Geofeminism in Irish and Diasporic Culture by Christin M. Mulligan

Author:Christin M. Mulligan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030192150
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

That’s how it was.

They came home. The priest confessed the girl [i.e. heard her confession] again and she took communion and she rose up alive and well just as she ever was. (Ní Dhomhnaill 1984, “Réamhrá/Introduction”)

Whereas in “Féar Suaithinseach/Miraculous Grass ,” the implied verbal and written confessions are detailed because they are the transubstantive act necessary to cleanse and reanimate the speaker’s body, repair her psyche, and transfigure her soul. In the poem, she upholds the inextricable link between the sacramental processes of reconciliation and communion in the Catholic tradition, yet she purposefully confesses not to the brothers and priests or even the doctors, but rather to the reader who presumably exists outside that patriarchal triumvirate, as suggested by the movement away from the accusatory direct address “Nuair a bhís do shagart naofa”—“When you were a holy priest” and “a fheara”—“men” to the implied universal “you” of the command “féach”—“look” in the penultimate stanza. Perhaps at its close, the poem itself is broadly addressed to other suffering women. While the dominating male religious figures of the Church repress and possibly exploit 33 the speaker, its non-gendered sacramental processes heal her when they are strategically separated from the authoritarian structures surrounding them. The priest—whatever his own failings and foibles—becomes the symbolic placeholder for Jesus in her confession, as he is during the consecration. His sins and her own fall away, and she is speaking directly to Christ. At the same time, the speaker’s account exposes her vulnerability to the assembled community at her bedside, she is speaking on a spiritual level not only to the priest as Christ but to the Christ embodied in those around her bedside.

Furthermore, her confession shows a conscious recognition of the Christ embodied in her own damaged but ultimately reanimated body. Her deliverance is achieved only through accepting, “owning,” and repenting her previous transgressions, whatever they may be. This parallels Sedgwick’s re-evaluation of the “toxic” functions of shame as being potentially transformative if one embraces them as such.

The poem takes this secular, theoretical approach to shame and sacramentalizes it through the invocation of both religious confession and theological transubstantiation . “Féar Suaithinseach/Miraculous Grass ,” is an act of contrition, for which there is great variety among the particular formulas or translations used from diocese to diocese and parish to parish, much less from country to country or language to language, so much so that neither the Missale Romanum/Roman Missal nor the Enchiridion Indulgentiarum/Handbook of Indulgences contain a standard version, and The Catholic Church does not restrict the term “act of contrition” to any one formula, with the Enchiridion Indulgentiarum mentioning various prayers including De Profundis, the psalm Miserere, and of course, the “Confiteor.” The poem itself has many Psalmic and generally Biblical qualities with its conjuring of a landscape that awaits salvation and its themes of suffering, despair, and ultimately sanctification. Here again the play on “féar”—grass and “fear”—man as in human as opposed to merely male is pivotal. 34

My own Irish Leabhar Aifrinn/Missal and other

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