Ireland Awakening
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Eva Stuart Watt creates a memoir of her days in Ireland. Often sacrificing comfort and safety, she spends her time with the youth of the day living out the love of God. See how God provides and blesses a life that is given away.
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Ireland Awakening - Eva Stuart Watt
Britain.
Chapter 1
MEMORIES
REMEMBER? Can I ever forget them? Those wonderful days by wind-swept shores of County Cork, when we met from various boarding schools, half a dozen of us boys and girls, to spend our holidays with Father and Mother. They were home on furlough from their lone, pioneer mission field in Kenya Colony and had taken a meagerly furnished house for us down by the shore near Fastnet Lighthouse, a good Irish mile beyond the little village of Schull.
It seems but yesterday, though it’s nearer half a century, that a rosy-cheeked, barefooted boy on his way back from market sold us a donkey for two shillings. And the boys, having saddled it with an old cushion, fastened with ropes, enthusiastically started taking us girls for rides around the low, winding road and over the heathered hilltops.
Those beautiful, warm summer evenings too, when we strolled along by the beach road, singing together our favorite songs; when night after night the parish priest, Father Frank O’Connor, would break in on our happy company. He said he liked the singing. Sometimes it might be ’Way Down upon the Suwannee River,
or I’m Sitting by the Stile, Mary,
or again Beulah Land.
I am sure Father Frank liked the music; but I always felt it was more than our singing which brought him out so far and so frequently from his home in the village; for invariably he and Father would end up by going on ahead, wrapped in deep conversation, till the singing died away on the night wind and the rest of us were lost to view. Often the moon would be rising over the sea when Mother would turn back with us, leaving the two of them to wander on alone, arm in arm, for many another mile. We never knew what they talked about: we only knew that they were friends with a capital F.
When the holidays were over, I recall, Father would often get a letter with a Schull postmark, which in length corresponded, I thought, with those walks in the gloaming—sheets and sheets from the parish priest, all about things vital and eternal. Father occasionally might read out a sentence here and there, such as Ah, Mr. Watt, I think you’re too cocksure of Heaven.
Then Father would write pages in return.
But memory weaves another web around the past. This time it is County Galway and still during Father’s lifetime. He and Mother had been to Africa for a term of service, and were back again broken in health and with empty pockets. Still they tried to bring us children together again for a few months to unite the severed ties of family love. By this time most of us were teenaged. The house in Schull was no longer available; and as a last resort Father had taken a coast guard boathouse, a couple of miles beyond the picturesque village of Clifden, in Connemara. By legal contract signed with the coast guard, Father had managed to secure the place for three years, had furnished it scantily from a store in the village, and got his bairns once more around him for the long-dreamed-of summer holiday.
Our little purchases of eggs and vegetables at the cottages would as often as not end up with an invitation to come in and take a stool by the fire. The barefooted colleens were like queens, holding scepters in their two-roomed cabins with grace and dignity; the men, though poorly clad, carried themselves with the air of chieftains. Before leaving the quiet seclusion of their firesides, Father would usually present them with a little Douay Gospel. This was never refused. It was new to them and their natural religious impulses responded warmly to thought of possessing a holy Catholic Book written by one of the apostles.
One Monday afternoon, however, quite unexpectedly the coast guard officer knocked at the boathouse. My sister Via, on opening the door was covered by his revolver. See this?
he cried in an excited frenzy; "this is what I have to carry to protect myself because I let you people in here. You’ll have to get out at once. Where’s your father?" Father was laid up with a sprained leg from running races with us, but asked him in and offered him a seat by his bedside. He’d come to report, he said with half-suppressed agitation, that on Sunday morning Father McAlpine, the parish priest of Clifden, had denounced us from the pulpit and told the people to boycott us rigidly regarding food and fuel, ordering them to hand up all the Douay Scriptures to be destroyed. Further, he had come to his house after Mass in a furious rage and fairly frightened his wife out of her senses by threatening that his life wouldn’t be safe for a day, unless he’d remove the family he had allowed into the boathouse. This of course explained the coast guard’s strange behavior and the revolver he carried.
