The lady lived a few streets up from the town centre. Terraces of plain, neat houses lined either side. Two up, two down, with a scullery at the back and the toilet in the yard, the lady’s house was like that of countless others. It was unlike many of them in being completely spotless, even the fireplace shone. Her daily routine changed little; she rose at six each morning, cleaned out the fire and set the one for that day (it would not be lit until later, coal was too expensive). Once the fire was set, she would set about giving the house its daily clean with brush, mop and dustpan.

Breakfast followed the cleaning. Apart from mealtimes, the rest of the day would be spent reading her Bible saying her prayers and thinking. Once a week she went down the street for her shopping, otherwise she saw no-one. She had no television, no radio, saw no newspapers, and, apart from her Bible, read no books.

The lady came to mind driving through a valley on the way south towards Nelson this afternoon. Picking up her hire car last Friday at Vancouver Airport, we had turned the radio on only twice, to listen to CBC news bulletins. At three this afternoon, I turned on the radio to find nothing but static on the CBC AM frequencies, switching bands I discovered the radio had something called ‘XM’. Whatever XM stood for, it meant that there were dozens of satellite radio stations available. Clicking through, I found Fox News, the CNN, and then the BBC.

I wish I hadn’t. The news report on the World Service seemed little different from a week previously, the world had not become a better place.

I often wondered in the past what it was like to live in very rural parts of Canada, did it not feel isolated? Was there not a sense of being cut off from the world?

This afternoon it seemed, that in a world where one could do little to change things, hearing no news and living one’s own life might not be such bad choice. Whether it’s in a back street of an Ulster mill town or deep in a Canadian valley, your own world might be a safe world.

My favourite broadcaster is an American.

For fifteen years or more, I have listened to him. He does monologues, stories about a fictional small town in a rural part of the state of Minnesota in the United States.

Back in the early 1990s, I would have bought cassette tapes of these talks that I would have played on the car radio. There would be double cassette packs on sale in a bookshop in Belfast – two ninety minute tapes, each containing six fifteen minute talks. I listened to some of those tapes so many times I could almost have joined in some of the lines

I still listen to those monologues, except that now I get them for free. Every week the broadcaster, Garrison Keillor presents his programme The Prairie Home Companion on national public radio in the United States on a Saturday evening and by Monday the programme is on the internet and I can sit here looking out at the Dublin mountains and try to imagine life on the vast American prairies.

His talks begin with the same sentence each week, “It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon” and he signs off with the same words each week, “Well, that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above average”.

It’s fascinating that I can now get for free what I used to have to pay for!

Anyway, I wondered why Lake Wobegon is so attractive, why do fictional stories about everyday life in a very small and very ordinary American town still have a fascination about them?

I think it’s about there being a community, about it being a place where everyone has a place and where everyone is recognized. I love living in Dublin, but there’s not much sense of community.

When I lived in the North, I would buy the local paper for whatever town I lived in: the Newtownards Chronicle, the Down Recorder, the Larne Times. We don’t have a local paper where I live; there are a few free papers, but they are not like having a proper weekly paper that you would buy every Wednesday or Thursday. There is no record of all the events in the life of community: the smiling faces of all the children starting school each September, the serious young people photographed with the bishop after their confirmation service; the obituaries of the local characters.

Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon is probably like many towns across the length and breadth of Ireland, but it’s not like Dublin. The city is fine; it’s just not a place where you get the atmosphere of a small town community.

I’m always fascinated to read the Gospel story of Jesus calling his followers, he goes to a quiet, conservative, rural community; the big city is the place where he meets opposition. Maybe that’s the attraction of places like Lake Wobegon, it’s the sort of place where Jesus might have found friends.

The traditional school leaving event held by many groups of Irish school leavers takes many forms - his was a dinner and disco at a local racecourse.

At 11 o’clock, as pre-arranged, we collected him. He doesn’t like music and he doesn’t drink, which meant there wasn’t much interest left in the evening.

“How was the dinner?”

“Poor.”

“It was €95 a ticket - how could it have been poor?”

“That was to cover the cost of the cocktail reception and the dance as well. The dinner was salad, then roast chicken, then chocolate cake.”

“What did you get to drink?”

“I asked for something non-alcoholic and the man went off to look for something. I got orange juice.”

I pondered his situation. I do like pop music and I do drink, but I think I would have been as lost as he.

