Ireland and Connecting Our Kids With Their Story

This year we will make the last of our family pilgrimages before we reach the next stage of our lives:  children in college and finding ourselves absolutely broke for the next twenty years.  Ha, Ha.

The truth is, we are likely broke now, but we’ve decided to ignore that reality and finish the “Trilogy” of family pilgrimages before our kids have grown too old to have the time or desire to travel with us anymore.

We knew that Italy, Spain and Portugal, and Ireland had to make the top of that list — not because of their appeal to tourists, but because of their deeply Catholic roots.

There are plenty of other places that could have made the list, but you have to make choices in life — especially if you are going to raise a big family that refuses to stop eating and growing out of their clothes and needing to keep their teeth intact and maybe even straightened.

We are excited to be ending this stage of our lives with a pilgrimage to Ireland.

The best pilgrimages involve sacrifice and difficulty, and what family vacation doesn’t involve that?  Might as well make it a pilgrimage and get some grace out of all that suffering.

Honestly, even if we could afford the Ritz, I think I prefer the way we travel.  We tend to settle in and live like the locals. We frequent the local markets, stay in apartments, and dine in for many of our meals.

We go to Mass with the locals and find ourselves connecting with people we wouldn’t otherwise encounter.  It’s an amazing way to experience a culture and get to know the people.

It is also an amazing way to be reminded of the goodness of people around the world.  Traveling has a way of eliminating the fear and prejudice that a 24 hour news cycle tends to encourage.

Even more impactful, no matter where you find yourself in the world, when you enter into a Catholic Church, it is an overwhelming experience to encounter Jesus and to feel like you are home.

We want those experiences for our kids and for ourselves.

I guess, at the end of the day, we are trying to teach our kids to embark on new adventures, but to always stayed moored to the barque of the Church.

Which brings us to our upcoming pilgrimage to Ireland.

We decided that this pilgrimage wouldn’t just be about the Catholic roots of this land of Saints and Scholars, but it would also be about our story.

We wanted to show our kids the places that were special for us as a couple, because ultimately these places are a part of their story as well.

We’ll visit the spot John first asked me to date him in Galway and I said “No, but I’m routing for you”.  Yep, I really said that.

John didn’t give up.  Eventually he convinced me to date him, and eventually he asked me to join him on a retreat back in Ireland, which ended with John quite unexpectedly asking me to marry him while overlooking St. Kevin’s chapel in Glendalough.

We’ll bring our kids to that spot.

We’ll likely share with them that John had absolutely nothing but himself to offer me on that day he proposed: no savings, no ring, no clue what he was doing (that made two of us). It was just John and I and our faith in God and that was frankly all that either of us needed.

We got married on a beautiful Fall day in Chicago and returned, yet again, to Ireland for our honeymoon.

On this trip, we won’t be kissing the Blarney Stone again — I’ve become more of a germaphobe since having 6 kids 🙂 — but we do plan to revisit some of those places in Ireland that we visited on our honeymoon.

We will revisit Kinsale.  This was one of the bright spots of our honeymoon and it is a picturesque little town with a lovely harbor and amazing food.

On our honeymoon, we actually had to split a meal because we couldn’t afford our own entrees.  Who knows, maybe we’ll take our kids to the same spot and split some more entrees in the unofficial foodie capital of Ireland.

And then there is the amazingly beautiful countryside we plan to explore with our kids.

Honestly, the beauty of Ireland should be one of the proofs for God’s existence.  How can you not believe in a loving God, when you drive from one breathtakingly beautiful spot to the next?

Spending your days surrounded by amazing views, like the ones you find in Ireland,  have no doubt been inspiration for the brilliant minds who helped to win Ireland the title, the land of Saints and Scholars.

How can you not see God and wax poetic in all of this beauty?

Our story goes way beyond just the two of us.  It goes back to many brave men and women who survived poverty, persecution and starvation, often because they were Catholic.

It includes stories of people who left everything behind to venture to a new world so that they might have a chance to make a better life for themselves and the people they loved.

It is a story to be proud of.

We’ll also visit uniquely holy places that mean so much to us because we are Catholic.

We’ll visit Knock, the only Marian apparition site I know of where Mary was completely silent.  She appeared with Joseph and Jesus (the Lamb) and the Beloved Disciple, John.

Knowing the Irish, perhaps she couldn’t get a word in edgewise.  Ha, Ha. Or just maybe Mary wanted to remind us that it is in silence where we can truly meet and contemplate the Lamb of God.

Perhaps in this noisy world of ours, the lesson of silence is one that we desperately need to hear.  I know I do.

We’ll visit Croagh Patrick, the mountain where St. Patrick spent 40 days in prayer and fasting, as he sought to gain greater love for a Pagan world that had not yet encountered Jesus.

We’ll climb the mountain he climbed and we’ll ponder a man whose love transformed an entire nation of people.

These will be some of the stories we plan to share with our kids along the way of this pilgrimage.

These are the stories that help to make sense of our lives and their lives, too.

We want them to know these stories.  We want them to know the people they came from and the love that brought them to this time and place.

We want to remind them that our story is part of a greater love story — a story of a God who loved us so much that He sent His only Son to die for us, so that we might live with Him forever in Paradise.

These are the stories I hope will remain with our kids, long after we’ve left the shores of Ireland and returned to our own home.

Lofty goals for a family pilgrimage, but then again, lofty goals are worth aiming for.

Have a great weekend!

 

Sharing over at Kelly’s