The Parish (5 page)

As the boys grew up, Conn became a friend and adviser, and when Gearóid and Diarmuid came to secondary-school age, they travelled to St Brogan’s with him; when Seán later studied history, the two of them enjoyed long and complicated discussions about ancient civilisations. Con was always amused
by the fact that in family discussion where heated exchanges often took place, our eldest, Micheal, never used two words where one would do.

At the age of eight, Lena took up horse riding, and Con often drove her to the local stables. On going back to collect her, he would wait patiently while her friend Sage was bedded down for the night. When she started into competitive riding and tack had to be polished, he never objected if saddles and bridles were strewn around his feet, emitting aroma of horse, as he watched the nightly news on TV. Her brothers were not as tolerant, but if an argument ensued, Con backed Lena up, and if that situation was reversed, she was in his corner.

Many problems that arose during her teenage years were discussed with Con, and often it was months later that Gabriel and I heard of something that had worried her. All her school subject choices and problems were sorted between the two of them as they travelled together every day before he dropped her off at her convent school in Bandon. They decided on her choice of course in UCC and the points necessary to get it, and on the day when her Leaving Cert results came out, she and I collected them in the morning but they remained unopened on the kitchen table until Con came from school that evening. Gabriel and I could understand her need for Con to be there, as they had shared the preparation and now she wanted him there for the results, be they good or bad. Fortunately they were good and both were equally thrilled.

Over the years, Con had become the tried and trusted friend of the whole family, and Gabriel and he often laughed when they recalled the first day he had come and my announcement that he could stay for only a week.

Since then, he had become one of us. Because he was so
closely woven into the family fabric, he was immersed in all our ups and downs and was often the one to pour oil on troubled waters. He was completely non-judgmental. At the other end of the scale, we had a family member who thought that the main aim of the rest of us was to make his life a misery. The result was that when that relation visited, we all bent over backwards not to say the wrong thing. After one such visit, as we all breathed a collective sigh of relief, Con said quietly: “Now we can all go back to being ourselves.”

When Gabriel and I first visited Kenny’s bookshop in Galway, we knew straight away that this would be Con’s idea of heaven. I had to travel the country every time I had a new book out, to do signings at bookshops, so any time I had a book signing in Galway, Con and I set off early in the morning so that he could enjoy a long day in Kenny’s. He loved that shop and always smiled ruefully before setting out for Galway, declaring that it was going to be an expensive visit. He knew that he could never resist the wonderful old books on offer. When we visited Kenny’s during the summer of 2000, he brought along his old copy of the Rev. Diggs bible on beekeeping,
The Practical Bee Guide
, to have it bound in hardback.

Just before that Christmas, Con got what we thought was a bad flu, but Ellen, my sister, who is a nurse and was home from Canada, insisted that he go to the doctor, who sent him to hospital for a check-up. The result of the tests was shattering: terminal cancer, with a very short projected lifespan. Medically there was nothing to be done, and Con came home two days before Christmas for what we believed might be at least a few months, though we were hoping for longer and praying for a miracle.

His two brothers, Fr Denis and Fr Pat, came to spend Christmas with us, knowing that it would be their last with Con. Like Con, they are gentle and unassuming. It was a Christmas full of pain, spirituality and an awareness that we were walking on the edge of a precipice.

We knew that we would be able to take good care of Con at home because we had medical expertise in the house, Fr Denis being a doctor and Ellen a nurse. But, in the event, long-term care was not required as Con died on 3 January 2001. His death, like his life, was full of peace and tranquillity.

Con’s illness and death had all happened so quickly that many of his fellow teachers and students in St Brogan’s, where he had taught up to the Christmas holidays, were taken completely unawares. They poured into our front room with grief-stricken faces, and stood beside his coffin where he was laid out in his best grey suit. His coffin, surrounded by lit candles in Aunty Peg’s brass candlesticks, stood in the corner where for many years he had sat correcting exam papers, reading his books or doing the
Irish Times
crossword. It was heart-breaking to see his young students gaze unbelieving into the coffin at the teacher they had loved. For all of us it was a cruel blow, but my heart bled especially for Lena, to whom he had been a loving friend and mentor.

Friends took over the kitchen and fed all comers. The neighbours who had known and loved Con, and the members of the local bridge club where he had been a member for many years, all came to say goodbye. Even though he had been a blow-in like myself, he had become very much part of parish life.

The following evening, through a cold, bleak January landscape, we followed his hearse back along the road through
Macroom and Carriganima to his home in Boherbue where he was laid to rest beside his parents. Our great grandmothers had been sisters and it was that family connection that had brought him to Innishannon the first day. Over the years, he had enriched our home with many blessings.