The evening after I finished my A levels in 1979, I went with friends to the King William Inn at Catcott in Somerset where we drank real ale, played skittles and had a huge Ploughman’s Lunch for our supper. We used regularly to go to the King William, I never remember anyone being drunk. It was a place for conversation and laughter and friendship - an English pub at its best.

There is a very dysfunctional relationship with alcohol here (and serious ensuing problems in our health system).

There seems to be hardly an event where it is not served. A colleague attended a reception at a hospital recently where wine was served in the mid-afternoon, to staff who were about to go back on duty or to drive home. It is hardly surprising, then if younger people take the cue that the more alcohol there is, the better the occasion must be.

If you are a quiet seventeen year old, who, through the law and through inclination, does not drink, you are left on the outside.

“What societies are you going to join when you go to college?”

He smiled. “The gun club”.

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes”.

Lines from Chapter 6 of Persuasion by Jane Austen were read aloud,

I hate sending the children to the Great House, though their grandmamma is always wanting to see them, for she humours and indulges them to such a degree, and gives them so much trash and sweet things, that they are sure to come back sick and cross for the rest of the day.

“Ah”, I said, “It was hardly an American import, then. The United States was a very young country in those days”.

Then Iago’s words from Othello came to mind, “Who steals my purse steals trash.” Having a battered wallet that is frequently empty except for used railway tickets and crumpled business cards, Iago’s regard of his purse as trash always had an attractiveness about it.

Trash has been around for a long time. A search for it amongst words coined by Shakespeare didn’t suggest he had made it up, but amongst the words he did coin there appears the word ‘zany’ - something else that has an American feel about it, but like trash has crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic

(In the years living in the North, there were many words that seemed local dialect and sentences that had a peculiar construction. Closer examination showed them to be not local adaptations, but the persistence of Elizabethan English into the late 20th Century).

The words from Ecclesiastes in the Bible that there is “nothing new under the sun” find a resonance in looking at language, but they also find resonance in politics.

The United States is not the first country to invade Afghanistan and Iraq; it is not the first country to use sanctions in defence of business interests; it is not the first to allow a country to be run for the profit of big business. The British invaded Afghanistan in 1878 and Iraq in 1919; the British employed gunboat diplomacy frequently from the time of the Don Pacifico affair in 1850 onwards; the British allowed the East India Company to rule India until 1858.

It is not just trash and zaniness that have travelled west before returning east.

I bought a Daily Telegraph from a paper seller standing at the entrance to the Carlisle Pier and we walked the three hundred yards to Dun Laoghaire station. In retrospect, going to the station was a daft thing to do, we could have walked the distance to the seasonal youth hostel in half the time we stood waiting for the train.

The youth hostel was in a primary school closed for the summer. The metal bunks were in the classrooms. We knocked on the door of the warden’s office; she appeared in her night dress, unaccustomed to arrivals at 8.00 in the morning.

We were allocated bunks and went to rest, but, of course, the place was a hive of activity by that time. I attempted to read the newspaper, but there was the urge to be out and about.

There was another lengthy wait at the station for a train into the city; the suburban rail service in those days was provided by elderly locomotives pulling carriages which were empty except for rows of plastic seats down each side. There were few enough jobs for people to be going to, anyway.

We rolled northwards into the city centre and got off at Pearse station where we were told that we could by fifteen day passes for train and bus travel throughout the country. The request seemed an unfamiliar one and we were sent to an office at one end of the platform. The man behind the glass glared at us suspiciously.

We explained what we wanted, twice. He obviously doubted our ability to pay. “Those passes are very expensive”.

We explained that we knew how much they were, we had read the tourist board information.

“They are £52 - each. Can you afford that?”

We took unfamiliar banknotes from our wallets and, almost with an air of disgust, he stamped the passes.

Exhaustion crept up as the day progressed and we caught a train back to Dun Laoghaire.

A fine afternoon with bright sunshine and the gentlest of breezes. Walking to the West Pier and finding a deserted spot on the seaward side, we stretched out in the sun. The granite flagstones were warm and the sunlight covered like a cosy blanket.

First impressions last and no matter how cold and depressing this June evening is, Ireland will forever be a place of warmth and embrace.

