Peter CostelloAtlantic Tabor: The Pilgrims of Croagh Patrick, text by Patrick Claffey, photographs
by Tomasz Bereska and Tomasz Szustek
(Liffey Press, €19.95)
This is a truly remarkable book about one of Ireland’s most popular pilgrimages. It had its origins in the enterprise of two young Polish photojournalists, Tomasz Bereska and Tomasz Szustek, who are settled and working in Ireland. These are photographers whose work, I suspect, will become more familiar to us all as time goes on.
Fr Patrick Claffey, who had published a poem in Poetry Ireland about his reactions on a return to Croagh Patrick after a long period abroad as a missionary, was approached to provide a short text. But inspired by the power of the photographs, he was prompted to dig deeper into not only the history and traditions of Croagh Patrick, but into the whole idea of pilgrimage as it finds expression in other cultures and religious traditions.
One point he mentions could have been more emphasised: the Reek seems a remote place today, but in prehistory, going back to the late Neolithic, it stood at the heart of one of the great cultural routes of ancient Europe, the Atlantic Western seaboard from Africa to Norway.
The photographs are both in colour and monochrome. The monochrome images are of the pilgrimage itself, the approach, the climb, the difficulties, the final achievement of the summit and the ceremonies there. The colour images are more powerful. They are simply of the pilgrims, alone, in couples, or with animal companions, photographed in repose but with a vivid sense of inner resolve. Here are real faces in ways one does not often see. These are the people for whom climbing the Reek is an intensely moving experience.
It is the inner nature of that experience that Fr Claffey attempts to understand in all its complexity in his text. For much of his career he worked in Africa. There in a village in Gabon he was told of a local hero, a man who had ridden from West Africa all the way to Mecca in the very early 1900s – an extraordinary achievement. His feat is still recalled with awe by the villagers of today. These days millions of Muslims fly into the Hejaz with ease. But Croagh Patrick is different: as the author says in some lines from the poem he wrote:
This is altogether
ruder stuff and
not for tourists.
Here there are:
No miracles
on this rain-swept
wind blasted mountain,
his Atlantic Tabor.
The idea of Mount Tabor is indeed the governing images of the whole book. In Matthew 17:1-2 the writer says Jesus took his disciples “up into a high mountain apart. And he was transfigured before them”. Then “there appeared to them Moses and Elias”.
The disciples asked him would they not make tents for the three prophets; but were told by Jesus not to speak to others of what they had seen. The real nature of what they had experiences was not to be on the mountain, but later in life. This episode crystallises the nature of a mystical religious encounter.
The early Christians (thanks to a suggestion by Origen) identified this high mountain with Mount Tabor – which, by the way bears, a remarkable likeness to Croagh Patrick, and Catholics, Greeks, and Oriental Chrstians still do.
But since the 19th Century scholars, as is the way of scholars, have doubted if Mount Tabor was the scene of the Transfiguration.
Yet the traditions remains, and it is traditions and beliefs and their effect on people that Fr Claffey is exploring. Since leaving Africa – he now works in a Dublin parish and teaches in Trinity College, Dublin – he has developed his interests in the religions of Asia and their insights into our common spirituality.
Drawing on a wide range of reading across many cultures, Patrick Claffey presents a deeply interesting picture of the interiorisation of the experience of Pilgrimage and what it means to those who under take one. He develops his theme with enthusiasm, and every reader will I think be encouraged to explore further. Atlantic Tabor is a richly rewarding book, both visually and intellectually, from which readers will derive not only information, but spiritual insight.
Moving well beyond Croagh Patrick, it describes aspects of the common spiritual heritage of humanity which are very illuminating, connecting as they do what it so often seen as a Catholic rite with the earliest religious impulses of man.
Transfigurations
But for some other imaginations there are (as I think) other kinds of pilgrimages and pilgrims, other kinds of transfiguration.
The author alludes to Thoreau in one place, Thoreau who claimed to have “travelled much in Concord” – his native place. We do not have to climb a mountain (desirable as that may be), we can simply walk to the end of the garden (as Kierkegaard did). As Eliot wrote in Little Gidding: “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”
An early Irish poet put it slightly differently, in words translated here by Frank O’Connor:
To go to Rome,
Is little profit, endless pain
The Master that you seek in Rome
You’ll find at home, or seek in vain.