LIVING ON THE MARGINS

Published as article in Spiritual Journeys, a book published by Veritas, Dublin, 1997, edited by Stanislas Kennedy.

Dara Molloy November 1997.

There are those who are marginalised by outside forces and there are those who choose to live on the margins. I am one of those who has chosen to live on the margins. For this reason, I do not identify myself as someone who works with the marginalised, or even one who lives with the marginalised, even though that is true also. My identity lies in being on the margins myself.

Geographically, I live on the margins of Europe. My home is on an island off an island off an island off Europe! This island, Inismór, one of the three Aran Islands, is ten miles off the coast, and exposed to the full force of the Atlantic. As an island, it was remote and inaccessible up to about ten years ago. Then the tourists came.

When I came to live here in January 1985, I had to travel to Galway the night before sailing, board a cargo vessel at Galway docks at 6.00 a.m. the next morning and endure seven hours on the sea in freezing weather before docking at Inismór around lunchtime. That sailing was only available twice a week, weather permitting, and the only other option was to fly. Since then, tourism has opened up the island, and a ferry from Rossaveel can now take you there in 35 minutes.

Apart from the geographical margins, I am also on the margins of society. By choosing to live on an island, in a Gaeltacht (Irish speaking) area, I have moved in the opposite direction to the mainstream. Islands around Ireland have had a continuous trend of depopulation since the famine – a trend even more severe than the rest of rural Ireland. Around the time of the famine (1847) 3,000 people lived on Inismór. Now there are only 750. In the 11 years that I have been on the island, the population has dropped by 150 from 900.

Detaching myself from the mainstream has also meant choosing to live simply and to produce my own food and other requirements myself. My income is so low that I don’t pay income tax. When I collect a half-dozen eggs from my chickens, I don’t have to pay for the carton, nor am I paying for the transportation of the eggs half-way across the country, causing pollution, environmental degradation and burning up of non-renewable fossil fuel. And of course, the eggs taste better! Opting out of the mainstream has meant living on a low income, without a bank mortgage and without a car. However, I experience the way I live as very satisfying and very fulfilling. Living on the margins, for me, has been a good choice.

I also live on the margins of the Church. Until the summer of 1996, I was still a church member, still a practising priest, and still a member of a religious order, although I had moved to the edge of all these institutions. However, I have now resigned from these organisations also. My priesthood is now the priesthood that Jesus exercised, of the order of Melchizedek (Heb. 7:1-28). The authority I claim for exercising it is the same authority that Jesus claimed and John the Baptist claimed (Mt.21:23-27).

I describe myself as being de-institutionalised and de-professionalised. I do not work directly for any bishop or any religious order. I have no ‘job’. I am not a curate or a parish priest, nor am I any longer a school teacher. Nobody pays me a wage, not even the State in the form of dole. In this sense, I am a nobody. I cannot be identified by my work.

Unemployed people, of course, are the same. I have plenty of work to do and I work very hard. but I am not working for an employer or for an institution. Nor am I working to make a living, so I cannot say I am self-employed either. I do not work to make money. I work because I see work that needs to be done and I can do it. My work is varied. It includes gardening, work with animals, building, writing, giving talks, offering hospitality, prayer, liturgy, ritual, administering the sacraments, answering letters, committees, projects, etc. My income comes through this work in various ways and I make enough to live on.

Our society gives identity and status to people according to their work. People with no work are then left without a place in that society. This applies not only to people who are unemployed, but also to retired people, people with handicaps, and people who do work which is not paid work or recognised as valuable. In my own life, I have chosen to join these people on the margins in a positive way. I wish to emphasise that my value lies not in the work that I do, as such, but in the person that I am. My works are my fruits, and these fruits may be in an area outside of the employment market or the gross national product. I will not accept economists as my judge and jury. I stand in solidarity with other people who are undervalued by our society.

My hero is John the Baptist. He was a man who chose to live on the margins. He left the towns and villages of Judea and shook the dust off his feet as he went to live in the desert. The place he chose was along the Jordan river about 20 miles from Jerusalem. 20 miles in those days was a day’s journey on foot. John chose not to wear the clothes that were commonly worn at that time. He wore animal skins. He preferred also not to eat the food of the people of his day. Instead he chose a diet of wild locusts and honey. I like him for this. In a visible and symbolic way, he made a strong statement about the world he was living in. He could not partake in it. My feelings are the same and so I try to imitate John. I normally don’t wear clerical or religious clothes, and my food is unpackaged, unprocessed, mostly vegetarian, and organically home produced. Our new home has been built by ourselves with the help of our friends, without using building contractors. We have used local material where possible and also secondhand material where we could get it.

