Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Buddhist
THE LUCK OF IRISH A Sermon on Human Possibility Preached on a St Patrick’s Day

THE LUCK OF IRISH A Sermon on Human Possibility Preached on a St Patrick’s Day

Last updated on: March 17, 2013 at 1:38 pm by James Ford

THE LUCK OF IRISH A Sermon on Human Possibility Preached on a St Patrick’s Day 2013-03-17T13:38:51-07:00 James Ford

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

THE LUCK OF THE IRISH
A Sermon of Human Possibility Preached on a St Patrick’s Day

James Ishmael Ford

17 March 2013

First Unitarian Church
Providence, Rhode Island

Text

Love is never defeated, and I could add, the history of Ireland proves it.

John Paul II

The world, as one of my teachers once said, is made of stories.

Stories tell us where we came from and who we are. And they point to what we might become.

Those who know me at all know that my father, James Ford, Senior, was a ne’er-do-well. We moved around a lot, just ahead, usually, of some sort of trouble. Moving meant taking what fit into a car. So, we really had very little by way of things. But, he was a great one for stories. And while the ground under those stories shifted a bit too fast for a child’s natural conservatism, nonetheless his stories gave me my core sense of family identity. On my mother’s side we were American mongrel. But, as far as my dad was concerned, my mother was the mother of Irish boys.

Throughout my childhood my dad asserted how he was the only child of the family born in America, and that all six, or sometimes seven older sisters had been born on the Old Sod. Years later I decided I’d take advantage of the Irish law of return that says, or, I gather, said if one grandparent was Irish, well, you are, too, and grab myself a passport. Never a bad thing to have a second passport, I thought. However, a little research revealed that while all four of my father’s grandparents were indeed born in Ireland, he had in fact cut out a whole generation of our proximity to Erin. Since then some have told me that anecdote was a pretty solid indicator he was indeed fully Irish.

My next complication around this identity thing and the stories that carry identity arose a while back when Jan & I decided to give each other genetic tests for Christmas. Turns out there are two kinds. One will tell you where your ancestors come from. The other is scientific. By mistake we purchased the scientific ones, which require a couple of genetics classes in order to interpret the data they provide. After trying to figure out some gross facts, we filed the documents away figuring that was a grand waste of money. Not too long after, wonderfully, because the testing site we used also enrolls one on lists that allow genetic cousins to become aware of each other, out of the blue I was contacted by a cousin who turns out to share my paternal line genetic markers out to some sixty-odd places. That means we’re very closely related.

But, he’s a retired Australian sailor of Anglo French decent. I figured it’s the Viking thing. The Celts of far Western Europe and the British Isles before the arrival of the Vikings, you may not know, didn’t appear to be fair and have red hair, but rather were, at least according to the Viking’s descriptions, smallish people with dark hair, dark skin, and dark eyes. So, I assumed a summer vacation raiding party deposited this Australian’s and my common genes on Ireland’s Eastern shores before or after doing something similar in England.

But, no, said my cousin, retired and apparently with a little too much time on his hands. He actually traced our common ancestor to one of several longships sailing into Rouen, in 911. A bit more than a century after that our ancestor now sporting a fancy French name, de la Poer, accompanied William, the Conqueror, on his expedition to England. And a hundred years after that, more or less, four of five brothers, sons of the Sherriff of Devon, Bartholomew de Poer, accompanied Henry II to Ireland, where their army put down an uprising. For their efforts the brothers were rewarded with County Waterford.

However the fortunes of the de Poer family, eventually apparently more appropriately named Power aren’t my stories. Rather, something in the neighborhood of seven hundred years later, a peasant from the next county over named Ford immigrated to America. What we know today is that whatever he thought his family connections were, and of course, in many ways the real family was that Ford family, also, he was a direct genetic descendant of one of those Power brothers.

I’ve brooded over that fact. Rape? Not unlikely. A kitchen maid seduced? Certainly possible. One friend even opined an illicit love affair, but real love. Sure. And, whatever, everyone comes from someplace else somewhere along the line until we get to our truest home in Africa, somewhere near the Great Rift Valley it seems, where the real human Eve and Adam differentiated out from other great apes. But, seven hundred years in Ireland for that paternal lineage, and no doubt much much longer on my maternal side probably still gives me adequate claim to Irishness.

