It's a short trip from pagan songs in a Westmeath church to a priest in Dire Straits in Dublin, writes MICHAEL HARDING
I WAS IN A church last week, but not for anything religious. The folk singer Mary McPartlan was performing, with Rick Epping on concertina and Aiden Brennan on guitar, in the village of Streete in Co Westmeath, and the parish church was the only suitable venue in the area.
The church is still in use, and it was strange to see the musicians parked in front of the altar singing pagan songs.
When the night closed in the spotlights lit up the sanctuary with an eerie light, and the saints in the stained-glass windows looked on with cold indifference.
On the wall behind the musicians there was a crucifix: a wounded outstretched Jesus, in his act of sacrifice, made spooky by the shadows. His head was bowed in despair, and the broken- hearted figure reminded me of an ex-priest I met at a Mark Knopfler concert in Dublin recently.
The ex-priest had watery eyes, and he was standing at the bar, just outside the auditorium, with a plastic beaker of Budweiser, and he told me that he used to listen to Dire Straits albums when he was in the seminary.
I asked him about his life in the priesthood, but he didn’t have too many funny stories.
“I closed coffins,” he said, “and shovelled clay into the graves, and tried as best I could to say comforting things to broken-hearted families. But I didn’t believe any of it. When I opened the front door of a funeral parlour and gazed at the family in black coats and suits and dresses, I would summon up twaddle about God’s will, and heavenly peace, though the words were so clichéd and archaic that they stuck in my throat. So eventually I left.”
The Knopfler gig was wonderful: cool, sophisticated music that steered the audience through a collective meditation into some kind of heaven.
But the ex-priest didn’t quite get it. All he could hear was a soundtrack to his own remorse.
I asked him how long it had taken him to realise he should leave. “17 years,” he said, with a grimace.
No amount of Mark Knopfler’s cool guitar could calm that hurt, I thought, as he knocked back the Budweiser. He never strayed far enough from sick beds, tragic accidents or cemeteries. And apart from those duties that brought him close to the dead, he found little else to do.
He had a hothouse full of tomatoes and a garden of roses, which he inherited from the previous curate. And he had a dog that gave birth to four pups in a box beside his bed.
He lived without being hugged. And the only parishioners who came close usually wanted to rebuke him for something he said in a sermon that annoyed them.
He was completely alone, and had little interest in either tomatoes or roses. The roses got black spot and the tomatoes were drenched with greenfly in one hot summer. Everything died in the end.
In the church in Streete, Mary McPartlan was completely alive, and her voice was as intoxicating as wine.
I knew Mary in Sligo, 30 years ago, when we were both innocent, and would walk on Strandhill beach and sing to each other all our sorrows, and tell to each other all our joys.
She has done some living since then, and her voice has mellowed into a beautiful, velvety vessel of lovesong, and there’s enormous ease and composure in every phrase she sings.
Years ago in Sligo, a friend asked her to join the church choir, but she refused, because she was a woman who held strong principles about equality.
Thirty years later, in a little church in Westmeath, she looked completely at home on the altar, and when she sang Rainy Night in Sohoshe looked me straight in the eye: "I've been loving you a long time/Down all the years, down all the days/And I've cried for all your troubles/Smiled at your funny little ways." There were flowers on the altar, and on the wall behind the singer, the broken-hearted Jesus didn't seem out of place.
“We watched our friends grow up together/And we saw them as they fell/Some of them fell into Heaven/Some of them fell into Hell.” I just hope the ex-priest is okay, out there in the darkness, with his ipod full of Dire Straits.