John the Baptist left the mainstream of Jewish society to live in the desert because he did not like the direction that that society was taking. In order to maintain his own integrity, he had to detach himself from any collusion with its false values and errant direction. From a position of strength and independence on the margins of Jewish society, John was able to see more clearly what was going on. Free from being tainted or compromised by it in his own life, he was the better able to speak out against it. John confronted the people of Israel with the picture he saw. His call was for conversion.

I feel a bit like John the Baptist. Standing at my front door I can face east and look out over the coast of Connemara. I am looking out at the whole of Ireland, even the whole of Europe. If I go out my back door and climb the hill a bit, I can look west out over the Atlantic towards America and the rest of the world. From this position, I feel detached and removed from what goes on in the world. I am not disinterested, but living on the island gives me a better perspective. Like John the Baptist, I do not like the direction our Western society is taking – consumerism, environmental destruction, breakdown of community, increased violence, loss of spirituality. I don’t want to participate in its onward rush towards destruction. In coming to the island, I have freed myself enough to make space for a different way of living, based on different values. In my new way of life, I feel stronger and more secure in the attempts I make to confront the people and institutions of the mainstream with what is happening. I do this by speaking to the groups and individuals who come to visit us. I also do it by publishing a magazine The AISLING .

Another of my heroes from the Old Testament is Abram (who became Abraham). Abram was getting on in years, and appeared to be very comfortable where he lived among the rich valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. Yet, although he was in his seventies, wealthy, with a wife, and large herds of sheep and goats, there was a restlessness within him, a desire to get up and move. Eventually, he responded to that desire and headed off west ‘to a place that God would show him’. In this act of blind trust he gave birth to the Jewish faith, and to the Christian and Muslim faiths which followed.

So Abram’s great achievement was not some heroic deed or some wonderful creation. It was the simple act of moving out into the unknown, in response to some inner calling. By removing himself from a defined and fixed environment, he left room in his life for the spirit of God to work.

I like Abram for this reason. As St Paul writes (Romans 4), Abram was ‘justified’ not because he kept the Ten Commandments, was circumcised, or obeyed the Torah. He lived before all of these things. If Abram could be ‘justified before God’, we can all be ‘justified before God’. It does not matter if we are unemployed, penniless, or never passed an exam. All of us will be justified before God if we allow space in our lives for God to act – and if we have the courage to follow the call of the Spirit within us, when God does act.

Abram’s blind act of trust was taken up as an example to be followed by the early Irish monks. Young monks wandered the earth, both in Ireland and across Europe, looking for their ‘place of resurrection’. They experienced a leading of the Spirit, symbolised as travelling on a boat without sail, oar or rudder. They believed they would be shown by God where they were to settle and build their hermitages. This would be their place of resurrection.

There is a story about St Jarlath. He was told by St Brendan (the Navigator) that he should drive his chariot until the wheel broke. Wherever it broke, there he should build his monastery. Jarlath’s chariot wheel broke at Tuam and so he built his monastery there. It is now the seat of the archdiocese of Tuam. The episcopal ring bears an engraving of the broken wheel.

Many young people today set off on a personal search, looking for clues as to what they should do with their lives. Sometimes they travel within their own country, sometimes round the world. They allow some inner intuition guide them to places far away from home. Often they keep wandering until they find their true home, a person to marry, an occupation to fulfil them, or a place to settle down. What they find becomes for them their place of resurrection, something that will stand to them against the difficulties of life. If people can find some deep meaning for their lives, they will be able to withstand all the hardships that come their way, even death itself. Finding their place of resurrection ensures them victory over the forces of death. Their lives will be fruitful, like Abram’s, because they have found and followed their calling.

I too experienced the call of Abram. It came not so much when I felt a calling to become a priest, in my early teens, but much later when I was already ordained and teaching in a school. From an onlooker’s perspective I had achieved my goal. I had done well at school, succeeded in university and now was ordained a priest. I had reached a place in society that gave me a high status and a comfortable life. That should have settled me.

