July 12, 2026
“No Lazy Bones nor Lazy Beds” photo by LKV Walsh
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Sometimes what Ireland has to teach me about what God wants for the world comes from the place, and sometimes it comes from her people. This week, it was both. I was lucky enough to spend time with two wise scholars of Irish ways, and in our conversations about history, I had the opportunity to tell them about An Gorta Mór – The Great Hunger. This is actually not true; they knew all about The Great Hunger. They were just not familiar with the terminology, which is the way historians increasingly are talking about what has traditionally been called, “The Great Famine.” But it wasn’t a famine at all, you see, because there was plenty of food. It just was not available for the Irish to eat. The statistics of what occurred here between 1845 and 1852 are well known and readily available. What deserves more attention, though, is the ways we are still learning to be honest about the whole thing.
A great example is in the photo above. The ridges visible on the hillside in this image are often called, awfully enough, “Lazy Beds.” They are the ridges of potato crops that were never harvested during The Great Hunger or after because the farmers well knew that all they would find is black slime. These imprints of suffering cover the landscape of West and South Ireland. They are prolific but not widely recognized, and they are damningly labeled even when they are. Yet these are not the evidence of sloth or moral decay; they are the evidence of colonization and deprivation. And they have much to teach us once we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
These potato ridges and their misnomer remind us that those in power have almost always misused it. They teach us that religious authorities have almost always been complicit in the subjugation of a culture or country’s supposed misfits. They ensure we cannot ignore the costs of turning a blind eye to what is happening (or what has happened). And they ask us to not only hear the truth by listening to multiple versions of the story, but they also ask us to speak…to say aloud the suffering we witness so that invisibility is impossible. That is the way to conversion. That is the way to being healed.
My fellow lovers of Irish wisdom this week are in their eighth decade of life, and they come from a place and a time that is most often associated with silence about all that has come before if the story would be one of hurt. So in an effort to be respectful, I tried to change the subject after a short while by commenting on how we were, perhaps, not being very cheerful for folks wh0 do not see each other often enough. Both objected to our ending the conversation. “The truth,” they said almost in unison, “must be told. It is the only way to heal.” Isaiah, Jesus, and the Irish teach us that to see and to hear is to understand in the heart. And once we do, we must be willing to SAY. There was no famine; the Irish were starved on purpose. God did not send a plague to punish shiftless people; those in authority allowed the devastation to continue because it suited their desires. But in every age and everywhere, those who are hated by authority and power are NOT the ones hated by God. May those who have eyes to see and ears to hear spread the word far and wide. Buíochas le Dia – Thanks be to God.
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