NEWS!
INTO THE UNDERWORLD: Tales Of Spiritual Initiation - Brand New Online Course
Hello my friends, before the heft of today’s post, something I'm excited about.
Into the Underworld: Tales of Spiritual Initiation launches in early September. It’s the most ambitious online course yet, venturing into new territory: stories from the Bible and the lives of the Saints.
The course includes more than 6 hours of recorded teaching from a live workshop, plus a limited number of seats for an intimate series of live lectures and interaction over Zoom. So you’ll get sessions live and recorded.
Enrollment will be open for a limited time and space for live sessions is scarce — sign up for the waitlist at JAWBONESTORIES.COM to get early access to Enrollment. Also, get a special surprise just for joining the waitlist.
In this course, I tell and teach on: Joseph in the Underworld, Jacob and Esau, Ruth and Naomi, Blind Tobit, The Voyage of Brendan, St. Patrick’s Bell and other saint stories. I’ll even been reading a little from my new book-in-progress.
*
My Heart Ate Light Documentary Update
Also! – a little clip from the documentary that I'm pleased to say is now in progress. Please consider having a look at the Crowdfunder page as we come to the end of that campaign:
And big, big thanks again for your generosity.
A Journey, Not A Route
I arrive in Dublin in the dark and don’t know where the river is. That’s never happened before.
In the morning I wake to the sound of gulls and that makes a child of me, growing up in a seaside town as I did. Before I’d slept I’d talked to someone grieving Glen, big eyed and exhausted, who’d slipped into church with their sadness and got all tangled up in words that seemed abstract and ceremonies that seemed so husked they could almost crumble in your hands.
Grief is the great leveller, and should banish all lofty theory. Much suddenly becomes nonsense in your jaw. Amazing how that happens. Truth announces.
Christian tradition is sometimes hard to talk about in such moments, but Jesus isn’t. There’s no suffering he can’t absorb along with you. Tuck your boat in behind him, nest in him, braid your life to his. I give as little concept as I can and hope that something, for a moment at least, helps.
Many of us have had to deal with deaths with long runways, but the suddenness of Glen Hansard killed by coming off his bike, that takes us all down at the knees. His dear wife Maire, the young lad Christy, there’s nothing redemptive at all to be made of it. It’s ghastly, unreal, information you carry in your pocket but can’t absorb or even properly believe. I keep falling asleep. Even if my mind can’t digest, my body knows it’s in the presence of a catastrophic event.
He used to pick me up at the airport, dogs in the car, stereo raging, chucking a sweater or coat at me as a gift. The grin. We could never believe our luck. Then straight onto a gig we’d be playing or someone I just had to meet. It was always going to be a long and often rather glorious night with Glen.
He owned Yeats’s brass bed – believe it or not – and that became where I always slept, down a long corridor that felt like it had the pronounced touch of a spook in it. Late night he’d cook a chicken and could produce excellent coffee when we finally surfaced somewhere before noon to head out to the next night of singing and story and do it all again. Off to Tipperary or West Cork or a nearer Kilkenny.
No Glen this time.
Uber and a way into town I’ve never been driven before. It was a route but not a journey. Got there in half the time but with half the craic. Silence.
Glen would always be pointing out where he once pushed a broken down car at midnight with Bono, or was encouraged as a young musician by a towering Phil Lynott outside the chip shop. And most of the stories were nothing at all to do with the famous, but part of the granular history of a town he gave his whole life to. It wasn’t all to do with the razzle dazzle.
Agh Glenny
Down On The Street
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.