But instead of feeling fulfilled and sustained in my role as a priest and religious, I found the opposite. I felt suffocated, hemmed in and controlled. Strangely, I felt spiritually starved. What my spirit longed for was the desert, the wide open spaces, the wilderness. My spirit wanted to have nothing and be nothing. The material comforts cluttered my life. The cultural baggage associated with being a priest, being a religious and being a teacher crippled me. I could not live out the expectations society had of me in these roles. It was not that I regretted joining the order, or being ordained. These to me were necessary steps in the commitment of my life to God. But I couldn’t commit my life to God and then just step into the well worn grooves of the priests and religious who lived their lives before me. The longing in me was to step out of those grooves. To get off the track altogether. To go out into the wilds where there were no tracks.

My first attempt at moving into the wilderness was in the summer of 1981. I got on a bicycle, with a tent and a sleeping bag, and I headed for the wilds of Donegal. For six weeks I wandered the hills and valleys, the shores and headlands, filling my lungs with fresh air and my mind with fresh thoughts. Each night I pitched my tent in some field and each morning I awoke to a new day, not knowing what it would bring or in which direction I would go. After the six weeks, I came back feeling clearer in my mind, strong and confident. Nonetheless, I was quickly back into the grooves of being a priest, religious and teacher. Nothing fundamental had changed.

Then, in the following summer, I visited Aran. This was to be the most significant experience that has ever happened to me. It was my first visit to the Aran Islands and I had no anticipation of what I was to experience. Ostensibly, my purpose for going there was to bring a group of young people on a holiday. The choice of Aran was arbitrary. We chose it because the school where I taught had made a trip to the island that Easter. The group who travelled there were able to tell us about it and give us the contacts.

We went to Aran for two weeks, a group of about fifteen young people and myself. All of us were involved in a youth prayer group in the town of Dundalk. We had wanted to take a holiday together that year. We stayed on the island of Inismór for two weeks. We were camping in a field near the shore, where the facilities were basic – a mobile home placed in the middle of a field equipped with a toilet and a tap. For the two weeks we were there, there were virtually no others on the campsite except ourselves.

That experience changed my life. It was as if the haze suddenly lifted from around me and I knew what I had to do with the rest of my life. I was to move to live on Aran. Here was the wilderness I desired. This was to be my place of resurrection. I was to leave all and go to this place.

My experience was a deep intuition. It was not rational. When I went home, I could not explain it to others. This was something I had to do. I had almost total certainty. To test it, I took time out for nine days. I let the idea sit for a while, to see if it would stay or go away. It stayed. On the ninth day, the feast of the Assumption, August 15th, I wrote a shaky letter to my superior asking for permission to go to live on Aran. Needless to say, the answer was no.

For the next two and a half years, my intuition to go to Aran was tested inside and out, upside and down until I felt completely exhausted. The first test was to be told that I was to remain teaching in the same school for another year, exactly as I had been – to see if my idea would simply go away. It didn’t. The second test was, the following year, to take a transfer to another job in another location – to see if that would settle me. It didn’t. The third was to consult with an experienced counsellor who deals specifically with people from religious orders who are in a spiritual crisis – to see if I was suffering from some delusion or psychological illness. I wasn’t. The fourth was to consult with the most respected spiritual counsellors available – to see if my call was authentic. They all said it was.

From all of these tests I emerged intact, with my conviction stronger than ever. All that I knew was that I should go to live on Aran and bring none of the institutional trappings with me.

A woman friend came to me one day and said she had something to give me. She said she was frightened in giving it to me. She had tried twice before to do so and had lost confidence at the last minute. What she gave me was a postage stamp size religious poster, stuck onto a card. The picture on it was of a small harbour with little boats tied up in it. In the background was the wide open sea. The caption on the poster said: ‘Boats are safe in a harbour, but this is not what boats are made for’.

That little poster, which I carried around in my pocket for years afterwards, said it all. At a time when I was beginning to question my own sanity, when my mind was raging like a mighty storm, this little card threw me an anchor, a tangible sign from heaven. Here was exactly what I felt. I felt enclosed in a safe harbour, in this institutional well-defined life. Everything in me screamed to leave and get out into that wild open sea – to travel to where no land was visible, to experience storms and high seas, to allow myself to be lost so that I could also be found. My call was the call of St Brendan. To go on a personal voyage in search of the land of heaven. It was also the call of Abram.

