An Charraig and Aisling Árann

by Dara Molloy
Revised November '05.

An Charraig is a household modelled on an Aistir (see separate article); Aisling Árann is the overall vision and supportive organisation.

I am one of a group of people who have come to live on Inismór, the largest of the Aran Islands. The island has 800 inhabitants and we number around twenty at time of writing. Each of us have our own reasons for coming to live here, but through them all there are common threads. We can be identified not so much through what we do as through how we try to live. The kernel of our identity is in our way of being in the world.

We live in households scattered across the island. Being scattered helps us to integrate with the local people. People choose themselves where they want to live and who they want to live with. Quite a number live alone. We have avoided the tendency to institutionalise our lives and to control each other. Households are sovereign and nobody from outside them has been given any authority to intervene. Influence is exercised through mutual support and challenge. We have no hierarchical authority structure. Some of us may come together when somebody takes the initiative or when a special occasion warrants it. A lot of casual visiting goes on and one household may invite others for a meal.

I live in the household called An Charraig. This was the original household, when there was only one, and it still plays a key role in the wider network. Until 1995 it was a small, rented, traditional thatched cottage. Then we moved into a new An Charraig at Mainistir. This was purpose built, by ourselves, and has two living units. There is a family home which houses Tess, Dara, and their four children, and there is a project house which houses six or more volunteers and a number of guests. A feature of An Charraig is that it practically always has guests staying. It also has many day visitors, especially in the summer. It is a busy place with lots of things happening there. Other households are quieter, even contemplative.

Our way of being in the world could be roughly summed up as:
— being rooted in the Celtic
— living in right relationship
— working for transformation.
I will use this structure to describe what we do and why we do it.

Being Rooted In The Celtic
Like a tree, we want to sink our roots deep into the soil — not just the soil of place, but also of culture and of vernacular and indigenous spirituality. Aran is a good location for this. It is a very definable place, and it has a rich traditional culture and spirituality which is not yet dead.

Our activities, in order to do this, include:-
a) becoming practiced in the Gaelic language through listening to Raidió na Gaeltachta (the Irish language local radio station) and conversing with the local people, as well as through attending classes, studying tapes and books, etc.
b) learning to celebrate with traditional music, singing and set-dancing. Some take classes in ‘sean-nós’ (traditional) singing, some attend the regular set-dancing sessions on the island and a number have picked up traditional instruments.
c) practice of traditional arts and crafts. At present among us these include:- Aran knitting, spinning, dyeing, weaving, candle-making, button-making with Celtic designs, greeting cards using the Gaelic language and Celtic designs, cheese making, wine-making, jam-making, bread-making, stonewall building, thatching, etc.
d) celebration of Celtic feasts and holy places. The Celtic feasts include the older feasts associated with solstices, equinoxes and seasons and also the feasts of the Celtic Church - mainly the feastdays of Irish saints. We give special attention to St Enda, St Ciarán and St Colmcille — all of whom lived on the island and each of whom have holy places by which they are remembered. There are traditional customs associated with these and we participate in these while also creating new rituals and ways of celebration ourselves.

Living In Right Relationship
Having rooted our lives in the Celtic past, the next part of the tree, the trunk, corresponds to the present and to the relationships in our lives. This is the visible, tangible, day to day part of our lives - relating to each other, relating to the Divine, relating to nature, to food, to animals, to money, etc. We are searching for the right way to live — for right relationship at every level. Not that there is one right way - I’m sure there are many. But we have a clear perception that relationships in the western world are out of harmony and that this disharmony is producing very bad fruits.

In the An Charraig household we work hard to get our relationships right. At the present moment, the following is a general description of how we now relate.

Our relationship to the Divine: We give expression to our relationship to the Divine in an explicit way through prayer. Various forms of prayer used include meditation, shared prayer, the Eucharist and rituals that we create for special occasions. Input into these forms often include music, dancing, readings, poetry, spontaneous sharing, spontaneous worshipful singing (praise), silence, symbolic objects, symbolic actions, dramatisation, etc.

