A Variety of Prophets

 

A Variety of Prophets          Gerry OShea

“There are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet uttered these dramatic words criticizing his friend Horatio’s over-dependence on logical reasoning for his grasp of reality.

 Renaissance thinking was in the ascendant among the intelligentsia in those years with its stress on the scientific method in searching for truth. Hamlet’s words warn us that imagination and intuition also provide valuable insights into the conundrums of life.

Shakespeare was not in the minds of the Mayo people when they won their second All-Ireland Football Championship in a row in September 1950, although people still discuss a post-game controversy that can be defined in terms of the disagreement between Horatio and Hamlet.

  Winning the Sam Maguire Cup was and remains today the apogee of achievement in Irish sport. Saying that the people in that county were elated at this victory certainly counts as an understatement.

The team members traveled home from Dublin on Monday morning, anticipating huge crowds in their itinerary as they paraded jubilantly through the county waving the famous Sam Maguire Trophy. When they reached the village of Foxford on the river Moy in the northeastern part of the county, the raucous celebrations were heard far and wide.

Their jubilant noisemaking clashed with funeral services in the church, and the officiating priest’s call for respectful silence for the duration of the services went unheeded. Defying a priest’s wishes invited anger and recrimination in Ireland in those years, and this man was exceptionally irate that his request was being disregarded. He saw it as a direct challenge to his authority as well as disrespect for the bereaved family.

Knowing the vibrant history of prophetic declarations in the bible, the minister, red-faced and incandescent with rage, condemned the victorious county team and prophesied that Mayo would never win another All-Ireland championship while any of the victorious players were still alive.

Most people considered that the clergyman overreacted. One wag commented that it would have taken another appearance by the Blessed Virgin, as allegedly happened in nearby Knock, to dampen the enthusiasm of the football celebrations led by that team of heroes.

The county has had numerous winning ladies’ and minor football teams since 1950. However, while the senior county team has contested eleven finals since that great victory 74 years ago, amazingly, they lost every one of them. For the record, the last member of the team, the great Paddy Prendergast, passed away just three years ago at age 95.

Mentioning the prophetic dimension of this event may seem to trivialize the warnings of the great prophets of the Old Testament, but the Foxford showdown still casts a long shadow. For the teams from this great footballing county to be starved of success for over 70 years just defies all logic.

 Eleven big-day losses before crowds of over 75,000 people in Croke Park with all the attendant community heartache got people talking about priestly curses and prophecies, especially as the number of defeats increased from one decade to the next.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, prophets were commissioned to speak for the Almighty. They often rebuked the people for wandering from their allegiance to Yahweh and warned about negative consequences for their wayward actions.

 Jeremiah, known as the prophet of gloom, preached against the evils of injustice and poverty in his time. Isaiah walked around naked for three years to get the people’s attention for his penitential message about rejecting their evil ways.

 Nathan risked banishment and even execution when he openly criticized the great King David for cultivating an adulterous relationship with Bathsheba, as well as assigning her husband to play a particularly dangerous role in a tribal battlefield, leading to his death.

King David repented his lechery and famously wrote Psalm 22, predicting the crucifixion over 1000 years before Christ was born. These men - and a few prophetesses, too – shared a sense of outrage that the Jewish people, at various times, had abandoned the God who had brought them out of the land of Egypt and often predicted dire consequences for their sinful behavior.

The Foxford priest’s dilemma could not be compared to the gravity of Nathan’s rebuke of King David’s dastardly misbehavior, but evidently, he felt so strongly about all the noise ruining the funeral ceremony that he drew on some spiritual power for revenge.

We recall Patrick Kavanagh’s famous poem “Epic,” in which he contrasts the historical significance of grand events with the importance of local seemingly trivial conflicts. The poem is set during the Munich crisis of 1938, when European leaders, led by Neville Chamberlain, tried to assuage Hitler’s claims to Sudetenland.

 The agreement they reached, which became synonymous with appeasement, was not the focus of Kavanagh’s sonnet. In fact, he diminishes the gravitas of those negotiations by naming them “the Munich bother.” The poet who hailed from Inniskeen, a village in County Monaghan, was famous for his ability to transform the ordinary and banal into something with wider significance.

This poem talks about a violent feud between the Duffys and the McCabes over a small patch of land. Kavanagh understands the pretentious irony of writing about such trivial matters. “Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind. He said : I made the Illiad from such a local row. Gods make their own importance.”

Perhaps the doubters of the powers of that Mayo priest should reflect on the whisperings of Homer’s ghost in Patrick Kavanagh’s ear – gods make their own importance.

Gerry OShea blogs at wemustbetalking.com