In the autumn of 1984 the tide suddenly turned. The resistance I had experienced for two years to my going to Aran began to recede. Circumstances worked in my favour. The retreat house, to which I had been transferred a year previous, was to be closed and sold. By January I would be out of a job. I asked for six months leave to go to Aran. To my surprise I got it. Subject to the approval of the local bishop and local parish priest, I could go. These approvals were granted and I arrived on Aran on January 9th 1985.

The parish priest got out of his sick bed to collect me at the pier. He brought me to my rented accommodation in the middle of the island. It was a small thatched cottage with one tap and an outside toilet. It suited me fine. I had three rooms and three beds to choose from.

I immediately set to making myself at home and creating a new rhythm of life. This rhythm was to be the monastic rhythm of prayer, work, and study. I was going to be a hermit, a Celtic monk. I joined the local people for Mass every morning in the Church nextdoor – celebrated by the local curate. I walked every foot of the island and familiarised myself with each of the holy places. I got to know my neighbours and began to speak in Gaelic, brushing up on school Irish long gone rusty.

My greatest learning in those days took place not from reading books, but from adjusting to a new life. I learned how to cook for myself and bake bread. My neighbour Tom took me in hand and taught me how to plant potatoes, making lazy beds to put them in and fertilising them with seaweed. Later I learned how to ride a donkey and skin a rabbit for my dinner. Other types of learning were to follow.

From the beginning, my intention was to practice hospitality. I was a hermit with only three walls to my cell. The fourth wall was missing, to allow openness to the world. Hospitality for me meant being open to the possibility of other people wanting to stay with me for a while or even to live with me. These people could be people on their own Abramic journeys, or they could be people in need. Things began to happen much sooner than I thought. By Easter two men had come to live with me. By June, we had a further two women join us. These were all young people seeking to live the gospel in their lives and searching for an authentic way to do it. They were looking for their place of resurrection.

My six months permission to live on Aran was extended by a further six months. Over the summer, many people came to visit, and regularly there were twelve or fifteen people around the dinner table. By September we had a further increase in numbers living in the house and things were getting a bit out of hand.

During this first year, my ability to cope with such an open policy was severely tested. On occasions I escaped into negative moods where a dark cloud would hang over me for days and I would hardly speak to anyone. I had never lived with people so closely before, despite having lived in a religious community for fourteen years. Furthermore, I had never lived with women. The sexual and emotional dynamics of a mixed household were something completely new to me. Although I was floundering and not in control, I knew that this was good for me. I knew I was growing. This was life in the open sea. I was being challenged to grow in areas where I had experienced very little growth in the past — in the area of relationships and in the area of my own emotions.

One year became two years. In the second year, I built a little wooden hut for myself outside the cottage. This became my cell. It was 10 ft by 8 ft and gave me room for a bed and desk. I was working on the Irish monastic model — of a monk having his own cell. It was only later I was to discover that often two or three monks shared a one roomed cell. Not for me. To survive long-term I felt I needed some space. The cottage was often packed with people and it was so small there was no way of escaping from it. The cell was to do with survival.

By this stage a daily rhythm had developed. We prayed together morning and evening. One of the small bedrooms in the cottage was converted into a prayer room. We sat on the floor and lit a candle, produced guitars and tin whistles and whatever other instruments were in use, and created a prayer session that lasted on average a half an hour. At first, we stuck very closely to the Divine Office format for Morning and Evening Prayer, reciting some of it in Irish. As time went by, we became more spontaneous. Although the structure remained much the same, the content was broadened to include more personal sharing, and readings from sources other than the Bible. Poetry, literature and story-telling combined with singing, spontaneous praise and silence to provide a daily diet that nourished us all.

Meanwhile our days were spent working on the land or at various arts and crafts. Each person who stayed had their own personal projects on which they spent part of their day. Other parts of the day were spent working communally. Each evening we gathered for dinner, cooked in turn by each one of us. Our food was vegetarian and consisted mostly of our own produce. We incorporated rice and dried beans of various kinds into the menu, the beans providing protein. In this way, we ate in solidarity with the poor of the world.