Fasting also plays a part in our lives. Wednesdays and Fridays are traditional Irish fast days.

The spiritual dimension of our lives is of course far broader than just the prayer times. We promote a consciousness of the divine element in everything that we do.

Our relationship to Nature, Food, Animals. We have worked hard on our relationship to nature, food and animals as we see just how far modern life has become disfunctional in this area. On Aran, the beauty and power and mystery of nature is all around us. We are careful in how we live not to damage it or treat it with disrespect. This has meant for example that we use energy and other materials from the earth sparingly. We try to avoid pollution of the air and of the water and of the land. We prefer smokeless fuel. We compost whatever we can and recycle whatever we can and we use natural fertilisers on the land (mostly seaweed).

In An Charraig we grow our own food and buy very little from the shop. This gives us independence but also means that we are not giving tacit support to many food-producing practices that are damaging to our health, damaging to the environment, or possibly oppressive and unjust to poor people. Where we do choose to buy, we are careful from whom we buy and what we buy. Our two main sources are Traidéireann (a fair trade company that deals with Third World producers) and Munster Wholefoods (who sell bulk wholefoods without expensive packaging or advertising). Our preferences are for purchases produced ethically and fairly, produced locally, produced with a minimum of processing and produced without unnecessary packaging (i.e. bulk).

Home production of food includes:- potatoes and a wide variety of vegetables all the year round, eggs, milk, honey, tomatoes, cheese, wine, chutney, jam. We also eat fish, rabbit and our own meat and fowl. Wild food is also gathered - shellfish, seaweed, wild garlic, wild leek, berries, watercress, etc.

We keep animals - household cats and a dog, fowl (chickens, ducks, geese), goats and sheep. Other animals will come with time. Our primary purpose in having these animals is to be in relationship with them, to give them a fair life suited to their nature, and to learn from them about ourselves and about the divine. When they become too numerous through annual breeding, we cull what we cannot keep or give away. These we eat.

Our relationship with each other: Where difficulties in relationships arise, within our own household or with others, we try to deal with them in a healthy way. This may involve gathering for a meeting, asking a mutually acceptable person to facilitate, or, when speaking of emotionally charged issues, applying the rule of thumb, “I felt A when you did B because of C”. We find that this allows people to own their feelings while at the same time linking those feelings to the behaviour of someone else, though not in an accusatory way.

Hospitality: In the An Charraig household, hospitality is a major part of our work. We practice it as a traditional Irish virtue, for which the country is famous. I have come to see it as even more than a virtue. It is the inculturated Irish expression 'love your neighbour'. Its essence is an openness to and recognition of the Divine in the other. Since we came to live on Inismór we have always had people stay with us in An Charraig. Our accommodation is simple. Guests usually bring a sleeping bag and will probably have to share a room or even sleep on a mattress on the floor. Our guests are invited to become full participants in the household and way of life for however short a period. They usually contribute roughly the cost of their keep. Some guests come out of interest, others out of a deep personal search, while others come for support and to allow healing to take place.

While households each welcome their own guests, together as a wider group we own a house of welcome called Killeany Lodge. This house can welcome guests in larger numbers as well as being a facility for us as a group. In order to buy this house we formed a company called Aisling Árann Teoranta. Membership of this company is open to those of us on the island and others among a wide network who share our vision. The function of Aisling Árann Teoranta is not only to be responsible for the house of welcome, but also to take on other organisational responsibilities in promoting our aims. We have used the company to run a number of Social Employment Schemes, to fund-raise, and to help establish a printing and publishing works that includes The AISLING Magazine.

Our relationship with the island: With the people of the island, our neighbours, we work to become totally integrated. Through a commitment to the island that for many of us will be lifelong, and through our commitment to the spirituality, language and culture of the island, many of us hope to end up more Árannach than the Árannaigh themselves. We fully participate in the social events of the island and many of us are members of various island committees and volunteer teams.

