a traitor, or at best, a foolish impossibility. The Protestants and Catholics alike would have seen my association with the other side as a sign that I didn't truly understand them: if I did, how could I possibly stand to associate with the other? There was no neutral ground, no bridge between the sides. Or, if there was a bridge, it was being burnt from both ends. The only things crossing the chasm were bombs and bullets.
And where did that leave me? It left me alone. It was the feeling I have when I attend Catholic mass with my Notre Dame friends, and they leave me behind in the pew to take communion; the feeling I have when people at church dismiss Catholics as papist and make jokes about their blindness; the feeling I have when Kevin leads us in the Hail Mary, and I can't join in; the feeling I have when I can tell that the people I love feel like I've abandoned them; the feeling I have when fellow converts to Presbyterianism speak of their former association with the Catholic Church as if it was something dirty; but magnified a hundred fold. I have so much love for Catholics and Protestants alike, and here I was, knowing that if I had come to Belfast fifteen years ago, I would be rejected by both of them. I would have been left abandoned to watch my two loves fight tooth and nail to kill each other, and neither one would have listened to my pleas to stop.
Every once in a while, we passed a little child. They would be in their little front yards playing, or peeking out of their windows at us. Each time I saw them, I wanted to talk to them, to offer them some gift of peace, though I had nothing to give. I wanted to say, "I am a Protestant, but I love you. I don't hate you because of my beliefs. I promise we can get along. I promise it doesn't have to be this way. I am proof of that." I pray that they grow up to understand that, even if I'm not the one to teach it to them.
Note the Irish flag on this person's house. They also have an Irish harp symbol on their front door, something I didn't see until I put this picture up here. Peter told us that people in these neighborhoods always used to leave their doors open, just in case one of their friends was fleeing from the Protestants and needed to dart through their house to escape.
Another mural. Note the Irish harp symbols on the gates.
We stayed on the bus through the Protestant part of town, just to be safe. We are mostly Catholic, after all. There were plenty of murals on the Protestant side, too. The inscription on the mural below means, "Who will separate us...?" taken from the verse, "Who will separate us from the love of Christ?" Obviously it's being put in a different context, referring to Ireland and Britain.
The mural below is especially scary. Oliver Cromwell is generally considered a horrible person in Ireland, someone who hated Catholics and killed lots of them. That feeling is understandable, when you read the inscription on the left bottom corner of this mural, a quote from Cromwell himself: "Catholicism is more than just a religion, it is a political power. Therefore I'm lead to believe there will be no peace in Ireland until the Catholic Church is crushed." This was one of the scarier murals we saw, in my opinion, specifically because of that quote.
I think it's hard for people to understand why these two groups hate each other so much. But, you have to remember, these groups have been at odds in Ireland since the Reformation, and the religious hate was tacked onto the existing tension between Britain and Ireland. Cromwell was in Ireland, a participant in this centuries-old battle, around 1650, long before the Troubles of the 1900's showed themselves in Belfast. After our Irish history class, the recent situation in Northern Ireland made a lot of sense.
However, it seems that this generations-old hatred is starting to end. Peter told us that he originally didn't tell his children about what happened to him in the Troubles, because he didn't want them to inherit his hurts and, in trying to defend his honor, continue to spread the hell he lived through. He just recently told his oldest son, who is about my age, maybe a bit younger. Peter said his son was really angry about all the things that Peter told him. It only reinforced his decision to try to keep most of the old pain quiet. He thinks a lot of people his age feel the same way, and that everyone who experienced the Troubles just want to make sure it doesn't happen again. The people carrying out the rare attacks now are mostly young, easily-influenced men who never experienced what the Troubles were like themselves. Peter says that he knows no Protestant would have anything to fear, walking through his neighborhood nowadays; however, he doesn't know if he would be safe in the Protestant neighborhood yet. I can't help thinking that maybe the Protestants would say the same thing.
I felt so alone that day, walking among all my friends, feeling so different from them. I don't know how they felt, not having the odd connections that I do. I just felt so hurt from both sides, but not really as a double victim: the real pain came as a double offender. Each time I saw a memorial for the Catholics who died at the hands of the Protestants, I thought, "My people are responsible for this." And every time I saw a memorial for the Protestants who died at the hands of the Catholics, I thought again, "My people are responsible for this."
And these people call themselves Christian. That's what I kept thinking to myself, over and over. They call themselves Christian. Members of one body, branches of the same vine, children of the same Father.
For everyone who reads this, I want you to remember: we do not need to hate those with whom we do not agree. No matter what group it is, religious, political, cultural, or otherwise. A culture of hate hundreds of years old cost Ireland years of violence and thousands of lives. We, to avoid this, must love every person, even if they do not deserve love, even if they hate us in return, even if they actively try to harm us, and even if they succeed. For indeed, do we always deserve love? We must put aside our own pain and see all people as who they are: people, just like us. Maybe we pity them, maybe we wish they would change and are sad when they don't. Every man does what is right in his own eyes: pity those that do not see clearly. Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves. And who is our neighbor? For those living in Belfast, it is literally the person living across the street. But for all of us, it is the one in need of love. And what human being doesn't need love?
I would like to end this post with a promise, a promise God made to the Israelites when they too were divided against each other. It is my hope for all those who are divided, and I do not think this hope will disappoint.
Ezekiel 37:21, 22, and 26
Thus says the Lord GOD:
I will take the children of Israel from among the nations
to which they have come,
and gather them from all sides to bring them back to their land.
I will make them one nation upon the land,
in the mountains of Israel,
and there shall be one prince for them all.
Never again shall they be two nations,
and never again shall they be divided into two kingdoms.
...
I will make with them a covenant of peace;
it shall be an everlasting covenant with them,
and I will multiply them, and put my sanctuary among them forever.