On Green Dolphin Street by Sebastian Faulks, Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson and Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, accompanied byThe Complete Novels of Flann O’Brien. It is O’Brien who will get most attention, not because of literary merit, but because he seems to anticipate the absurdity of much of contemporary life

O’Brien, also known as Myles na gCopaleen, was the pseudonym of Brian O’Nolan, a Dubliner who died in 1966 and who is remembered by some as a serious and even dour character. O’Brien’s description of an encounter with Sergeant Pluck in The Third Policeman has within it a sense of the frustration that arises when dealing with Irish bureaucracy. There is a well-honed skill of ignoring questions, or answering questions that were never asked in the first place (which gives an excuse to post a passage from Chapter 4 of The Third Policeman that was posted here last year)

Is it about a bicycle?” he asked.

His expression when I encountered it was unexpectedly reassuring. His face was gross and far from beautiful but he had modified and assembled his various unpleasant features in some skilful way so that they expressed to me good nature, politeness and infinite patience. In the front of his peaked official cap was an important-looking badge and over it in golden letters was the word SERGEANT. It was Sergeant Pluck himself.

“No,” I answered, stretching forth my hand to lean with it against the counter. The Sergeant looked at me incredulously.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Certain.”

“Not about a motor-cycle?”

“No.”

“One with overhead valves and a dynamo for light? Or with racing handle-bars?”

“No.”

“In that circumstantial eventuality there can be no question of a motor-bicycle,” he said. He looked surprised and puzzled and leaned sideways on the counter on the prop of his left elbow, putting the knuckles of his right hand between his yellow teeth and raising three enormous wrinkles of perplexity on his forehead. I decided now that he was a simple man and that I would have no difficulty in dealing with him exactly as I desired and finding out from him what had happened to the black box. I did not understand clearly the reason for his questions about bicycles but I made up my mind to answer everything carefully, to bide my time and to be cunning in all my dealings with him. He moved away abstractedly, came back and handed me a bundle of differently-coloured papers which looked like application forms for bull-licences and dog-licences and the like.

“It would be no harm if you filled up these forms,” he said. “Tell me,” he continued, “would it be true that you are an itinerant dentist and that you came on a tricycle?”

“It would not,” I replied.

“On a patent tandem?”

“No.”

“Dentists are an unpredictable coterie of people,” he said. “Do you tell me it was a velocipede or a penny-farthing?”

“I do not,” I said evenly. He gave me a long searching look as if to see whether I was serious in what I was saying, again wrinkling up his brow.

“Then maybe you are no dentist at all,” he said, “but only a man after a dog licence or papers for a bull?”

“I did not say I was a dentist,” I said sharply, “and I did not say anything about a bull.”

The Sergeant looked at me incredulously.

Dr Samuel’s hospital had been paid for by a missionary society. It was in a village some twenty miles from the next settlement, the journey by road could take up to four hours; there were moments on the journey when it seemed that it would have been easier to get out of the jeep and walk. The hospital had one hundred beds, which meant that at any one time there could be two hundred patients, for having a bed to oneself would have been a rare privilege. The hospital could not feed so many patients, they depended on members of their family or friends to bring them food each day.

Doctor Samuel had two colleagues, a German doctor funded by a German aid agency, and his own younger brother, who had agreed to help out for the time being. Getting doctors to stay was difficult, the village was remote and the pay was poor. There had been frequent times when he had been the only doctor. Surgery had been difficult at such times, trying to act as surgeon and anaesthetist simultaneously.

Our visit to Doctor Samuel’s hospital coincided with the visit of a German businessman who had been equipping the hospital from his own pocket. The owner of a medical supplies company, he had been ploughing his money back into keeping this remote, flickering candle of hope supplied with equipment. New equipment meant bringing it himself; the only way he could beat the incompetence and corruption of those who would otherwise might have benefited from his generosity.

Doctor Samuel would sit down at the end of his rounds and begin the paperwork for he was also the hospital administrator. A non-stipendiary priest, Doctor Samuel devoted Sunday morning to church duties. If there were no emergencies, Doctor Samuel’s time off was Sunday afternoon before the rapid sunset at 6 pm and his evening rounds.

Doctor Samuel drove us to a lakeshore in his old battered jeep, he heard that going for a drive was what we did on Sunday afternoons. He stood looking out across the lake.

“Do you ever have a holiday?” I asked.

