To Walk with Saints and Scholars

04/05/26

“Easter at Cill Maoilchéadair” Photo by LKV Walsh

And just like that, we have walked our way back to Easter – the season as well as the day.

And once again, like every year, we are left to wonder about the meaning of lives that include one joy after another and then also one grief after another.

The cycle is a circle and, it seems, intentionally so.

If I’m honest, I keep waiting for each grief to be the last, and of course, it never is. I also keep waiting for each resurrection to be the last, and it never is either. I’m not sure why I haven’t appreciated before that healing from the last devastation is always followed by another devastation from which to heal. Yet it’s oddly beautiful because resurrection looks more and more like simply taking what I learned last time into next time so that I at least don’t have to learn that again. Poor old Michael Finnegan…

So I light three candles in the ruins of an 12th century oratory, and I say my Easter prayers. The church at Cill Maoilchéadair was built at the end of an ancient pilgrim’s route associated with St. Brendan and has welcomed seekers for a thousand years. In its day, it was the “St. James Cathedral at the end of the Camino de Santiago” for those walking to God across Ireland; it was resplendent because it was the place of the soul’s resurrection. And as each pilgrim stepped out of the building and back onto the stone path overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, there was, at the end of it all, only more pilgrimage.

I pray it may ever be so. Amen.

“Leaving Cill Maoilchéadair” Photo by LKV Walsh