I blame Charlton Heston. The school I attended stood in the shadow of a dark mountain. We went up the lane, breathing in the smell of sour hops from the brewery, to attain wisdom in the school that Blessed Edmund Rice built. We did not know we were pilgrims; that the daily journey we completed from our homes had started in Leinster two centuries before we were born; that we, the Catholic poor on the wrong side of Partition, were as much part of Ireland as those in the South.
Religion was a compulsory subject though, in truth, the teachers did not take it too seriously as an academic subject. I turned up for my O-level to find a Bible on the table. Why? We had not studied the Bible. Our teacher, a good man, had preferred to talk to us about ethics and behaviour during the two years he had shepherded us through the course. We were the first generation of Vatican II, the children of the mid-1960s, the first generation not to hear the Mass in Latin, not to learn Catechism, to have Catholicism offered as a feeling, the sheep who were driven out to weekly confession and Mass.
I failed my R.E. O-Level. It was the only one I failed. I cannot have been the only one.
But Moses was mentioned somewhere along the line and the film, The Ten Commandments, back in the pre-streaming days of analogue television in Belfast, would have been a staple. There is Charlton Heston as Moses, coming down from Mount Sinai, with the tablets in his hand, bringing God’s commandments to the Israelites in exile. I kept looking up at our own mountain, expecting him to appear, one day.
Indeed, in my childish imagination ever since then, every time I see a mountain I think of Moses. Every slieve has become Sinai. I pass Slemish on my annual trip to the Glens of Antrim and I see Moses, up there, looking for Patrick no doubt. I drive through the Blue Stacks in Donegal and there he is, traipsing through the turf.
I look across the lough every day at the Sperrins and imagine him up there too. Believe it or not too, my daily commute allows me a brief glimpse of the magnificence Mournes – Na Beanna Boirche – and I wonder if he is up there on Slieve Donard. Or coming home from Dublin for many a year, seeing Slieve Gullion would be the first sign that I had escaped the Pale after another week’s servitude to Gloriana’s kith and kin. Moses would have liked Slieve Gullion; it is an extinct volcano. He would have appreciated the fire and lava of a volcano; that is the sort he was.
Moses is always there, a lone figure on the mountainside, striding down, carrying those tablets like they were something out of a CrossFit competition. He is very Irish, is Moses. He knew violence and hard times. He knew what his people were and what they might become. He would have no difficulty recognising this lost tribe of Ireland, our leaders and their followers worshipping the Golden Calf, the rest of us in despair of finding our promised land in a turbulent world.
It is odd how things stick in your head. We forget that the religion, Christianity, that so many of us practise, perhaps badly, is so old. You remember that Christianity is 2,000 years old and then you remember the tap root Christianity has into Judaism and that throws you even further back into far-flung lands and an ancient past.
You go to Mass on Sunday, dip your fingers in the holy water and you are in the Jordan with John the Baptist and Jesus. You have reconnected with your ancient faith and, through it, another land and another ancient faith tradition, re-watered the roots that go so deep into the planet. Thousands of years of religious practice and heritage revived in a simple act of submission.
You are a spiritual being, one fully alive within an ancient faith, but you are Irish, and you have little awareness, really, about this. The Irish do not do spiritual. The Irish do “ól agus ceol”; we are shallow, like the craic, like the banter, like a pint. So many have no real appreciation of how profound our religious heritage really is.
Throw in the Irish language – which no one speaks anymore, you say – and you have another ancient marker to accompany you on your life’s journey. Well, except you carry Irish in your surname, anglicised, wrought into another tongue, but still, in its essence, a metaphysical marker, every bit as distinct as the blackbird’s yellow beak above Loch Lao, a cultural kernel, an ancient atom that, once split, carries you into a different language, into a different culture, back to your Indo-European heritage, lost in antiquity, and the poor, mangled, anglicised surname you carry, or inherited, – Murray – becomes Ó Muirí, becomes Ó Muireadhaigh, becomes Ua Muireadhaigh and you follow the family tree back to south Kildare two hundred years ago where the paternal family’s travels in Ireland begin and, then, startlingly, a couple of lines in a book: “Mullaghmast was the royal seat of the Uí Muiredaig…”
Wait, are they my ones? Royalty, you say? I will take it.
Yes, I know, I am in danger of overegging the cultural pudding. But still, it does send shivers down your spine, doesn’t it, even the vaguest connection with antiquity, lived through a name, however mangled over time?
Faith and language, barely understood, barely functioning, barely alive, often only on the surface, and yet profound and ancient and fulfilling.
You have seen the marketing slogan, I am sure, boasting of “Ireland’s Ancient East”. Yet everywhere in Ireland is, in fact, ancient and its native inhabitants, with their first and last names are also, in fact, ancient. We do not realise that so much these days because we are modern; we have the M50 and multinational corporations. There is nothing backward looking about the modern Irish; we are as much part of the West’s machine as any other people.
It is said that the devil’s greatest trick was to deceive people into thinking he did not exist. Perhaps it is the greatest trick that Gloriana’s scribes have played on the Irish is to convince them that they are nothing of consequence, in spirit and flesh, when, in fact, they are of huge consequence: we know Moses. Tá aithne againn ar Mhaois.