Placelore

Pilgrim

Pilgrim, take care your journey's not in vain, 

a hazard without profit, without gain;

the King you seek you'll find it Rome, its true,

but only if he travels on the way with you.

 

Medieval Irish Lyrics with The Irish Bardic Poet

Selected and translated by James Carney

The Dolmen Press 1985 edition.

Another translation from Robin Flower, The Irish Tradition, The Lilliput Press Ltd 1994

Who to Rome goes

Much labour, little profit knows;

For God, on earth though long you've sought him,

You'll miss in Rome unless you've brought him.

 

(From the manuscript of Sedulius Scottus)

 

"Here Am I"

The man whose calling "O Allah" was equivalent to God's answering him, "Here Am I"

That person one night was calling "O Allah!"

That his mouth might be sweetened thereby,

and Satan said to him, "Be quiet, O austere one!

No answer comes to thee from nigh the throne,

How long wilt thou cry "Allah" with harsh face?"

That person was sad at heart and hung his head,

And then beheld Khizr present before him in a vision,

Who said to him, "Ah!  Thou has ceased to call on God,

Wherefore repentest thou of calling upon Him?"

The man said, "The answer 'Here am I' came not,

Wherefore I fear that I am repulsed from the door."

Khizr replied to him, "God has given me this command;

Go to him and say, 'O much-tried one,

Did not I engage thee to do my service?

Did not I engage thee to call upon me?

That calling 'Allah' of thine was my 'Here am I,'

And that pain and longing and ardour of thine my messenger;

Thy struggles and strivings for assistance

Were my attractions, and originated thy prayer.

Thy fear and thy love are the covert of my mercy,

Each 'O Lord!' of thine contains many 'Here am I's.

 

The soul of fools is alien from this calling on God,

Because it is not their wont to cry, 'O Lord!'

On their mouths and hearts are locks and bonds,

That they may not cry to God in time of distress.

God gave Pharaoh abundance of riches and wealth,

So that he boasted that he was 'Lord Supreme.'

In the whole of his life he suffered no headache,

So that he never cried to God, wretch that he was.

God granted him the absolute dominion of the world,

But withheld from him pain and sorrow and cares;

Because pain and sorrow and loads of cares

Are the lot of God's friends in the world.

Pain is better than the dominion of the world,

So that thou mayest call on God in secret.

The cries of those free from pain are dull and cold,

The cries of the sorrowful come from the burning hearts."

 

(Jalaluddin Rumi 1207 - 1273)

tr. E. H. Whinfield

 

Unknowable

"But now you will ask me,... How am I to think of God himself, and what is he? and I cannot answer you accept to say I do not know! For this question you have brought me into he cloud of unknowing. Of God himself can no man speak."

The Cloud of Unknowing

"Whoever perceives something in God and attaches thereby some name to him, that is not God. God is ineffable"

Meister Eckhart

"God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere"

Hermes Trismegistus 

" ...God is unknowable. God is also undefinable, because attaching any characteristic to the Infinite excludes its opposite, immediately violating the wholeness and completeness of the Absolute, outside of which nothing can exist"  

Healing Words The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine  HarperPaperbacks 1997 

Help Towards Awakening

"The aspirant to deliverance must resort to a sage as his Guru, that is, one who has awakened from the sleep of ignorance of the Self and is therefore free from delusion. How can one, who has not awakened from sleep, awaken others who are of the same case?" 

Bhagavan Sri Ramana

The Supreme Science 24.

 

Father of a Nation

Above the door in one of the classrooms of the primary school that I attended as a child was a picture of man dressed in the robes of a Roman Catholic bishop of the late 19th century. His left hand held a crozier, while his right pointed towards the ground, upon which numerous snakes were depicted crawling towards the sea; in the background there was an image of a monastic round-tower. The bishop was said to be St Patrick (circa 387 – 493), and the painting represented a fusion of a politicised Roman Catholicism and a romanticised Nationalist Ireland. From this conjunction, with the added influence of the nostalgically "Irish"-in-America and in more recent decades the Americanised Irish-within-Ireland, emerged the modern presentation of St Patrick.

