Smothering Candles

There’s a gentle irony in the fact that there we were sitting on a Saturday evening in the chapel of a convent in Belem out to the west of Lisbon’s city centre, listening to a song being sung in which a Donegal mother cries for her son who had defected from the Catholic faith and become a Protestant minister. The song in question “Fil Fil a Run o” is a popular tune from the northwest, dating from the 18th century, * (it has been recorded by Cara Dillon, the Irish Tenors among other artists). On this occasion it was part of a set being perfomed by a duo called Lumiere (Pauline Scanlon and Éilís Kennedy) from Dingle, Co Kerry. **

The rather sectarian content of the song is buried underneath a beautiful wistful melancholic tune, and you can really feel the mother’s heart beat for her son, and the scandal she found herself in. As the translated lyrics go, she cries  “you denied Peter And Paul, because of the gold and the silver. You denied the Queen of Glory, turned your coat and became a Minister” . And so it made me think about family ties and deeply held beliefs, and the freedom to choose and think and believe differently from your parents. It’s a natural desire that one’s children should share the worldview and beliefs that we hold dear, but it’s not a given, and one of the important keys of parenthood is that, having given the best guidance we can, we allow our kids the freedom to make their own choices and way through life, without fear of rejection or reprimand.

But it it also made me think about the strong manner in which “Mother Church” holds on to her own. Sometimes, it would seem to me, the light the institutional Church, offers to the world, instead of liberating and expanding vision, tends to smother the believer in a heavier atmosphere of tradition. Just as, in the darkened atmosphere within the convent, the smothering candles allow only the faintest glimmer of the world, and that seen through the lens of a particular ecclesiastical interpretation, excluding the light from any other sources. But the music was great anyway!
 
* Interestingly, the song is linked to the true story of one, Dominick O’Donnell, who was a Church of Ireland minister, and whose grave even now lies in the churchyard of Carrigart. 
**  http://www.lumieremusic.net/audio.aspx