On Wednesdays and Fridays we fasted. We adopted and adapted the early Irish tradition of fasting. This tradition was based on the notion of postponing your first meal of the day. From this, the word ‘breakfast’ comes. On Wednesdays we breakfasted at around 2 pm. On Fridays we held the fast until 6 pm or later, eating only one meal on this day. However, these fasts were also influenced by other circumstances. If a fast day fell on a feast day then the feast day took precedence and the fast was cancelled. Also, the demands of hospitality were of higher priority than those of fasting. The arrival of new guests to the house cancelled whatever fast was going on at the time. Everybody ate to celebrate the arrival of the visitor. Sundays were always feast days. Whoever cooked dinner on a Sunday was asked to do something special and to provide a dessert. In this way we lived healthily and provided a balanced rhythm to our week.

Things developed from there. More people came and wanted to stay, so we developed a back door policy as well as a front door policy. While the front door policy offered hospitality and welcomed people in, the back door policy provided a way for them to move on or find their own accommodation on the island. Over time, many people chose to settle on the island and found their own accommodation. This created a network of ‘blow-ins’, who, while integrating into the local community, still found support among each other. There was never a question of us forming a ‘community’ or separate entity from the main community of the island. All of us had come to the island to get away from being caught up in institutional or mainstream living. The last thing we needed was to set up our own institution or ‘community’. But in trying to live differently and follow our dream, we did need support.

From very early on I was joined by Tess Harper. As other people came and went, she stayed on. Apart from her, the longest anybody has stayed in the house has been two to three years. Tess has become a feminine anchor for the house, to balance my masculine energy. In terms of the Celtic monastic model, Tess is the abbess, although this image is not to her liking. However, it fits with the early Irish practise of having mixed monasteries. In Kildare, Brigid’s monastery was mixed and she had Bishop Conleth as her abbot. We are not trying to create a new monastery, but we are trying to live in the spirit of Irish monasticism.

With Tess as guardian of the house and of the vision alongside myself, we have been able to take on many things that otherwise would have been too much for me. From the beginning, people came to the house who were on the edge. These were not people who were choosing to be on the edge, but people who found themselves there and who needed support. It began when a friend of mine in Dublin, who worked on a project with young people in Dublin’s inner city, contacted me and asked me would we take a teenage girl who needed to be rescued from the situation she was in and given a chance in a new environment. When she came to us, she was 17, depressed and listless. But the rural environment suited her. She was particularly good with animals. After a while she blossomed and eventually rented her own accommodation on the island and got a job in the local factory. She now lives in Galway and has three children.

We have not always been so successful. Many people thought that if they came to Aran they could overcome their deepest problems. At first, we too were equally naive and took on all-comers. However, over time we began to see where our limits lay. Unless we were going to dedicate ourselves totally to supporting people with certain problems, then we had to limit and select who we took on.

Over time, and after many different experiences, we realised that we were not able to offer much help to people with severe behavioural problems or psychiatric illnesses. Over a period, a number of recovering alcoholics had come to live with us thinking they would be permanently healed. It never seemed to work out that way. Similarly, we had people with psychiatric illnesses coming to us and thinking that they could throw away their tablets after a short while. But unfortunately it was not so. We realised that unless we were to dedicate ourselves and our home totally to supporting and accompanying these people through a healing process, we would not be of much use to them. We now will not normally take on somebody like this but we may be able to direct them somewhere where they will get help.

However, we discovered that we could be of support to some people. Over the years, we have had stay with us a number of young people in their late teens who were coming out of institutional care and were not yet ready to face the world alone. Living with these young people through these transition periods has brought us in touch with the results of parental neglect, violence in the home, sexual abuse and society’s abandonment of these young people. It has also connected us with people and organisations working on their behalf in the cities.

We have also found that we can give support and some reprieve to people working with marginalised people. Very often these workers are in very pressurised situations and suffer from exhaustion and burnout. Aran is a place of exquisite beauty and a sojourn with us away from the hustle and the hassle can provide a healing for both body and soul. There is no television in our house and as a result plenty of time is given over to conversation. Physical work on the land can reconnect people with the sources of life, and long walks along the bóithríns, beaches and cliffs can blow away the debris in the mind to give clarity in thought and vision. Prayer together in the evening is a way of acknowledging the presence of the divine in all that we experience. It allows us to share our deeper thoughts and feelings and to display the fruits of God’s work within us – healing, acceptance, insight, peace of mind.