But Father was unmoved. You’re a very foolish man,
he said calmly, to be frightened by the threats of any man. I have taken the boathouse legally for three years, and I will not relinquish title to it till three years have expired.
If you’re not away by noon tomorrow,
blurted out the intimidated man, I’ll send the police to clear you out, I will!
And away he went.
Of course it was only bluff. But sure enough there was a boycott on. As we passed the cottages they would shut their doors or run inside and hide, these lovely, guileless Irish peasants. The parish priest’s wand had suddenly cast a spell over them; they were no longer themselves; their wills were not their own. My dear father only sympathized and loved them the more. He hurried away on foot to an adjoining parish and bought a load of turf, sufficient to last us out the three months. Rather than embarrass our neighbors by trying to make our little purchases at the scattered farm homes we took turns walking the long trail by the shore road into Clifden to a provision store. And to show he had no ax to grind, Father took four of us to the Chapel the following Sunday. We sat close to the pulpit and listened to Father McAlpine’s sermon and prayed for him, and for our island home, and for Clifden in particular. The love of Christ was bigger than boycotts and petty persecutions and threats; but Father could have wept for the people, fear-bound and terror-driven; driven in one case, for example, to shout to my sweet and gentle mother, You’re not fit to be a donkey to an apple man
; or in another case to send their dog on me, when I was sitting alone on the roadside with my paints, sketching those beautiful blue mountains, The Twelve Pins of Connemara. Fear-bound, they had handed up for destruction the holy Word of God they so much prized, riches that money could not buy, "better than thousands of gold and silver," as David put it.
There was one exception at least. An old veteran had moral courage enough to hide his New Testament and read it daily. And when under the boycott order his pretty daughter could no longer deliver the daily can of milk, what did this man do, but bring it secretly across the boulder-strewn beach, when the tide was out. There may have been others, only God knows, who prized enough their liberty of soul to refuse the handcuffs.
But "the fear of man bringeth a snare; and for the most part they were helpless tools, pieces of involuntary machinery rotating in a great world-wide system that involved both priests and people. Father McAlpine (I say it tenderly for he has gone) was a man of passionate zeal and could have been another Paul, if only he had had the same personal contact with the Saviour as Saul of Tarsus had on the Damascus road. Like Saul he had often unconsciously shown his animosity to Jesus of Nazareth by persecuting the very few evangelists who had ventured to preach Christ’s redemption in the streets of Clifden. He had led his people in having them stoned and pelted with eggs and turf, in having them beaten almost into unconsciousness; and then in that condition carried to the station and put into the train with the remark,
Next time you come back, you needn’t take a return ticket."
All he really did to us was to change the character of our holiday. We had fewer games and more Bible-reading; fewer songs and more prayer, generally out in the sunny fields, lying face-down among wild thyme and clover; or down by the wave-swept shore, where sea gulls and cormorants cried to their mates from great grey boulders.
I am sure it was in God’s plan, who knows the end from the beginning. We were learning, when the sea grew boisterous, how to hoist our sails and employ the wind to propel our craft toward harbor. We were learning that circumstances themselves can never defeat us, but only our wrong handling of them. Every Bible story that was read would be related somehow or other to our beloved country and her needs. We read how God appeared to Moses and said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows, and I am come down to deliver them.
We felt that God also knew the sorrows and oppressions in a spiritual sense of our fellow countrymen, and would come down to deliver them one day. We were coming to love them, not merely because we were of the same blood, but in a much deeper way, as we were being shackled to them in their captivity. God save Ireland
was somehow becoming to us much more than a political slogan: it was being turned to a prayer of faith by which mountains
could be removed.
Chapter 2
CROSSING THE RUBICON
SCENES HAVE CHANGED with the years.