An Easter tale... about a Cork man who ‘rose from the dead’!
In religious terms, it’s a very special and solemn few days in the lead up to Easter Sunday.
It’s also so different from when I was young - imagine a match or a meeting, a fundraiser, a disco or a music ‘session’ any time from Wednesday night (Spy Wednesday) until Sunday? No way in the world!
But then everything changes and truly nothing stays the same.
I suppose it gives a fairly mixed message that we are now down to one single solitary day in the calendar year when drink is not sold - but who am I to be giving out?
In truth, I’m not complaining or giving out - no, simply making observation in a non-judgemental way.
By the time I got ‘to the age of reason’, the severest restrictions of the season of Lent were nearly gone. No meat on any Friday and ‘Black Fasts’, with the standard one meal and two collations only applying to Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
My granny Twomey often said ‘fasting and prayer are good for the sinner - but the working man must have his dinner’! Wise words, well spoken. And yes, I am looking forward to a cup of coffee after 40 caffeine-less days and nights!
It surprises and pleases me too that I still hear of so many ‘giving up something for Lent’.
As a small child, I remember Good Friday as a very special and silent day - only absolutely necessary work was done, and holy or sacred music issued forth from the wireless near the kitchen window. Ah yes, ’tis so different now, but I think people still have a great goodness in them and a spirituality that’s not defined by rules, regulations or dogma.
You know, the whole Easter Story is a mystery, but the very fact that over 2,000 years after the death of Christ, that cruel death and subsequent resurrection, are still commemorated – well, that counts for something.
In this modern technological world, everyone wants answers to everything! Faith in the unknown is something that many find hard to accept in a universe ruled by logic.
Another of my ‘primary’ teachers, the late Donal Ó Liatháin from the Muskerry Gaeltacht, convinced me he saw a fish standing on its two hind legs in a little river near us. Down by Tom Ryan’s bridge where the Knoppogue River that flows through our glen joins another stream from Cronovan - that’s where it happened.
He recalled in detail seeing the little trout rise up out of the crystal clear water and then it walked across a big flat stone which was just above the water level. That was told to me over 60 years ago and still to this day, if I’m ever on that bridge, I peer carefully into the still, clear water, but I haven’t yet seen what Donal saw.
On the first Ordnance Survey Map completed in the 1830s, there’s a field not far from here marked as ‘Paircaclampar’, or Pairc an Clampar - the field of the disturbance, division, quarrel, turmoil, or rowdiness.
When or why did all this happen? No-one knows now, but the memory of ‘bad blood’ still lingers.
Stories of the black dog with red and fiery eyes crossing roads at certain spots abound in local history. ‘Twould be easy to dismiss such tales as simply ‘alcohol-induced illusions’ but I’ve spoken to persons who never took a drink, and if out walking, to this day, they’d hurry beyond such and such a place. Some things just cannot be accounted for.
Only last Thursday, I spent a few hours with two friends - we were talking and righting the wrongs of the world, in a light-hearted fashion, might I add! One of the pair, Jim, was suddenly and somewhat violently awoken from his sleep in the early hours of Friday morning. About 3am he was lifted up suddenly from his bed - suspended over the sheets. At the same time a thunder-like noise seemed to fill the room, lit up by a rainbow-like arc.
Jim thought his head was split and reached for his forehead, but he was OK as he was deposited back down on his bed. It happened, it wasn’t a ‘bad dream’, but that paranormal experience can’t be logically explained.
On Monday, April 7, 1777, a man was returning to his home in Castlelyons from Tallow in the County Waterford. With his horse and butt, he was bringing a load of coal from Janeville Quay.
Passing by the townland of Kilcor, he saw ‘somebody or something’ that fatally frightened him. He took to the bed and died three days later - he was just 35.
On one of the four hilly roads that lead up to Bartlemy once stood a fine mansion – at one time a branch of the Croker family lived there. Reputedly, another family there were the Corbetts who were reclusive and solitary. It’s said the last female of that family line was never seen without a veil over her face - just her eyes were visible.
Getting back to the Resurrection and this Holy Week - well, my great-grandmother, on my father’s side, is buried in a remote rural graveyard in East Cork. Hers was a long-tailed and long-branched family.
I think her ‘clan’ have about nine graves in this particular burying-place. Different branches of the family had their individual plots - all side by side with cousins and relations.
Two brothers were at a family interment there one day. As the coffin went down, one looked at the other. No words were spoken but the pair were both of the same opinion that Martin had been buried in the wrong grave - in ‘their’ ground.
They said nothing, but went home to their farm to do the evening work.
Later that moonlit night, the brothers returned - with two shovels! They went to work and soon had the grave ‘opened’ once more. They removed the coffin and filled in the grave. They then placed the coffin on the stone stile just alongside the entrance gate!
Early next morning, the local postman, on his rounds, saw the coffin. He was stunned and in awe and remarked: “Holy God almighty, Jesus Christ rose from the dead after three days - Martin is risen after only one!”
Some things we can explain -others we can’t - call it faith, an enigma or just mystical! Happy Easter to all.
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