Well, sort of. This kind of claiming is in a way an American thing. Not long ago I was talking with an Irish friend, by which I mean someone born and raised in Ireland who snorted when I said I was Irish, too. Rolling his eyes he noted how many Americans of his acquaintance so casually say they’re Irish. He smirked. I swear he smirked and said, “You’re all Americans.” I think he meant it kindly. Although that smirk did lead me with some questions.

No doubt I am, and we, what’s left of our line are fully American. And there’s something peculiarly American about how we hold our ancestral connections. We Irish Americans like, for instance, so say how much we’ve done for the country.

So, just to tick off a little of that, eleven people of Irish descent signed the Declaration of Independence, fully half the Union army’s rank and file were Irish. Sadly during the exodus from the Great Hunger, my people would disembark from the famine ships and Union army recruiters were waiting with a small bonus for those willing to be canon fodder. In more recent history we can count our contributions shaping this nation including from my personal favorite, Mother Jones, as well as President John F Kennedy, the immortal Tip O’Neill, the wondrous Eugene O’Neal, and can I say, I have to, our current president, Barack O’Bama. We nearly all feel we all have a little of the Irish in us, and many of us in fact do.

Now despite having been here from before the beginning, the story of the Irish in America is also very much an immigrant’s story, with beauty and sadness. Prejudice against the Irish raged in the middle of the nineteenth century, and continued in various ways right to the middle of the twentieth century. We’re all aware of that sign declaring, “no Irish need apply.”

The path into the heart of this country was often ugly. In my life I think of the demonstrations in Southie during Boston’s busing crisis. And how Irish Americans paid for most all the bombs that exploded and bullets, which were fired in Northern Ireland’s Troubles. And before that there were those terrible days during the Civil War when Irish mobs rioted and lynched blacks in New York City. That hard time on the road, as one jaundiced observer tagged it, as the Irish gradually became white.

And the Irish became white. Now there’s a story. I’ve particularly thought about that, how the Irish were not always considered white, and with that, of course, with that as naturally as the dawn follows the night the question: what does whiteness means? Particularly as it matters so much, or has, I desperately hope it is dying as a marker for whether one is on the inside or the outside of the American story of one’s children doing better than oneself.

These are, you may have noticed, particularly hard times, the first, perhaps in American history where the young of today, writ large, might not do as well as their parents did. We stand in dangerous times. Nothing lasts forever, not people, not countries. But, also these are times pregnant with possibilities. And among those possibilities, one is that perhaps, just possibly, we can put a stake in the heart of American racism. It can go several ways, of course. Hard times also incline one to turn in, and to protect one’s own. We can get more tribal, and I mean that in the worst possible sense.

But, we don’t have to turn inward like that. We can open our hearts ever wider. Hard times can remind us that that list of who is us, who is ours, can expand just as easily as it can contract. It has been part of the American genius to include, to gather together. Once my people were caricatured as looking more like monkeys than humans. Now one author has described our struggle into the mainstream as selling out those others who were also at the bottom of America’s economic system. Those riots and lynchings in New York were among the poorest of the poor struggling to survive in a tribal way. Another hard truth is that part of our Irish ability to assimilate into something bigger was the fact we really didn’t look all that different from the mainstream of the country at the time.

But, here’s a really interesting fact. Whatever our race we don’t look all that different from the mainstream of our time. Race really is a construct with almost no genetic significance. And while I am proud as can be of my Irish ancestry, and the rest, bottom line, we’re all related, coming as we really all have, from somewhere out at the true homeland, the true Eden, our true dream home somewhere in the vicinity of the Rift Valley. There’s a story.

So, what’s my take away for today, the Feast of St Patrick, the nation’s annual recollection of our Irishness? Well, among other things we of Irish descent should better than most see through the lies of race. Our story is one of overcoming, of becoming larger.

Here’s a bit of that story. We come to this country from many things, actions and situations. Violence, perhaps. Love, you bet. The great Hunger and the choice of leave or die haunts my people. Others came involuntarily. Many, maybe most came dreaming dreams of something better for themselves and their children. That’s true even for those who were here when the Europeans arrived – they, too, come from the Rift Valley. We came poor. More rarely we came rich. We came every color available to our human condition. We bring the cultures, or fragments of cultures that nurtured our ancestors. We bring words and figures of speech. All coming here, to a land of many stories, and one.

We find we need not turn on our immediate or near family to discover the family is in fact much larger. We may have a home in Ireland. Maybe all of us do, in one sense. But we also have a home on the Rift Valley. And that’s even truer. What we know is if one or some of us have done well, then the family obligation is to reach out a hand, and bring another along. ‘Tis the Irish way.

