"Ah, back through the glen I rode again and my heart with grief was sore
For I parted then with valiant men whom I never shall see more
But to and fro in my dreams I go and I'd kneel and pray for you,
For slavery fled, O glorious dead, When you fell in the foggy dew." from "The Foggy Dew", traditional Irish rebellion song
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I don't think I've ever been passionate about my liberties and my freedom. I take them for granted, and I expect them. St. Patrick's Day, and now the Iraq War anniversary have really put that into perspective.
Would I ever die for those to come after me, for a cause that isn't tangible? No. Unfortunately, no. Not even close. I'd be the first to recant, to denounce whatever it is, and the very fact that I'm aware of that cowardice is troubling. I don't think I'm necessarily alone, either.
This very notion strikes at the heart of my current crisis of faith. Where does faith become fact in my mind? If there is no place that this occurs, what is the purpose of the faith? If there is indeed a place, where is this place specifically in my mind, because it is hazy or not even there at first thought. To die for freedom, die for my people, die for another or for a cause - it is something that is ungraspable as the cosmos, the notion of God or the afterlife, or the system in which the world works. It would take, as I often say in reference to a friend in the military or other life-threatening profession, a "greater man than I."
A greater man than I. Now that is a bit of a cop-out. It takes a man more braver than I, more self-less than I, and more responsible than I to give me my "taken for granted's". What a way to downplay their commitment. There's is something corrupt in this train of thought, I think. It's not healthy, and it's not safe.
So do I have a place where my faith meets fact, where it becomes certainty? Right now, no. I feel distant from that part of my heart and soul, but I do not feel unwelcome with it. I feel that my life sweeps me up too often, and I leave that part of me to toil on its own now, much like forgetting you left the dog outside.
But really, is there any sense of urgency that tells us we deal with eternity everyday? I think one has to believe in eternity first. I would say I have seen the eternity, in a more tangible form, when men and women clap at the Buffalo Irish Center for those fallen rebels of the 1798 Fenian rising in Ireland when they are mentioned in song. Or just in the very music itself, that me, someone really unknowing of the Irish plight in the last ten centuries, sings a song such as "The Foggy Dew" on St. Patrick's Day, and keeps those ghosts alive for another year. I feel apart of the bards, the troubadors, and the poets who have come before me. Perhaps this is the eternity the men and women knew of, and died for, the eternity that made me shout as I sang "O Glorious dead!" There is this steep admiration and awe that pours from my heart in the closing words of that song. Greater men than I, now great forever in the songs that will never, ever die.
So the fundamental problem I am getting at is that I oft have this assumed and ignored sense of invincibility. That the train really doesn't end. And "The Foggy Dew" has show me that in parts, I am right, and others not. We can live on through those that come after us, in special ways, and if you believe it, in the next life, reunited with the Life Force that I call God. But the train does end, there is finality, there is a stop, because the tangible eternity I so very much seek cannot really come, it is not of this world. It is necessary to no longer be of this world to arrive at this. And moreover, we are to be remembered only if we make this faith-turned-fact. There is no other way.