He smiled. “A holiday? How could I? Who would there be to do my work? Who would run the hospital?”

It was a stupid question. All I had done was cause embarrassment.

There was a touch of spiritual pride as I was driving to a meeting this morning, I had worked out that this was the 21st working day in a row, then thoughts of Doctor Samuel came to mind.

Being altogether less composed and less confident, I am astonished at times at what he is able to achieve - “brassneck”, he would say.

Most times, I am still the quiet little kid who left High Ham Church of England Primary School in July 1972. Stepping up a weight or more at times, I very quickly lose my nerve, and revert to being the country kid.

Not understanding how one of the Irish law courts would conduct its affairs, I asked a barrister friend what would happen. The same evening he was able to phone me with an answer to all my queries and more besides; he had phoned a colleague who was able to provide immediate answers.

Putting the phone down at the end of the conversation, I wondered what would happen if I remained the country kid all the time. I wondered what would happen if I didn’t have people I could phone or contacts I could write to, because that’s the way it is for most people.

Anyone who has had to deal with Irish Government departments will know how difficult it is to even get an acknowledgment that they have received a letter. Four months to the day since writing to the Revenue Commissioners about money they owe, the letter remains unacknowledged. It is not a problem, a friend pointed me to an accountant who delights in relieving the Commissioners of money that is not theirs.

Getting anything done requires cultivating a network of “friends”; people who know someone, people who know the right number; people who know the name of the person who sent the unsigned letter; people who know who can answer the questions. If all else fails, being on first name terms with the local TDs is helpful - I know Mary and Sean and Eamon, three of the five in the constituency.

But what about people who haven’t the confidence to punch above their weight? What about people who have no-one to phone? What about the people with no networks?

Most of us are still like eleven year old kids from a country primary school, it’s not only that we don’t know people, it’s that we wouldn’t have the confidence to contact them if we did. Punching above your weight is fine, but you need to know how to punch and where to punch and to be able to punch with strength. Ireland in 2008 can sometimes feel like being a flyweight boxer standing blindfolded and punching out at opponents who feint away into thin air.

I remember in my days as a theological student going to take a service at a country church one Sunday afternoon. The service was at three in the afternoon, it was the weekly worship for a little community of people who seemed from a bygone age. I arrived at the church at 2.30 and was greeted by a man sitting in the porch rocking backwards and forwards. He gave me an odd look and said, “They are in there”.

“Who’s in there?” I asked.

“They are”, he said

Concluding it probably wasn’t going to be a very fruitful line of inquiry, I quietly opened the door and stepped inside.

They were indeed in there. There were eight or nine of them, lined up along the front pew, the youngest was about five years old, the oldest was about eleven. They were the church Sunday School; I discovered that they met at two o’clock each Sunday afternoon for three quarters of an hour before being joined by their parents for the service.

I stood and listened for a while. The teacher was a middle aged man squeezed into a suit that clearly only came out on Sundays. He had a King James Bible from which he read a story and then asked questions and he had the old Prayer Book. When the Bible story was complete he turned to the Prayer Book and began asking the children their catechism. It was fascinating to watch.

The children of that church probably remember lines that I shall never be able to remember, lines that many of you still know off by heart, maybe fifty or sixty years after you first learned them.

Something has been lost since those times; in trying to be more appealing; in trying to make things more understandable, we have sometimes fallen into the trap of ‘dumbing down’ the teaching of the Bible and the teaching of the church.

One person, who could never be excused of ‘dumbing down’ the Christian story, was the writer of “There is a green hill far away”, Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander. Mrs Alexander wanted to teach the Christian faith to children, but was able to do so in such a substantial way that her work remains popular amongst adults even today.

Cecil Frances Humphreys was born here in Dublin in 1818, into a gentry family. Her father, Major John Humphreys had served in the army and became land agent to the Earl of Wicklow and later to the Marquess of Abercorn. Immensely talented, the young Miss Humphreys began writing verse at early age, catching the eye of John Keble, a clergyman, poet, and professor at Oxford, who was to launch the Oxford Movement, the High Church movement that brought new life to the Church of England.

