CC Podcast S01E04: The Religion You Were Raised In
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Lora O'Brien: [00:00:00] So you left the church a long time ago. You can give anyone who asks a clear account of why, and you've had years to get the wording of it right and to get it right in your own head. But there's still something of it in a drawer in your house keepsake, something that reminds you of that time in your life.
Now, whether that's a set of rosary beads or a confirmation medal or a Bible with somebody's name written inside the cover, you've cleared that room out since you left, but that token of that time is still in there. Now, here's the part that you don't usually say out loud, so I'm gonna say it for you.
You've been examining that one for years, and you still can't put your finger on why a thing you don't believe in still has that kind of a hold on you. You feel that grip every time you look at that thing or see a symbol of it out in the world I'm Lora O'Brien, and I'm a native Irish educator and a cultural [00:01:00] steward.
I was raised Catholic, so I know of what I speak, and I hold a master's degree in Irish history. I work right here within the Irish folk record, which is the account of what ordinary people actually did in their own kitchens, their own bedrooms, their own fields, their own pubs, and social situations, rather than what the people above them said that they were doing, whether that was the Protestant ascendancy, the upper class in Ireland at the time, or the Catholic Church, who also colonized this island.
Now, look, plenty of you listening weren't raised in Ireland, and plenty of you have never been here and may never set foot on Irish soil. Although I hope for your sake that that's in your future 'cause it's beautiful here. The material I'm bringing you is Irish because Irish is what's mine to work with.
It's where I'm coming from. But what I'm asking you to do with it needs nothing Irish from you at all specifically, unless you happen to have been born here as [00:02:00] well. If you were raised Catholic in Boston or in Bavaria or raised Protestant anywhere at all, you were handed the same split, and you've made the same decision about it, or you probably wouldn't be listening to this podcast.
So I'm gonna give you three things and then what they add up to. First one is a word. The Irish for a charm is
ortha, O-R-T-H-A. Now, Steefan O'Colla puts out that ortha came into Irish straight from the Latin oratio, and oratio means a prayer. The word for the working, the spell, if you like, came out of the word for the prayer. Now, O'Colla also shows where the charms ended up when Irish folklore was organized as a discipline, which is under popular belief and practice in the same list as the old prayers that were recorded The second thing is a charm.
Barbara NĂ Fhloinn has collected the Irish charms for stopping blood, and this one was written down in Baile Dearg in [00:03:00] County Mayo. It's in Irish
And it opens, "I laonna ainm an fhir a scuallt taobh mo chlann a thuire." Now, here is what the academic translates it as " Elena was the name of the man who split the side of my savior. Three things came out, blood, wine, and pure water. Oh, Holy Spirit, this blood is coming too fast. Holy Woman Brigid and Holy Barbara and the 12 apostles stopping this blood in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."
So listen to who gets called on in that translation. Obviously, I didn't give the full charm in Irish. I just gave you the opening lines. But the full charm is translated there in English by Barbara Ni Chluain So who gets called on in it is the Holy Spirit, then Brigid, then Barbara, then the 12 apostles, and then the Father and the Son at the [00:04:00] end of it.
Every power named in that charm is a Christian power, and there's no older god anywhere in it
The third thing I want you to think about is a bishop. In 1771, the Catholic Bishop of Ferns, Nicholas Sweetman, wrote regulations for his diocese, and Andrew Sneddon gives us the clause. No priest of his was to read exorcisms or gospels over people without written permission from the bishop In the bishop's own words, and remember this is in 1771 in Ferns in County Wexford in Ireland.
But in the bishop's own words, no priest of his was to act the fairy doctor in any shape. So that means that these things were being done within the vernacular, within the common experience of the people, and the priests were doing them. The priests were doing the magic. So a bishop puts that in writing when his own priests are out [00:05:00] doing it
Andrew Sneddon, who I mentioned, ~um,~ he is one of our preeminent academics who works with Irish witchcraft specifically, and he has the bishop before him working the same ground from the other side. In the early 1760s, Bishop Maget was telling anybody who thought they'd been harmed by witches or by fairies to have recourse to the exorcisms, prayers, and sacrifices of the church and not to some other magical rites.
That's a bishop offering the church's own version of the same service that the fairy doctor or before him, the banfasa, was actually doing in the community. So we're gonna put the three of these things together. The word for the charm came out of the word for the prayer. The charm then calls on the Holy Spirit and the saints and nobody else, and the bishop had to order his own priests to stop working the traditional witchcraft [00:06:00] cures Now, that's one practice with the church standing in the middle of it because they put themselves there basically
But what you were handed was a clean split, the church on one side and everything else on the other, with a choice to be made between the two of them. That's how most of us grew up within the dominant patriarchal religions. It was either/or. So when you went, you took the whole shelf down at once because a clean split is what you'd been told the choice was.
Now, that split was somebody's work, and you can watch it being built in those two bishops. Magit sends people to the church with their trouble. Sweetman orders his own priests out of the other business altogether. This is two diocese, 10 years apart, both putting a line down the middle of a thing that hadn't had a line there at all within the Irish tradition So for you, the cost landed somewhere that you weren't even watching.
The doctrine went, [00:07:00] and the other things went out with it. You lost the words you had for a graveside and the thing that your mother said at the door when you were heading out. When you gave up religion, you lost whatever you used to say to yourself at 2:00 in the morning with the weight sitting on your chest and no name for it.