Finally, our relationship to money: We try to avoid the use of money as much as possible through living simply and producing as much as we can ourselves without having to buy it. In this way, our money needs are slight. Each of us earns money in different ways. Some of us are ex-professionals and offer services on a part-time or contract basis (on and off the island). Others of us are skilled craft-workers and sell our produce to tourists or by mail-order. There are part-time and casual jobs available on the island, especially in the summer. Work in our house of welcome and on the magazine produces a basic income for some others.

To Work for Transformation
In our image of the tree with its roots and trunk, the third part of the tree, its branches, corresponds to our attempt to reach into the future and work for transformation. We seek the light, reaching for the stars.

Transformation begins with ourselves. In coming to live on this island we have removed ourselves from lifestyles, value-systems and institutions that were not life-giving to us. In giving ourselves the space to choose differently, we have opened ourselves to various other influences both within ourselves and around us, choosing them carefully and allowing a creative process of transformation to take place. Nonetheless, difficult situations have arisen from time to time for each of us. By attempting to respond positively to these, with the help and support of others, many of us have had to deal with major turmoil within ourselves. These have often led to big changes taking place. In the course of these experiences and through subsequent study, a number of our group have become skilled in spiritual discernment, understanding the psyche, and counselling. Others have brought with them, or have learned here, various natural therapies. Through all of this and through the sort of life that we live, many of us can say that we are being transformed and made whole.

Our Mission
We are not missionary, at least in the sense that we do not try to convert others to our beliefs or way of life. Nonetheless, the practice of hospitality creates the space for an encounter with the other. In this way we believe many people are influenced without aggression, fear or fundamentalism. Our missionary spirituality, if we have one, is that of the Celtic monks rather than the standard European model. The Celtic monks chose to be missionary by being ‘the light on the hilltop’ and ‘the salt of the earth’. By concentrating on the quality of our own lives, and allowing that be visible to others in a non-egoistic way, we believe that we can perform a transformative role in society around us. Actions speak louder than words.

In line with the Celtic monks, who copied and illustrated texts in their ‘Scriptoria’, we in An Charraig have established a publishing and printing business called Aisling Publications.

The magazine,The AISLING Magazine, contains an average of 16 articles on issues ranging from Spirituality and Celtic Studies to Economics, Social Analysis and Environmental, Political and Justice Issues. It contains no commercial advertising, has not borrowed from banks, and receives no institutional sponsorship. It is now published only on the Internet.

Our ‘Aisling’ or Vision
The word AISLING means ‘vision’. The vision that we share is of a transformed church and a transformed society based on right relationship. Here on Aran we do not call ourselves a community. Rather we say that we are working towards community. Community in this sense is the kingdom of God — with us already and yet still to come. This transformation that we work for begins with ourselves, personally and communally. Much of what we try to do is done in the consciousness that it might inspire, encourage or simply inform others. In this way a light might be taken from our light and carried somewhere else, where it itself becomes a light for others.

This already is taking place, in that many people who have lived with us here, or visited over a period, have now found their own feet and are doing something similar in their own way elsewhere. Many were already doing it, or already had the idea to do it, and our coming together in friendship has given mutual encouragement and support.

Ultimately, the precedent for what we are doing is in the monastic model of society and church proposed by the Celtic monks 1500 years ago. The patriarch of this movement was St Enda or Éanna who came to Aran around 485 A.D. Aran quickly became a monastic island with over ten monasteries situated on its small and barren landscape. Many people came and stayed. Others came to learn and to be inspired and then moved on to found their own monasteries. St Ciarán, St Colmcille, St Brendan, St Sourney, St Jarlath all spent time on Aran and then took the fire elsewhere.

The monastic movement in Ireland was a community movement that was not just for monks, celibate or otherwise, but for everybody who wanted to participate. It was a movement that not only transformed church and society in Ireland, but had a major influence for good throughout the known world. This is the tradition in which we want to continue.



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