Franz Becker

Reading Response
They’re hard, the wooden pews. Day by day you start the morning in them with the sign
of the cross. You watch day break through the stained glass and chant the prayers in unison.
Slowly, unconsciously it becomes a part of you. Catholicism is an ethnicity as much as it is a
religion. Those days as a Catholic school boy stay with you all your life. While you may lose the
gift of faith, while you may never have known it, the religion is a part of you. It stayed with
Seamus Heaney, as it stays with all of us. You learn many things in those pews, about creeds and
parables, morals and doctrine, and yet it is the suffering you remember and the sense of guilt you
carry with you beyond the large oak doors. It was for our sake he was crucified under Pontius
Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried. Catholics seek to suffer as christ did, for it is only
through sacrifice that we may know what Christ endured for our eternal life. Heaney uses the
title poem of his book Station Island to explore this sacrifice and come to understand how it is
central to the Irish Catholic identity. It is in coming to terms with guilt and realization of the
meaningless rites which the church offers as a form of atonement that Heaney comes to reject
Catholic rituals in favor of his art.
Catholics love their pilgrimages. From Camino de Santiago to the pilgrimage which
poem is named after at Lough Derg. You suffer on them. Fasting and walking till your feet bleed,
seeking to suffer as Christ did, it is a sacrifice you choose to make, an atonement of our sins.
Guilt is at the heart of Irish Catholicism and it is this guilt which Heaney seeks to free his writing
from in “Station Island.” The first canto of the poem finds Seamus meeting Simon Sweeney
when he is about to embark of the pilgrimage. Simon is a sabbath breaker who tells Seamus to
“Stay clear of all processions.” This ominous warning foreshadows the delima Heaney seeks to
address in the poem, of the superstitions which come with the faith. This questioning of
superstition is seen again when he next meets William Carleton, whose own short story, “The
Lough Derg Pilgrim”, attacked the superstitious aspects of the pilgrimage. The pilgrimage itself
calls for walking around stone beds while saying prayers for three days while on a fast of bread
and tea. In the third Canto Heaney continues to highlight how meaningless some of the
superstitions are “I thought of walking round and round a space utterly empty.” In the fourth
canto Heaney meets Terry Keenan, a young priest who grew up in his rural neighborhood and
became a missionary. Father Keenan took a vow of poverty, to suffer as christ did, in the belief
that his sacrifice would be rewarded, but instead he dies in agony far from home. He devoted his
young life, with all the promises of tomorrow, to a life lived in constant agony because it was the
“decent thing” to do. This sacrifice accomplished nothing, besides giving his community a sense
of comfort as a “holy mascot,” rectifying something in them. This canto highlights the unfair
sacrifice asked by holy mother church. Back to those days in the pews it was asked of all of us,
to give up a life of love and pleasure, a freedom to chase our dreams in exchange for the
hardships of that most noble vocation. Next in canto six Heaney shows again the all too familiar
Catholic guilt of a school boy coming to terms with his sexuality. He’s seen at the “breathed on
grille of the confessional” receiving penance to perform for his lustful thoughts and then he has
sex with his girlfriend, and his heart is flushed like “somebody set free.” There is a realization
here, when he has intercourse for the first time which is “given” to him by her, he realizes the
ridiculousness of some aspects of Catholicism. This beautiful gift given to him was not dirty, and
the lustfulness he felt toward it before the act needed no absolution.
The poem has a clear shift in the seventh canto, where the violence of The Troubles begin
to define his encounters. He first meets his old friend William Strathern, who owned a drugstore,
and was shot dead at his front door in the middle of the night by two protestant policemen.
Heaney is disgusted at himself for not doing more, pleading with his dead friend to “Forgive the
way I have lived indifferent—forgive my timid circumspect involvement.” There is a sense of
guilt here and in the next canto when he meets his dying friend Tom Delaney and Delaney’s
cousin, Colum McCartney, who would be killed by protestant paramilitaries. With Tom on his
deathbed, his words fail him, he can’t manage any banter to ease his pain. Heaney feels as if he
has failed his friend, and heads home with a sense that “I had said nothing and that, as usual, I
had somehow broken covenants, and failed an obligation.” Here we see again that sense of guilt
which has plagued him. In the ninth canto Heaney meets Francis Hughes, the second of the
hunger strikers to die in 1981. In this part of the poem his guilt for his inaction is clear. He
"repents" for "my unweaned life that kept me competent to sleepwalk with connivance and
mistrust." There is also a rejection of Catholic practices in the canto, where he comes to
understand how frivolous the superstition behind the rituals can be, comparing them to a tribal
hunting ritual which never fails because a deer always shows up at the end of the dance because
“they keep dancing until they see a deer.” In the eleventh canto Heaney goes to confession with
an Irish priest in Spain where he is told to “Read poems as prays” and his penance is to translate
a poem by St. John of the Cross. The sense of poetry as penance shows that his work can save
him from his guilt and be used as a way to rectify what he has failed to do in the troubles. In the
final canto Heaney comes to meet James Joyce, who says that these Catholic rituals of
confession and penance don't free you from your guilt, "Your obligation is not discharged by any
common rite." In a clear rejection of Catholic practices as a way to find answers for Ireland’s
problems, Heaney, through Joyce’s ghost, offers art as a form of atonement. He tells Heaney to
stop with the rituals of the church and use his art instead as way to salvation.
Seamus Heaney was not a Catholic poet because he defended the church or its practices,
he was a Catholic poet because the church molded him. It instilled in him that guilt, as it did in
all of Ireland and that need for self sacrifice and suffering as a form of atonement. He still seeks
salvation, but comes to understand that it will not come through the rites of the Church, but
through his own work.