In 1848, when she was 30, Cecil Alexander published a collection of her poems called Songs for Little Children. The book had reached its 69th edition by the end of the 19th Century. It was edited by John Keble and contains three of the best known hymns in the English language, “Once in Royal David’s City”, “There is a Green Hill Far Away”, and “All Things Bright and Beautiful” - all three sprang from her desire to explain the Christian faith to children

Cecil Frances Alexander didn’t just write for children though. She contributed poems and French translations to Dublin University Magazine under pseudonyms. Her poem the “Burial of Moses” appeared anonymously in Dublin University Magazine in 1856 prompting Alfred Lord Tennyson to say it was one of the few poems of a living author he wished he had written.

Her marriage to the Revd William Alexander at Strabane in October 1850, caused great concern to his family, she was six years older than he was, and apparently her date of birth was altered to conceal this fact. William became Bishop of Derry in 1867 and went on to become Archbishop of Armagh. Mrs Alexander threw herself into whatever challenge she met, becoming actively involved with the Derry Home for Fallen Women, with the development of a district nurses service; and in visiting the poor and sick.

The fact that Mrs Alexander’s hymns are being sung around the world 160 years after they were published as a collection for children is a mark of her extraordinary talent. It is hard to imagine much that is being written now still being around in 2168!

“There is a green hill far away” is a simple telling of the story of the Passion of Christ and a simple explanation of the theology of those Good Friday events. I’m sure the little children for whom the hymn was written did not fully understand what the hymn was all about, particularly when they reached the third and fourth verses which deal with the doctrine of the atonement. They might have wondered what was meant when it said Jesus “died to make us good” and that he was the only one “good enough to pay the price of sin”, but then we might wonder as well. How many of us could fully explain what the hymn was all about?

There are things that are a mystery; there will be things that remain a mystery until we reach the next world, but because something is mystery it does not mean that it should be feared, just because we do not understand something, it does not mean that we have to avoid it.

Generation upon generation of children have sung “There is a green hill far away”; we have sung it many, many times in this church, and we have felt no need to try to explain it, no need to simplify it, no need to re-present it in such a way that we think people will better understand it.

Mrs Alexander’s genius was to write about the Christian faith in such a way that the truth of what was being said could reach us without there being a need to try to take it apart and repackage it.

The tune to which we sing “There is a green hill far away” is by an English church musician, William Horsley. Horsley was organist at a succession of churches London and was well respected as a musician, writing three full orchestral symphonies as well as publishing five books of glees, unaccompanied songs that might be sung as after dinner entertainment, yet it is the simple hymn tune that has carried his name down through the decades. Perhaps it is in simple ways that we say profound things.

Like the Sunday School teacher in that country church, Mrs Alexander sought simply to tell children about the faith that meant so much to her. As adult onlookers to her efforts, we have great hymns for which to thank her.

This blog visited Lake Wobegon last year, it should be a compulsory journey for anyone in pastoral ministry. Listening to Garrison Keillor’s News from Lake Wobegon on the Prairie Home Companion offers more sound advice than our professor ever did.

Garrison Keillor has created a wonderful society set around the imaginary town of Lake Wobegon in central Minnesota. Lake Wobegon is populated by Catholics of German descent and Lutherans of Norwegian descent. Lake Wobegon’s name is said to come from a native American word meaning “we waited all day for you in the rain”. The town has a population of 942 (it’s probably gone up, or maybe down, since I last checked) and its life revolves around the two churches: Lake Wobegon Lutheran and the Catholic Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, where the Parish Priest was Father Emil.

It is Father Emil that came to mind as I prepared for a funeral, something he once said, years ago.

Father Emil retired maybe twenty years ago, the last I read about him he was in a retirement home. When he was retiring from the parish, one of the town’s Lutherans suggested to him that he would make a good Lutheran pastor if he was looking for something to do. I remember Keillor reading the story himself in a deep Midwestern accent. Father Emil commented very gently,

Lutheranism is my idea of a holiday. To take those truths we find difficult, and bend them a little to make life easier. Yes, Luther was a great man all right .

I wonder, Father Emil, I wonder.

I’m sure you meant no offence, but Lutheranism and my own tradition stand close, as you know.

Wouldn’t it be easy just to stick to reciting the stuff again and again? Wouldn’t it be easy just to recite truths learned years ago, and not to have to deal with the nasty realities of the contemporary world?

What would be easier to stand in church and read everything from a book, word for word, or to try engage with people?

Bending truths, Father Emil? Or attempting to make those truths comprehensible in a world where God has almost disappeared?