Other people that we have been able to support are people whose lives have hit a major turning point. People who have spent twenty or more years of their lives heading in one direction can find, all of a sudden, that they do not wish to travel, or are blocked from travelling, in this direction any more. For some it is a crisis within their professional careers, for others it is caused by a death or the breakup of a relationship. Often these people are left in mid-life with very little and are so wounded as to be unable to see clearly what direction they must take next. A period with us has often proved helpful, and people in this situation have stayed anything from a week to a year.

But at the end of the day, we are only a small household. We cannot take on all the problems of the world and hope to solve them. Opening our home to those who experience marginalisation has been a blessing for us because it has connected us to the crucified Lord in a tangible way. It has also rooted us in reality so that our home on the island never becomes an ivory tower cut off from the realities of life in this modern world. Despite the fact that we live in such a remote area, we are nonetheless, through these people, in touch with some of the major justice issues in our society.

Our rule of thumb has been to have a place in our home for one person at a time who needs special support. This way we are not diverted from our main work which is to create a spiritual way of living that responds to the signs of the times and is right for today.

We have often thought that many families and households throughout Ireland could do what we do. If they did, the number of places required in institutional care would be greatly reduced. Of course, there are many homes already where children are fostered. But I am thinking about something broader than fosterage, to include teenagers, young adults, old people, people with physical or mental handicaps and people in transition.

There are many happy homes in Ireland that are not overstretched and that have room at their table and in their hearts for people worse off than themselves. The living out of our commitment to follow Christ takes on a very tangible reality when we open ourselves to the presence of a person in need. No institution can be an adequate substitute for a happy home where people feel they belong. To limit our homes to our own flesh and blood diminishes the power of the gospel to change our lives.

In the past, before there was such a thing as institutional care, Christians practised the virtue of hospitality often to a heroic degree. In Ireland, the example was set by the Celtic monks for whom rules of hospitality were very strict and had the highest priority. The stranger at the gate or the person in need was to be treated as a Christ figure or an angel carrying a message. Hospitality was practical. Before anything else, the guest was to be offered three things: a footbath, a bed of clean hay with a lantern, and a good meal.

Unfortunately today, the word hospitality has mutated into hospital, hostel and hospice. These institutions have commandeered the word and the idea of hospitality, and have changed its meaning to suit themselves. Hospitality today has come to mean professional care or else it has come to mean tourism. ‘Céad míle fáilte’, as an expression of Christian hospitality, was never meant to mean ‘your need is my opportunity to make a living’, no more than it was meant to mean ‘you will be good for my business’. The full meaning of Christian hospitality cannot be expressed from within the context of an institution, a profession, or a business.

There is plenty of scope for a revival of Christian hospitality, one that is not tainted with the self-centredness of tourist facilities or professional care. This hospitality will take place in people’s homes. Christian households will dedicate their surplus energy, space and money to caring for someone in need of a home and a supportive environment. Institutions, while they may offer some type of support and service, are never the ideal solution. No institution can offer the sense of being at home, and of being loved and cared for, that comes from true hospitality in a Christian household.

Christian hospitality has, in truth, been hijacked and then distorted by institutionalism, professionalism and tourism. It is time for those who seriously wish to follow Christ to recognise what has happened. In the story of the man on the road to Jericho, who was attacked by robbers and left dying, it was neither the institutions nor the professionals (the priest and the Levite) who picked him up, but the one who saw in him his neighbour. A revival of Christian hospitality will subvert the institutions and the professions, and will give Christian homes a distinctive and recognisable flavour.

‘An Charraig’ is the name of my home. It will never be an institution. Nor, I hope, will it ever be so subverted by the values of modern society as to make it impossible to live the gospel in it. It is a place where we experiment with combining the demands of the gospel with the signs of the times and the resources of the locality. What we have come up with is a way of life that is rooted in our Celtic tradition and that tries to give that tradition an authentic expression for today. In relating to others, to nature and to God we are looking for ‘right relationship’, a way of living spiritually in our environment that is respectful, compassionate, non-violent, just and ecologically sensitive. Our goal is to work for transformation – transformation of ourselves, our society and our Church. We can only try. We leave God to do the rest.

Dara Molloy, November 1997.

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