The dream lives on

As the World Youth Festival in Australia unfolded recently, the images of exuberant young people gathering around the aged but still dynamic Pope Benedict XVI inevitably reminded me of my own days of youth and the gathering that took place in Galway in 1979 during the visit to Ireland of the Pope’s immediate predecessor. The world has changed greatly in the intervening time and the once youthful participants in the Galway rally at Ballybrit Racecourse are now middle-aged or thereabouts. The adult organisers and leaders of the event are mostly dead by now and another generation has taken the place of those youth who sheltered under tarpaulins that misty, damp September morning as they waited for the famous red helicopter to arrive.

Something else has died in the meantime too. The idealism and the innocence that marks adolescence are often casualties of the process of growing up and learning the art of compromise. The discovery that parents and parent-figures are not perfect comes painfully but inevitably. We live with a God who, according to the poet Patrick Kavanagh, ‘delights in disillusionment’. Almost all of the institutions that we took for granted in our youth have taken a battering in the intervening years. Perhaps most painful of all has been the steady erosion of self-sacrificing idealism and the heroism of gesture that often went with it.

There was an increase in students coming forward to study for the priesthood immediately following the Pope’s visit. I was one of those who were said to have ‘followed the Pope into Maynooth’. When I entered there in September 1980, memories of the Galway Visit were especially fresh. ‘Young people of Ireland; I love you’ was regularly intoned, imitating the Pope’s Slavic accent. The Central European accent was then very foreign to our ears. Jokers imitated the Pope’s dramatic gesture of prostrating and kissing the soil as he entered a new country. My own journey into vocation and into Maynooth was only indirectly because of the visit, yet perhaps it was providential.

On my way home from Galway with my friend, we stopped to eat and rest a little. I bought a daily paper and discovered that the Parish Priest in my own parish had died. He was one of the old-style parish priests; gentle enough in presentation but infallible in pronouncement. I knew him through my aunt who kept house for him and he had challenged me a few times to consider priesthood. In the course of attending his funeral and thinking on his life, I arrived by a circuitous route back to my adolescent dream of becoming a priest. Following a few interviews and almost one year of secrecy and subterfuge later, I was packing my bags for the seminary.

Pádraig Pearse, in a poem called ‘The Fool,’ wrote movingly of his sense of destiny and of vocation. He did not use the word ‘vocation’ but he describes the high idealism and the challenge of the revolutionary or the vocationer who stakes his or her life on ‘impossible’ dreams. He wrote: ‘I have squandered the splendid years that the Lord God gave to my youth / In attempting impossible things, deeming them alone worth the toil… I have squandered the splendid years / Lord, if I had the years I would squander them over again, / Aye, fling them from me!’

Pearse foresaw the criticism that idealism attracts from cynics and from the compromised. He knew that a certain reckless foolishness is often part of the heroic gesture. The poem continues, “The lawyers have sat in council, the men with the keen, long faces, / And said, ‘This man is a fool,’ and others have said, ‘He blasphemeth;’ /

And the wise have pitied the fool that hath striven to give a life / In the world of time and space among the bulks of actual things, / To a dream that was dreamed in the heart, and that only the heart could hold… / O wise men, riddle me this: what if the dream come true? / What if the dream come true? and if millions unborn shall dwell / In the house that I shaped in my heart, the noble house of my thought?”

I watch the Australia-bound pilgrims and the youth of another century, another continent, being powerfully challenged by the words of one whose idealism survived the personal trauma of World War Two and the words of another idealist of the early last century come to mind. Tom Kettle’s particular form of foolishness and idealism led him to opt for participation in World War One. Just days after the birth of his daughter and days before his own death at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, he wrote a poem to his, as yet unseen, baby daughter. It includes these lines; ‘So here, while the mad guns curse overhead, /And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor, / Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead, / Died not for Flag, nor King, nor Emperor, / But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed, / And for the Secret Scripture of the poor’.