(The Nationalist, 14 February 2003)
I believe it is true to say that there are places in the lives of most of us that have special significance, though they may mean nothing to another person. It could be a place which has special associations, such as a family gathering, a football field where I scored my first goal, a place where I saw a beautiful sunset, where I first heard a song that came to mean something special.
I remember hearing a man, over fifty years ago, walking along the Dublin Road in Thurles in County Tipperary, singing a song, one line of which was ‘It’s the loveliest night of the year’. He wasn’t drunk; he was simply and soberly happy, perhaps with the beauty of a long summer evening, and his joy spilled over into song. I hope the memory of that evening stayed with him for as long as it has with me.
When I was based in New Zealand, I went on holidays one time to the South Island, to Queenstown, a small town on the shores of Lake Te Anau, at the foot of a mountain range appropriately called the Remarkables. It is probably the most beautiful place I have ever seen, and I have seen many beautiful places in countries where I worked or visited. (Some readers may have seen a little of it – all too little – on a recent RTÉ travel programme called No Frontiers.) I took a cable car from just outside the town, at one end of the lake, and went part-way up the mountain. There was a viewing point with an outlook over the full length of the lake, and the snow-capped mountain range running parallel to it on one side. The beauty of it was breath-taking, the memory lasting, the impact unforgettable.
It often struck me since then that, if a person asked for an argument for the existence of God, you could do a lot worse than leave aside reasoning and intellectual processes, and simply bring them to that viewing point. There would be one condition attached: they would be asked to maintain silence for fifteen minutes.
I imagine that most of us have such sacred spots, precious memories, unique occasions which remain with us for a lifetime. They are not always happy ones. Sometimes, such as seeing a person die, they are sad. But they say something to us, and the less we say in reply, the better. It may be that those are sacred spots where, in some inarticulate way, we get a hint of the divine.