Sunday

As in the States, Sunday here is a confused day. The holy go to church, of course. In this country, church means mass; something like 95% of people in the country, including immigrants, are Catholic. When I arrived last year my cousin told me that a stranger attending a Catholic mass anywhere in Ireland would not be noticed, but a stranger attending a Church of Ireland service would raise eyebrows. And so it is.

Today I went to church in Carbury, which would be my parish if I had one. I cannot swallow the Jesus message, but I am confirmed in the church, having not had much choice as a teenager, and know the ritual. Carbury is not the closest church to me, but the people I know who are churchgoers attend there, and I like the smallness of it.. It’s odd that I can look around and identify a good third of the congregation and greet most of those by name after the service. It’s odder that I am related to several of them. In California, when I took my father to church ten minutes from my house, I knew no one, and was only related to him.

            The sermon today was about Mary and Martha. In the Bible (I know this because the appropriate passage was read from the lay pulpit before the sermon) it says that Martha got impatient with Mary because, while Martha was running about organizing the tea for Jesus, who had shown up unexpectedly, Mary was merely sitting as his feet, listening. The Bible’s version is that Mary was the holier one; poor Martha, like women everywhere, was disparaged for her practicality and her impatience at being left to do all the work. The priest delivering the sermon was an old-school Irish pastor; it was easy to get the impression that we were keeping him from his dinner, which was getting cold while he was forced by circumstance to be in this inconsequential church, reading out the prayers. So I was surprised when he addressed the Mary and Martha parable, and even more surprised when, from the high pulpit, the one signifying the extreme authority of the church, he defended Martha. How, he asked, could Mary have the time to sit at Jesus’ feet if Martha weren’t there in the background, fussing with the cups and saucers? Now this priest might very well have been reading someone else’s text—I suspect that the notion of the minister gnawing the end of his pencil as he writes the weekly sermon died with David Niven in The Minister’s Wife—but the sentiment was very 21^st century.

            After the service the priest did hurry off, driven away in a Mini by a church volunteer, one of the legion of modern-day Marthas who keep the church afloat. A few of the older parishioners hung around in front of the church; most hurried off back to farm work, to family time, some to substantial Sunday midday dinners (meat, potato and two veg followed by pudding) in the local pubs.

 After church I was going to head back to the Slieveblooms for a walk, but the weather was very wet and there had been heavy rains overnight. The walk would take place, but I was not equipped for the wet. You need gaiters, high boots, walking sticks and other paraphernalia that I don’t have here. When the weather calmed later in the afternoon I headed down to Kildare and two major attractions there, the Japanese Gardens and the Irish National Stud. There is no explanation for how this odd duo got together, but the slogan is, Where Strength and Beauty live as one. Actually, there are three sights here, since, tucked into the center of the National Stud is a second garden, a millennial reimagining of a seventh century ‘natural environment’. This is dedicated to St Fiachra, patron saint of gardeners. So there is the small but jam-packed Japanese Garden, a hodgepodge of tunnels, hilly pathways, an empty tea house, a wooden bridge or two, some Western perennials, and lots of water features. We are meant to travel along the Life of Man [sic] from the Gate of Oblivion to the Gateway to Eternity, with many a short stony climb in between. The grounds are immaculate save for the inevitable crisp package tossed into the stream. But the dense foliage, the clipped trees and emphasis on layers of green, which the Irish understand so incredibly well, make for a pleasant walk even in the rain.

            Then there is the National Stud. This institution was founded in 1900 when the country was greatly concerned that its treasured Irish racehorse bloodline would disappear without intervention. Up to this point mares were covered by travelling stallions, which were brought to towns on specific dates advertised on fliers. The mares were brought to these stallions, then taken back to the farm to give birth a year or so later. I suspect there would be many a heated discussion if, after a few weeks, the stallions were found not to have done their duty.

Since Ireland was still a colony when the Stud was donated to the state it was left to the British to continue the place until it was handed over to the Irish in the middle of World War II, when it no doubt became burdensome for the British to maintain it. Today it is still a stud farm, although judging by the small number of stallions dotted around the pastures the government is having as much trouble supporting this endeavor as it is underwriting most of its responsibilities. Still, the idea of allowing the pubic to wander through the fields and paddocks of a real horse farm, watching the stallions graze and seeing the products, if not ever the actual acts, of their activities in the adjacent fields, the foals tottering on their absurdly long and spindly legs, rarely venturing far from their highly protective mothers.

These days the idea of needing to protect the Irish bloodstock is out-of-date. Ireland is chockablock with highly successful breeders who own huge and gorgeous stud farms, particularly in the flat grass-rich acreage of the Midlands. The National Stud is for all intents and purposes a museum, a look behind the scenes for the rest of us, and like all museums everywhere, appears to be struggling for its existence, since there aren’t enough people interested in wandering through a few paddocks on a wet Sunday afternoon to catch a glimpse of a few good horses and their gangly offspring.