H
is intense concentration on his surroundings caught my attention. He was not in my direct line of vision but slightly to my right as he sat in front of me at mass. His eyes roamed around the church. He began with the sanctuary area, taking in the blotched walls. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. Up and down his glance swept like a giant brush along the walls, and then his eyes locked on to a patch in the middle of the stained-glass window, above the altar. I recognised his problem. It was very difficult to be sure if it was the stained glass or the real sky that boasted that particular shade of blue. I felt tempted to lean forward and assure him, “It is a hole.” But I knew when he nodded his head thoughtfully that he had figured it out for himself.

Then he moved down along the aisle walls where navy-blue and grey mildew had battled through layers of ancient green plaster. The plaster had surrendered many years previously. He noted the cracks in the latticed windows and the frayed sash ropes swaying aimlessly in mid-air, and then he tilted back his head and took in the arching ceiling with
its fractured cornice mouldings and grey cobwebs hanging lankly from high-flying bulbs. When these bulbs needed to be replaced, it was necessary to erect scaffolding, or a brave parishioner—usually Gabriel—tied two tall ladders together and risked life and limb to replace them.

After mass I waited for our visitor to leave the church. I followed him down the aisle as he tilted back his head to take in the sloping overhead gallery where exposed rotted rafters crawled like black snakes along the gaping ceiling. In the back porch he frowned at a modern PVC window in an old gothic arch. As he came out the door I knew that any attention he might have given to the ceremony had been overwhelmed by the condition of our parish church.

Suddenly he turned and caught my eye: “Are you the woman who writes the books?” he demanded, and when I nodded, he shook his head and informed me grimly: “Ye have a lovely little village but ye’r church is a bloody disgrace!”

I could not contradict him. It was an embarrassment at funerals and weddings to watch outsiders look around our church in disbelief. After all, ours was not a poor parish. Brides before they walked up the aisle fought bravely to improve the look of the place, but it is difficult to put a good face on a tired old lady whose bone structure has collapsed. One posh prospective bridegroom had inquired in a plummy English accent: “Could one not give this place a lick of paint before one commences proceedings?” Unfortunately we were long gone past the remedy of a quick lick of paint.

There is nothing more likely to cause trouble in any parish than the restoration of the parish church. Because it is everybody’s church it is everybody’s business, and even if you never darken the door of the place it is still your church. We
all know what is best for this place where we were baptised, got our first holy communion and were possibly married—though that could be a double-edged sword. Above all, the chances are that when our race is run it is in here we will be brought for a final farewell. So this is our place and doing it up is akin to doing up the family home. We all need to air our opinion, to have it heard and acknowledged. The man in charge of this job is usually the parish priest, and for his future peace of mind he had better get it right.

It so happened that in our parish, just as we were finally about to get moving on church restoration, we got a new parish priest. We knew nothing about him so he had that advantage. He had rubbed nobody up the wrong way by forgetting to call out an anniversary or by not agreeing a time for a baptism. He was starting with a clean sheet. How it would be when the restoration was over would depend on his tact, his delegation skills and his ability to suffer us all gladly. It would also depend on how he handled our funerals. The bereaved are vulnerable and a priest who is sensitive and caring around death will be forgiven many other flaws. But as yet our new PP was an unopened package, so I rang my friend Noeleen who had worked with him in his previous parish and asked, “What kind is the new fella?” I could sense her smiling over the phone as she told me: “He won’t put a foot wrong.” Well, I thought to myself, that will be some achievement.

A small building committee had been set up by the previous priest. We were just five in number because he believed that small is beautiful. I was on this committee with no commendation other than a deep love of and attachment to this old church that was built in 1829. The plot had been given by the local landlord, which was a very generous gesture
for the time and had caused certain ripples of disquiet amongst the landed gentry who would not be attending that church. The wily parish priest of that time, fearing a change of mind that could lead to a claw-back of his plot, buried the first four coffins at its four corners. At that time nobody moved the dead.

I was not baptised here and had not received my first holy communion here, so I was a blow-in. But the chances were that I would be carried in here for my grand finale because many years previously Aunty Peg, in her wisdom, had bought a family grave by the main pathway, commenting: “If I’m there beside the path someone will see me and say a prayer.” One day I will join Aunty Peg and Uncle Jacky in their sunny patch. So I had a vested interest.

We had meetings with architects, lighting designers, heating experts, sound experts, stone experts and endless other experts and people who were no experts at all. But it was good for me to have a demanding project on hand because Con’s death had rocked the ground beneath our feet. The meetings went on for months and months and we had meetings about meetings. And in the meanwhile parishioners asked, “What are ye doing? When is it ever going to start? How much will it cost?”

