Seeing the extraordinariness of the ordinary
Fr Jason Murphy writes beautifully and eloquently as always in his bi-monthly column 'Let the Busy World be Hushed'
The Angelus bell rang out in the blue of the sky on the Feast of the Guardian Angels on the hill that stands high at Killoughter. A hill from which you can see, on a bright clear day such as this, the spire beyond at Belturbet answering the call to pause and pray in the middle of this autumnal day. Down in the fields below his Charolais heifers raise their heads to the familiar tone of the bell that has rang out from this hill for over 180 years as they chew quietly on their cud beneath the golden shade of the large Chestnut tree at the crossroads that has given refuge to man and beast alike for one hundred of those years. Each day he quietly walks up the hill from his home at the crossroads to ring the bell, three times three followed by a continuous sequence of strokes to which some bless themselves and others pass on by but he pulls the chain to strike the bell regardless, the constant in the midst of the everyday amongst these hills.
A woman hanging her washing on the line for the last day of drying can be seen with a peg in her hand resting it on the line, looking out into the trees beyond at Shannow wood, praying for a wee girl whom she knows is not well, reminded by the sound of the bell in the midst of the ordinary to stop and think of others. He is unassuming and quiet about his work, to be found in the hush of the chapel as the evening light streams in the stained glass of the windows that look to the west, polishing and cleaning the seats that his father and his grandfather knelt in once to pray.
He lives not far from the thatched cottage in the field where he grew as a boy, in a house that both he and his father built some 40 years before, the house where the women of Laurel Hill and Drumeena come for a wash and blow dry of a Friday in his wife’s cosy one-roomed salon.
He can be seen walking through the fields to fodder the cattle or driving along the narrow lane where he once walked from school picking blackberries in these October days, now looking o’er the same hedges aloft in his pristine Massey Ferguson 35 tractor.
For his life is lived in the midst of the local, centred around this corner of the world, unbroken in its regularity, in the routine he follows day in day out, bar the nights he spends with the stars and Joe Finnegan in the Hotel Kilmore. For those who pass the road in their zupped up cars, Philip’s days are far from exciting, without speed and exhilaration, but for those who have the eyes to see it is as clear as the spire beyond at Belturbet, Philip has within his grasp the key to this life and its living.
For I once listened to an interview with John McGahern, the writer from County Leitrim as he approached the end of his life, an interview in which he reflected back on all his years. He had travelled the world and lived in different cities, writing many novels before returning to his native county to live quietly with his wife amongst the fields and hedgerows he knew best, for all of his latter years. In the interview he was asked which he thought was the most precious life he had lived over his span of 71 years and his response was one that has remained with me since first hearing it, a response I try to keep before me as I live in the midst of the everyday.
He replied ‘the most precious is the life lived in the midst of the familiar and the ordinary where it seems to others that nothing really happens’.
Sometimes it is only when the ordinary and the familiar is taken from us, be it through sickness or death, the faces with whom we share our lives, the place where we have lived, that we truly come to know how precious the life we are gifted really is, how much we take the extraordinariness of the ordinary for granted.
For me, Philip McEntee, the man who rings the Church Bell at Killoughter, each and every day, both morning and evening, who fodders his cattle and watches for his neighbour, who goes the road in his 35 tractor and bids at the mart for Charolais heifers, is the example of how to live, contented and at peace with both friend and neighbour, a constant for those who pass the road, who rush and race and never take heed, at one with God and nature in the midst of the ordinary and the everyday where it seems to others that nothing really happens.
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