• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Irish America

Irish America

        • Who We Are
          • About Us
          • Irish America Team
        • The Lists
          • Business 100
          • Hall of Fame
          • Health and Life Sciences 50
          • Wall Street 50
        • Highlights
          • History
          • In This Issue
          • Music
          • Politics
          • Sports
          • Travel
        • Columns
          • First Word
          • Hibernia
          • Quote Unquote
          • Slainte
          • Those we Lost
          • What are you like?
          • Wild Irish Women
          • Window on The Past
  • Home
  • Who We Are
    • About This Magazine
    • Irish America Team
  • In This Issue
  • Hall of Fame
  • The Lists
    • Business 100
    • Hall of Fame
    • Health and Life Sciences 50
    • Wall Street 50
  • Archives
    • Magazine
    • Highlights
  • Travel
  • Events

The Irish as Playful Souls

By Andrew Greeley, Contributor
October / November 2000

October 1, 2000 by Leave a Comment

The old St. Patrick’s Day quip about there being two kinds of people – those who are Irish and those who wish they were – turns out to be not so far from wrong.

The research my colleague Michael Hout has carried out shows that there are a lot more Americans claiming to be Irish than one might expect from immigration records, because the children of ethnically mixed marriages tend to identify with their Irish ancestors. Perhaps this identification is helped by the fact that the Irish are playful. Their incredible skill with words in poetry, drama, and fiction is the result of the play that infects their culture at every level. They play with their kids. They play in their conversations. They play in their pub chatter. They even invent new sports on which to gamble. They see politics as a form of play.

There are of course some Irish and Irish Americans who are dull and somber and nasty and mean, God forgive them for it. The broad culture, however, exalts play, legitimizes it, and reinforces the mystical dimension of the Irish heritage, allowing us to understand what John O’Donoghue (author of Anam Cara) means when he says that the body doesn’t have a soul, the soul has a body.

By “soul” he means the human person reaching out to embrace others, the world, and God. My own research suggests that while many of us (in both countries) repress our mystical possibilities, they still lurk within us. Perhaps this is why the revival of Celtic spirituality is so popular in both countries.

Our Irish heritage also permits us to remain Catholic despite the nitwits who so often run our church. We can laugh when we contemplate that, for all their pomposity and ignorance, they are still the successors of the Apostles and that the latter were a pretty disreputable and undependable lot of traitors and cowards and thieves.

Being Irish also provides justification for being recklessly generous. Just as the monks went off to Europe in huge numbers and converted much of it, and in more recent generations Irish priests and nuns went to every nation under Heaven (including this one), so too do Irish and Irish-American young men and women show up in all the places of the world where bravery and energy and compassion are needed to take care of the suffering brothers and sisters.

None of these characteristics I celebrate are qualities of which to be proud. They are rather obligations, challenges, and opportunities. We do not use them as standards by which to compare ourselves with others, but rather as criteria against which to judge ourselves in comparison with the norms of our heritage. To be playful, mystical, Catholic, and generous are provocations and indeed vocations.

How are we doing? It is a question which always troubles us, especially when we consider that there are still those in our society who think we are corrupt, superstitious, rigid, puritanical.

There’s no way to really answer that question. Only God knows, and She hasn’t issued any reports lately. Not as well, certainly, as we might. Better, perhaps, than we sometimes think. Still impelled and compelled by the place and the people and the heritage from which we come? I think so. Moreover, I think we will be that way – that is, we will be Irish – for a long time to come. ♦

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Highlights

News
Articles and stories from Irish America.....
MORE

Hibernia
News from Ireland and happenings in Irish America.....
MORE

Those We Lost
Remembering some of the great Irish Americans who have passed.....
MORE

Slainte!
Discover Irish ancestry, predilections, and recipes.....
MORE

Photo Album
Irish America readers share the stories of their ancestors....
MORE

More Articles

  • <b>Hero Pilot Visits His Irish Cousins</b>Hero Pilot Visits His Irish Cousins
    All of America was waiting for the heroic return of Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady, plucked from Bo...
  • <b>Hibernia Happenings</b>Hibernia Happenings
    Galway Guide Is a Bird in the Hand Visitors to Galway and other parts of the West of Ireland are...
  • <b>Protecting the Moving Image</b>Protecting the Moving Image
    Next time you try to illegally copy a Hollywood movie from a videocassette outlet such as Blockbuste...
  • <b>The Peacemaker</b>The Peacemaker
    The Peacemaker: As chairman of industry leader and insurance giant Mutual of America, William J. Fly...

Footer

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Subscribe

  • Subscribe
  • Give a Gift
  • Newsletter
  • Customer Service

Additional

  • Advertise
  • Contact
  • Terms of Use & Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2022 · IrishAmerica Child Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in