The day the quantity surveyor finally came up with the cost was the day I nearly fell off the chair with shock. For some reason I had got it into my head that we could be talking about £500,000 and I had thought that even that was a very sizeable sum. So when the quantity surveyor calmly threw out a figure of a million I realised that we had one big problem.

Now, this was a few years before millions began to be thrown around like snuff at a wake, and it remained a million even after we had pared the cost back to the bone. In the
original plan there had been extra details that we had cut out. I repeated a million to myself a few times just to get used to the sound of it: a million … a million … a million. The parish would have to raise a million. There is nothing that concentrates the mind of a parish like a million. Once the figure had sunk into my mind, I concluded that it was a case of getting the money and getting the job done, but it soon became apparent that there would be more to it than that.

At one of our endless meetings, Fr Tom Hayes from the bishop’s office came to discuss matters. He was pleasant, enthusiastic and full of good ideas. He pointed out that the money would restore the building but that the actual fundraising itself could revitalise our parish. That possibility had never dawned on me, but I could see his logic. After all, what good was a beautiful building with no sense of community? To me his was a whole new concept that turned on a light in my head. But a week later, when on a wet dismal night a group of us came together around the altar in St Mary’s to form a finance committee, that light flickered. We seemed to be a disorganised, ill-assorted collection, all wondering where to begin, and the gloomy church added to our sense of depression. The prospect of trying to transform this damp old building into a place of warmth and comfort was a daunting one. Like many old churches around the country, it was cold, bleak and miserable, and certainly not serving the purpose for which it was intended.

I was at this finance meeting to represent the building committee. Members of the building committee had decided at a previous meeting that we should not be on the two committees. If you were on too many committees in any parish, the people who did nothing might decide very quickly
that you were trying to run the parish. So one committee was enough. When a determined man decided that I should be PRO, I protested and informed him that as I was already on the building committee, I could not be on the finance committee. “Says who?” he demanded. My protestations were swept aside and I was told that if I was helping to spend the money, then I should be helping to make it as well. There was no arguing with that logic. Gabriel, who had served here as an altar boy, was also on both committees, and the restoration of this church was one of his life-long ambitions.

So, with stops and starts, the finance committee was gradually formed and the most prevalent feeling that night around the altar was a huge sense of responsibility. At last we had our committee, and though we were all unsure of what lay ahead, we were determined to give it our best. If motivation was needed, it was all around in the dismal peeling walls and leaking steeple of St Mary’s. Would our little army be up to the challenge? We would need to pull in all the parish troops.

The structure of a parish is good scaffolding for holding together a community. The station areas within our parish comprise a small number of townlands, and within these station areas the houses rotate the hosting of mass for the neighbouring houses. Apart from the religious aspect, it is the ideal conduit for new people in an area to get to know their neighbours and also to keep the old neighbours in touch with each other.

With the decline of farming in rural Ireland, occasions for meeting up have disappeared. The creamery had always been a great meeting place where farmers waited in line and discussed world events, national events and local happenings. But the creamery disappeared and with it a social corner of rural
Ireland. Then the forge where farmers met on wet days to get their horses shod disappeared and then, like falling dominoes, went the local barracks, school and post office. Now the local shop is under threat and the shopkeepers’ slogan could be “use us or lose us”, and the loss can have a cumulative effect on the community. Some say that big is best, but we are discovering that big is also impersonal and lonely.

So, the stations are one of the networks that thread our parish life together. After the station mass, people sit, chat and eat, and how elaborate the eats are depends solely on each householder, but the usual is tea and cake. Within each station area are people who are interested in maintaining a community structure, and these are the men and women who the people in each station area like to represent them. So, the townland representatives were called to the first collectors’ meeting. But would the troops come?

That night, as I walked up the hill to the meeting room in the school, I thought that this was the test. Would we have a good turnout, or would we get off to a dispiriting start? As I rounded the corner, the answer was laid out before me. The road up to the church, the school car park and the church car park were packed with cars. I felt my heart rise. It was good to know that there was life blood pulsing through the veins of our parish.

It was a vibrant meeting with the usual ups and downs, and the people who thought that it was asking too much of the parish, and the people who thought that it was only a question of forging ahead. But meetings are strange events and one negative thinker can turn a whole meeting upside down. When this appeared to be happening, my heart sank. But then a young man whom I did not know stood up at
the back of the hall and said with quiet determination: “Let’s get one thing clear here right now: we must stop apologising for looking for money for our church. We need the church for baptisms, for communions, weddings and when we die. We’re only looking for five pounds a week or whatever people want to give. It’s their church and it’s up to the people.” There was no arguing with such common sense. With his positive statement, he turned the meeting right around. We concluded on a positive note. The parish collection was about to take off. We were on our way!