Let the busy world be hushed: Shared bonds and the ties that bind

We sat and talked after mass in Cornea, having called to Owens’ for milk and a currany cake. ‘A good crowd tonight; I’m sure there were smiles on their faces when I didn’t keep them that long’ as the two of us sat at the kitchen table, where once parish priests and curates had played cards.

Who could have foretold how our lives would be as we walked together through the door of the President’s Arch above in Maynooth College on an All-Ireland Hurling Final day all those years ago; fresh faced, on the cusp of life, not knowing what the road would bring, a road we had shared through the parishes we have been in from the wilds of North Leitrim to the shores of Lough Oughter.

A young lad with wild notions in his head of changing the world and the other more grounded and sensible, steeped in the local, its people and the land, up from where the air is thin in Carrickallen.

Here as the winds blew outside and the stained glass in the Gothic window of the church opposite illumined the darkness of the night, we spoke not on theology or ecclesiastical matters but on that which bound us together - an interest in people and the stories of their lives, lived in the midst of the ordinary.

As we talked, one story reminded of the next, one encounter borrowed another until we had travelled the roads from Glencar to Greaghnagibney, stopping along the way in houses where we were welcomed after a christening, a wedding or indeed in the midst of grief. And there in our conversation as two lads might sit over dinner in the canteen at the mart, never once was an article of canon law mentioned nor a doctrine of faith, as we shared one memory after another until the night had passed and the kettle had to be refilled once, twice, indeed three times.

The hands of the clock we willed to slow to give more time for another chapter of the story to be told as we got lost in the hills above Tarmon chapel and men lapping hay ‘and what’s that I was telling ya and what’s this is his name’ and in all the toing and froing we had to retrace our steps as far back as the Melrose Inn to find our bearings, that night we stopped for a Cidona and listened to young men talk on the vagaries of farming not far from Glen Gap forbyes those that have it easy on the road south for Virginia.

And indeed in all the miles we have travelled over the years and at all the tables we’ve sat at in different parishes, there’s been times we have felt downcast, not knowing what the way ahead would bring, being sent here, there and yonder, the constant change we have to face, trying to make sense of it all for good decent people that sit before us of a Sunday. Yet, in the midst of it all, we have laughed until we thought our sides would split at the spakes and come - outs of young lads from Aughaloora that sometimes would be retold from our work in school.

But there in those hours we shared, whilst cutting another slice of his mother’s brown bread, the cares and worries of our lives subsided in the ebb and flow of conversation and I, for one, left the table albeit in the small hours of the morning, feeling much the lighter having sat and talked the whole of the evening through, knowing that all is left behind and never a word from the table is spoken.

And if one is to reflect on that which has carried us through the years thus far, from those years of naivety as seminarians in college to this point of looking back over 20 years and more, it surely has been the ordinary people we have encountered and befriended along the way, the people who make up the tapestry of our memories, people who at times struggle through the days of their lives just as we do, ordinary people like our parents from the town and the country whose lives we have been privileged to share in, in a simple unobtrusive sort of way.

We often underestimate these simple conversations had with the people we take for granted, people who share in the same experiences as we do, who walk a road akin to ours, over many miles through many years and yet, in stopping along the way to chat for an hour or two and more, it allows us to reflect, to take stock, to dust ourselves down as the days pass and the evening comes until we meet again, after mass in Coronea.