I Am Said I

The Dun Aengus

The Lord called me before I was born, from my mother’s womb He pronounced my name. It is He who created me, knit me together in my mother’s womb. Already He knew my soul, my body held no secret from Him when I was being fashioned in secret, moulded in the depths. He searches me and knows my resting and rising, my purpose. All my ways lie open to Him.

I am not the one you imagine me to be.

From the time I was a boy in the Aran Islands I knew that God was with me there, and it seems that He spoke to me through island, sea, sand and rock and sky. And it seems that the island was listening to me, that He listened to me through the same island.

We spoke the same language, dreamed the same dream and yearned with infinite desire for simple unattainable experiences, experiences that would express something of who we are in each other’s presence; who I would become in Him – He being the greater.

As with many important things in life I resisted the sea at first. Resistance is part of my default setting. I resisted being born, I resist life, resist God. I was three years old, boarding the Dun Aengus steamer at Galway docks for my first journey by sea, my first journey to Aran.

On the gangway I looked down the gap between the ship and the dock and the black water below terrified me. So I froze and screamed, refusing to move forward until the captain came down with a packet of fruit pasteels. He lifted me up and carried me aboard and I was captivated by ship and sea from then on. Aran would become part of who I am. Perhaps that’s logical since my Dad’s mother was a native of Inis Mor, a place that was to reveal to me the beauty, majesty and mystery of God. The greatness of God.

The sea expresses something of the vastness and majesty of God, something of the expanse of my own soul, hinting at the great unfathomable mystery of God and of each one created in His image and likeness. We are the likeness of majesty, mystery - unfathomable.

As with John the Baptist He would increase and I would decrease. I would ascend to the heights by descending, by waiting and waiting and waiting. I waited, I waited for the Lord and He stooped down to me. (Psalm 30)

I am not the one you imagine me to be! I am mystery, unfathomable even to myself and much more are we mystery to each other, a mystery to be honoured with silence, a mystery that does not need to be worked out in all its detail.

The beauty is in the mystery. And yet we try to rob each other of both mystery and beauty in our search for knowing. It was the original mistake in the Garden of Eden – they wanted to know too much, to possess too much and in the process lost almost everything. And life became more difficult than it needed to be. Became intolerably difficult at times.

Mystery, desire and prayer require us to wait for the unfolding of what God is offering; to wait rather than to reach out and grab what we want, what we want to become. We run ahead of ourselves, we run ahead of God in our eagerness to get life right and we forget about gift and grace. This is true of our eagerness to repent and be converted, our eagerness to become better people.

I have discovered that everything I desired comes to me in its time, usually after many years of waiting, years even of forgetting what it was that I desired until the moment when it was fulfilled.

Katie took me by the hand when she was eight years old and we went walking to the river in Holycross. She told me how she has wished for things but that they don’t happen and I suggested that she tell her wishes to God and then wait like I waited for years. But it’s impossible for a child to think in terms of the waiting of a 60-year-old adult. I told her some of the things that I desired as a child that came to pass in my adult life.

It’s not easy to shake off your country, the place of your birth. Last May 2018, in the wake of the Referendum, I decided to shake the dust of Ireland from my feet because I could not in conscience be part of what most of my fellow Irish citizens had decided, though conscience is not now held in high esteem. I could not be part of the aggressive joy displayed by the victors and cannot see that the result means the liberation of women. The celebrations in Dublin Castle shocked me to the core and they shocked people here in England. And what sticks in my mind is that most of the people I know probably voted for abortion and, because I no longer know who’s who, I find I want nothing to do with anyone apart from my family and a few close friends. It’s a profoundly emotional response but it’s real; it is what it is. And I feel for all those who are now alienated and unrepresented at home.

I never wanted to live in England but have become very happy here, partly because it has given me a welcome escape from Ireland but mostly because I love being where I am and love the people with whom I share life here in Hastings. But when England beat Ireland in rugby recently it pulled at some primal part of me and I knew I’m not as free of my country as I would like, even though I have little or no interest in rugby.

Being in my mid-sixties it seems a little late in life to be wondering who I am, asking questions about my identity but I am serious about reshaping and reforming my identity, allowing the reshaping of who I am to happen.

My thoughts go back to the very beginning of the Camino to Santiago – a defining experience in my life - to the hostel in San Jean Pied de Port and the woman of the house. At breakfast during a lovely conversation I asked her, “where are you from?” and she replied, “I allow no country to claim me!” It’s an answer that impressed me, the liberty of it, though at the time I didn’t see much meaning in it for me.  However, it has come back to me often and it strikes me now that I am being called to the same kind of liberty.

The question of identity also brings me back about twenty years to the church of Santa Anna in the Vatican. Sr. Hieronyma, a Swiss Pallottine Sister, boldly marched me in there, past the Swiss Guards one day to pray. I would never have ventured there on my own, feeling that it was somehow off limits. But it was while kneeling there gazing at the Tabernacle that my identity emerged in a significant way.

Having grown up with a sense of my own inferiority I was surprised by the awareness that the Holy Spirit seemed to stir in me. It began with a love for my name, first my Christian name and then my family name, followed by the place where I grew up, my home town and country. It was as if God were reminding me how precious and important it is for me to savour my identity as Eamonn Monson from Mervue, Galway, Ireland and then it seemed like I was being drawn into the Tabernacle with the words, “all of these aspects of your identity are precious but your real identity is to be found hidden in Jesus in the Eucharist in the Tabernacle.”