Loving our family, that hand should be held out to as many as possible.

To the whole family.

To all of us.

‘Tis the human way.

Don’t you think?

Amen.

Uncategorized

Previous Post

March 16, 2013

The Birth of a God

Next Post

March 18, 2013 Hillary Clinton Calls for Marriage Equality

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category A Christmas Carol Abolitionist African-American Ahmadiyya Alan Watts Aldous Huxley Allen Ginsberg Amedkar Jayanti American politics American Zen Anaheim Zen Sangha Anglican Annie Besant April Fool Armageddon Art and Religion artificial intellegence Atheist Awakening B R Ambedkar Barlaam & Josaphat Beatnik Between Bhagavad Gita Bible biography birthday bodhisattva Bodhisattva Precepts Book burning Book of Common Prayer Book of Mormon Brahmo Samaj Buddha Buddhism Buddhist Buddhist Lord's Prayer Butterflies Calendars cartoons cat ChatGPT Chicken Tortilla Soup choices Christian atheism Christian mysticism Christian origins Christian Science Christian Zen Christianity Christianity and Buddhism christmas Christmas Truce Christopher Isherwood Church of Later Day Saints Cinco de Mayo circus covenant critical thinking culture D. T. Suzuki Dalit Buddhism Daniel Defoe Desert Fathers and Mothers dharma talk Dogen Donald Trump Dongshan's Five Ranks Dorothy Day dream Duty Easter ecology Edwin Arnold emptiness Empty Moon Zen Network Episcopal Church Eternal Now Ethics evolution existentialism Faith fantasy Fathers Day film film review fire Five Ranks Folk music food Form and emptiness Four Seals Francis of Assisi Francis Xavier Free thinker friendship George MacDonald Gerald Heard Glenn Taylor Webb God Good Friday Gospel of Gospel of Mark Gospel of Thomas grace Graduate Theological Unioin Graduate Theological Union Guanyin H R Blyth Hakuin Ekaku Hanamatsuri Hanukkah Harada Yasutani Zen Heart Sutra Henry David Thoreau Hermann Hesse Hinduism History and Religion history of religion Holy Spirit home Hospitality Icon Ides of March Isaac Newton Islam Islamic mysticism Jack Kerouac James Luther Adams Jiddu Krishnamurti Joan of Arc Johannes Gutenberg John Donne joke Judaism justice karma kensho King James Bible koan Koun Yamada Kyoto School Lewis Carrol Liberal Christianity Liberal Religion Life Plan Community Liminal literature Literature and Religion Liturgy Lord's Prayer Love Mahatma Gandhi Mahayana Martin Luther King Jr Mary Baker Eddy Mary Magdelene Mary Oliver Mayflower Compact Meditation memories memory metaphor money money and religioin Mormons Mother's Day movie review mysticism mythic Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church New Thought Nichiren Buddhism Nonduality not knowing Omar Khayyam Pacific School of Religion pagan Palm Sunday Passover peace Pentecost perennialism Phantastes Philip Kapleau philosophy Pilgrimage poetry Poetry and Religion politics Prayer Precepts Printing Press prophecy prophetic spirituality psychology Pure Land Queer religion queering religion Quietism Ram Mohan Roy rebirth recipe Relationships and religion religion religion and history Religious syncretism Resistance Retirement Retreat review Rissho Kosei Kai Ritual Robert Aitken Roshi Robert Ingersoll Rohatsu Romani religion Rosie the Riveter saints samadhi SanboZen Sangha Satyagraha science science and reigion science and religion science fiction seminary sermon Sesshin Sex and Religion Shinran Sikh Sikh tradition silence Social Justice Socially Engaged Buddhism Society and religion Soto Zen soul spiritual community spiritual practice Spirituality Sufism Suicide superstition Taoism Television Teresa of Avila Thanksgiving theological schools Theosophy Thomas Merton Time Transcendentalism Transcendentalist Trinitarian Trinity Uncategorized unitarian Unitarian Christianity Unitarian Universalist Universalism Vajrayana Vedanta Walking war Willa Cather William Ellery Channing wisdom women and religion women in religion World Teacher Writing zazen Zen Zen Center Zen inspired retriement zen meditation Zen Precepts Zen women

Select a Month September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

The beginning of knowledge starts with this.

Select your answer to see how you score.

Understanding Fear of the Lord Wisdom Instruction