As much as possible these influences needed to be passed through before I was somewhat able to approach with new interest the question, “Who was St Patrick?” Patrick is, in my view, and to the extent that my understanding will allow, the most pivotal figure of Ireland's record since the 5th Century and one of the most important in Europe, yet not a great deal is known about him.

An Orthodox Byzantine Icon

I cannot rely solely on history to try to locate Patrick, although his life did coincide with a recorded Irish history of sorts. But it also flourished during the latter period of Ireland's last mythological cycle, sometimes referred to as the “historical cycle” or the “Cycle of the Kings”. It is not known with any certainty where Patrick was born; it may have been in either the Roman province of Briton or Gaul, although it is most likely the former. Patrick informs us that his father, Calpornius, was a deacon and also an official of the empire in the town of Bannaventa Berniae. Though there is some debate about the possible existence of two Patricks who came to give impetus to the outpost of Christianity(1) that had been established in Ireland years earlier, the evidence upon which this is based has no validity.

Most scholars accept there was but one remarkable man ("the Great Initiate") who was the author of two short pieces of writing: the Epistola and the Confessio. The Confessio is a form of literary genre, and the Confessio of St Patrick, along with the Confessions of St Augustine, is among the finest extant examples of this form from ancient literature.

As a youth Patrick was captured by hostile marauders at his father's country estate, transported along with many other captives to Ireland, and sold into slavery. Muirchú, one of the saint’s hagiographers, declares that Patrick tended sheep; other sources claim that Patrick was a swineherd, one of the lowest placements in the society of his exile. Here, through hardship and suffering, he came to recognise his lowly state and began to pray for help and guidance; as the years passed his prayer deepened and was answered. He escaped and returned to his home, where in response to an inner call, he undertook years of study and initiation for priesthood at St Martin's Monastery at Tours, at the island sanctuary of Lérins, and with St Germain of Auxerrre. Later, in a dream, he received a summons from an angel, Victoricus, to return to Ireland: “The sons and daughters of the Forest of Foclut call to you.”

Accompanied by a group of companions, he returned and disembarked at Inber Sláine, circa 433 AD. Gradually he traveled inland towards the household of the chieftain, Miliucc, whom he had served while held captive.  Miliucc, hearing of the approach of his former servant, committed an apparently strange action: he immolated himself along with all of his possessions, and from the slopes of Slíabh Mis where he had arrived ‘in a state of grace’, Patrick witnessed the funeral pyre.

Gradually as I explored the Confessio of Patrick, it began to dawn on me that the writings could be, like many other such literary efforts, allegorical(2). With this in view, let us examine again the opening part of Patrick’s return. He comes no longer a captive. Through effort and guidance, the inner man Patricius(3), father of the Nation, has become free of his former master, his outer man. Whereas Miliucc is consumed with fire, his descendants submit to the new inner man and Patrick utters these words: “I do not know, but God knows,” and of Miliucc declares, “His seed will serve instead of being served for all time.”

The Confessio concludes with the declaration that what was accomplished in Ireland was “the ‘Gift Of God’, and this is my confession before I die.” After his death, Patrick’s “children in the faith” consolidated his extraordinary missionary initiative. In a time of disintegration and darkness, Ireland became known as "the island of saints and scholars”, a place of refuge and a light to Europe and beyond, and remained so through periods of inner renewal for several centuries.

(1) Palladius was the first bishop sent by Pope Celestine I to ‘the Irish believing in Christ’ in 431'.

(2) Origen (A.D. 185 – 254?) utilized his sermons and writings to illustrate his view that there are at least three levels of meaning in any biblical text; the literal sense, the moral application to the soul, and the allegorical or spiritual sense, referring to the mysteries of the Christian faith. Origin was influenced by Plato, Pythagoras, Gnosticism, Jewish exegetical traditions, eastern teachings particularly those of Persia and India, and drew upon those when he advocated two varieties of religion for different types of people — an esoteric and an exoteric.

(3) His birth name may have been Maewyn Succat, the name Patricius or Patrick (Irish Pádraig) was bestowed on him by Pope Celestine I. By the 8th century he had come to be revered as the patron saint of Ireland.