You lost your faith, you lost your spirituality because you had to give up the church and the organization and the patriarchy and the colonization that stood with it Now today you might notice it at a funeral. Everybody around you has something to say at the graveside, and you have nothing. So you stand there with your hands crossed and you say the bit that you remember in your own head maybe.
Then you feel like a hypocrite for even saying it, and that's worse than having nothing. You might notice it when the bad news arrives on a Tuesday afternoon, and the first words into your mouth are the ones that you'd have sworn you'd forgotten, the ones from your childhood that used to give you comfort or were supposed to, [00:08:00] but never really did.
Now, you may have told yourself that you've dealt with all this years ago, but it keeps coming back because you never really took it apart. You just left. You just did that clean split. And when it does come back, it comes as a reflex rather than as a belief. "Oh, that's just how I was raised." And it comes back as something, again, that's supposed to give you comfort, but never really did, and certainly doesn't now 'cause you don't have the belief in it.
Might be a word you catch yourself saying or something your hands do before you've even consciously decided to do anything
And maybe you didn't know that that gap needed minding until you went reaching for words that weren't there anymore, a belief that never sustained you. Now, I've done the wholesale version myself. All of this work came out of my own journals, my own beliefs, my own experiences, my own life before it ever came near a microphone, and I'm not exempt from a line of it, not from one [00:09:00] little bit of it ~But the charm,~ but that charm that names the Holy Spirit and Brigid and Barbara and the 12 apostles together and puts all of them to work in the same moment, there's no choosing in it anywhere.
Your job is harder than that because you're the one who has to decide what stays. The doctrine is the part with a claim in it. It tells you what's true, who's in charge, who's in and who's out, and what you owe them on the back of that, what your place is in all of this. It's the part that did you the damage, and it's the part that you left behind and you don't want to go back to But the practice is the part with a job in it.
It's a form of words for a thing that has no words, whether that's by a grave or sitting with somebody who's sick in the night, or a door you're going out of at 7:00 in the morning with a knot in your stomach And there's no claim in that part at all. [00:10:00] We still need the words, we still need the practice, we still need the belief and the spiritual support, and it's okay to need that because we're humans But what you used to have or thought you had went in the bin along with all the rest
~So this practice,~ so this podcast, this project, the Cailleach community is designed to give you a practice, to give you back something that you've been cut off from because you had to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We're gonna do a small practice here. It takes a page, a pen, and just one sitting down at a table on your own.
You don't have to answer to anyone
So have a little think as you sit there with your page and your pen, and write out by hand one thing that was said over you as a child by the church that you were raised in It might be a grace before dinner, a prayer that you were made to learn by heart, a line a priest or a minister said at a funeral, or anything [00:11:00] that any adult said to you with God's name in it.
Take the first one that comes to you rather than the most important one or what you think should be the most important one, 'cause the first thing you think of is the one that's still alive in you. Now write it out
And then read it back once slowly in your own voice. Say it the way it was said to you rather than the way you'd say it now
And then underline the one part of it that you'd actually like to keep. Might be a whole line, it might be two words, and there might be nothing. But if it's nothing, write the word nothing at the bottom of the page and underline that
Now copy the underlined part onto a smaller piece of paper or rip a bit off your big piece of paper or out of your journal, that's okay, but just make it small enough to go in a pocket. And get rid of the first page, burn it, bin it, rip it up, whatever suits the house that you live in and where you are.
And don't read it again on the way out. You're done with [00:12:00] it But put that small piece of paper, the bit with, ~you know,~ what you want to keep, and if that's nothing, that's okay because that's a choice. That's a choice that you are free to make
And if you feel that it leaves a gap Don't worry, we'll find other stuff to fill that gap because humans need spirituality. Humans need faith. Humans need belief. Humans need community. Humans need support. And as women and midlife women, we need this so, so badly. And that's why I'm here doing this
But put that small piece of paper with that word, those two words, that line, that sentence Fold it up and put it into a coat pocket, into a purse or a wallet, somewhere that it travels around with you, into your phone case, and somewhere that you'll come across it without necessarily going looking for it.
Now, if writing by hand is difficult for you, you can say [00:13:00] the whole line out loud instead and write down only the few words that you're keeping
One small thing about the charm, and it's about the charm rather than about you. But that charm belongs to the people who kept it. It was kept in Irish in a named townland, and it was handed on from one person to the next under stated conditions. That academic who was translating it, Barbara NĂ Fhloinn, records the rule on one of them, where the cure passes from one person to another, and a man has to leave it with a woman when he's dying, while a woman has to leave it with a man.
Now, hearing a charm read out on a podcast is not the same thing as being given one. So take that charm as evidence of what was going on in the houses and leave it where it is. We don't need that. But this week, take one line off the church that you were raised in And again, if there's nothing from those childhood practices that gives you any comfort or any sustenance anymore, then mark that really clearly.[00:14:00]
Take nothing and be happy with that And just sort that into its own thing
Carry on with your life. So if you want something to steady yourself with while you do it, the grounding audio and the PDF that goes with it are free as ever at cailleach.community/past, that's P-A-S-T. And
it's what I give women who come to me with that waking anxiety and that inherited heaviness. It's the start of sustenance. It's the start of a new practice. It's the start of sustainability and community and self-focus, and it's free, and it's yours, and I'll see you in the next episode. Slán.
