THE TOLL of Christ Church Cathedral’s bell is as familiar as the seagull’s cry over Dublin’s inner city, where the Liffey still laughs at all our shenanigans. In this past sunny June, gulls shrieked around the Pride flags flying on government buildings and on the illustrious Trinity College Dublin. My first visit to this Viking city was in 1970, taking that risky train line frequently bombed by the IRA. An East Belfast Protestant from Ballymacarrett, I was a little evangelical fanatic attending Grosvenor High School, where the headmaster ensured his students learnt some Irish history and even read “The Irish Times”. Despite the anti-Republic rhetoric of the Orange world that we inhabited, I was nosey enough to find out for myself what all these stories of the “Free State” were about. Anxious to see if the fake news of Ulster’s economic vitality over her impoverished southern cousins was real, I purchased a little camera. Although many of the finer public buildings were covered in centuries of soot and the city’s tenements hid the struggle of large families seeking bread and work wherever they could, I found in 1970 Dublin, a fusion of Art, History and English, layered on a beautifully framed but cracked canvas waiting to be restored. As I photographed Christ Church Cathedral, Trinity College and the majestic old parliament building on College Green, a seed was sown. Like a first love that haunts the soul and memory, Dublin and Ireland continue to enchant and surprise, even during what is now my fifth time of living here. I have lived and worked in many other cities in my 72 years, including London, New York and Los Angeles, and have seen the best and worst of human misery through the 1980s and 1990s, working with the AIDS epidemic from California to Kampala. Yet Dublin and its people (including many new arrivals) continue to enchant me as I keep discovering the city as if for the first time. After 45 years of living abroad, I find it to be a refreshingly hospitable metropolis, big enough to stretch the imagination and small enough to talk to anyone in a pub or on the street. I turned up for the annual Pride Service in June a little early and decided to walk the labyrinth in the forecourt of Christ Church Cathedral. Memories returned. Following a pattern based on Chartres Cathedral, the walk is designed to remove us from this earth’s reality to the heavenly realm, imagined in the central rose to which we journey. Sometimes as we walk in meditation, meeting others on their own path, who travel for a time alongside us before turning away to continue their journey without us. The beginning of the walk invites us to enter a gap on the edge of the circle and can fool us into believing the route will be direct and logical to the central core. It isn’t. As when discerning the fake news from my Orange world, discovering for myself what was real and what was fiction, figuring out this labyrinth demanded something from me. I had 20 minutes before the service began. Shadows of my former selfI spiralled my way around the granite paths carved out with faint shadows of myself and my former self. I have been here before, but now, changed and different, I was asking myself simply what has remained and what is lost or gained. As a Pride flag fluttered from a nearby railing, a dominant thought was, “Jesus, we have come a long way from the days when the church was throwing us out for being in committed loving relationships!” A seven-year-old boy joined me on my path and I was, at first, upset because he was running. Judgement – he’s doing it wrong! He wanted to get to the centre as fast as possible. I could see an earlier version of myself in his unaware enthusiasm and I tried to ignore my reaction. He was amazing in that he intuitively knew the steps and the direction, but he was missing something, as we all invariably do. In addition to the little boy, others kept walking across the granite design without looking below or realising it was a prayer map. As I attempted to be holy, an American couple asked me to take a photo of them in front of the cathedral. Initially I was annoyed that they interrupted my walk with Jesus, but – “catching myself on” – these fellow pilgrims were unwelcome messengers that this metaphorical journey is above all, simply LIFE. What role do interruptions play in our quest for the holy and eternal? I had just visited the National Gallery of Ireland exhibition on William Blake and captured one of his drawings where he showed an image of a man in hell and an angel in heaven, the text simply saying, “Everything is an attempt to be human”. The exhibition helped to explain the spiritual forces shaping 18th and 19th century England and Ireland. It was all about shame and guilt, heaven and hell, monsters and angels and reminded us of how the church weaponised GRACE. That pesky bell that rings to tell us the service will start in five minutes begins to toll. DONG! DONG! DONG! I found myself moving away from the central rose where I really hoped for a spark of enlightenment; the path took me in the opposite direction, right back to where I started 15 minutes before! “Christ!!” Was I going to have time to find what I was seeking? Here I was right back to where I began! There is a sneaky right turn in the labyrinth that slides by the opening path and takes you round one complete circumference on the edge of the pattern. It was unexpected. It signaled I was right back where I started but in a different space, a different phase of life, a different experience of Dublin and Ireland – and about to enter the cathedral where my love...
