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A Pilgrim in Ireland: A Quest for Home

by Frances Greenslade

A Pilgrim in Ireland begins with Regina writer Frances Greenslade’s participation in a traditional Sto:lo autumn equinox gathering in the coastal mountains of B.C. “The ancestors are close,” she muses before realizing, jarringly, “Not my ancestors.” A lapsed Catholic with a pagan Celtic heritage, Greenslade finds herself at something of a loss. Although she’s drawn toward her husband David’s native heritage, his traditions are not her own. The experience eventually leads Greenslade to a solo pilgrimage to Ireland, armed with a partial family tree and a volume of Yeats.
The question of finding a spiritual home has become, in our polyglot and postmodern times, something of a cliché. With terse, evocative writing, and a detached, critical eye, Greenslade finds the pressing human truth behind the cliché and brings it to life in all of its frustration, disappointment, and eventual joy.
Greenslade does not let the aims and expectations of her pilgrimage blind her to the realities of foreign travel. The Ireland she discovers is a place of contradictions, an island of magic and faith but also of sectarian strife, violence, and racism. Her (literal) pilgrimage to Lough Derg (St. Patrick’s Purgatory), for example, is a bold recounting of personal frustration and spiritual failure. The grinding loneliness and discomfort of hostel after hostel is equally frank.
Rich with research and anecdote, the book functions as a primer to Irish lore, the peculiarities of Irish Catholicism, and to Irish history. It also serves as an inspiring example of personal spirituality, of an individual achieving a synthetic spiritual insight from disparate traditions. Greenslade’s disappointments and frustrations in Ireland lend power to her return to Canada and her discovery of home here, in the arms of her husband and the light of a prairie storm. The book’s closing pages read less like a homily, as one might expect, and instead take on the air of a genuine epiphany.

 

Reviewer: Robert Wiersema

Publisher: Penguin Books Canada

DETAILS

Price: $29.99

Page Count: 256 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-670-91112-7

Released: Apr.

Issue Date: 2002-3

Categories: Memoir & Biography