Everything's Coming Up Irish: Poetry and History

I’ve gone with orange for the border on this post, because included in it is a poem contributed by Kevin—a poem written by his mother, who grew up in the Methodist church in Northern Ireland. I’ll let Kevin tell you the story behind it.

My mother wrote this about a year before she passed away. At the time she was attending a class at a day home for seniors. She thought the people in her class did not have a good understanding of St. Patrick, so she wrote a poem.

Here’s May Greenshield’s poem, written in May of 2003. She passed away, Kevin says, in January of 2004:

When St. Patrick came to Ireland
To set the people free
He used the little Shamrock
To teach them of the love of God
Who was the “One in Three”

Next up, Kim of The Upward Call has posted a little more Irish poetry, along with a little history of the Easter Rebellion.

I just posted a hymn by Thomas Kelly, an Irish hymn writer. I suppose that’s Irish poetry, too.

 
Would you like to join in the Everything’s Coming Up Irish fun? Post anything related to Ireland or Irish things and send me the link (You can email me, or leave your link in the comments to this post.), then look for a link to your post in one of the upcoming ECUI posts. No blog? No problem. Email me your contribution or leave it in the comments, like Kevin did with his mother’s poem.

Sunday's Hymn: Irish Hymn Writers

Since the theme for the month is everything Irish, I thought I’d feature hymns by Irish hymn writers. This one’s written by Thomas Kelly, an Irish Anglican priest who became one of the Irish dissenters. It was one of my mother’s favorite hymns.

 Praise The Savior, Ye Who Know Him!

Praise the Savior, ye who know Him!
Who can tell how much we owe Him?
Gladly let us render to Him
All we are and have.

Jesus is the Name that charms us,
He for conflict fits and arms us;
Nothing moves and nothing harms us
While we trust in Him.

Trust in Him, ye saints, forever,
He is faithful, changing never;
Neither force nor guile can sever
Those He loves from Him.

Keep us, Lord, O keep us cleaving
To Thyself, and still believing,
Till the hour of our receiving
Promised joys with Thee.

Then we shall be where we would be,
Then we shall be what we should be,
Things that are not now, nor could be,
Soon shall be our own.

---

Other hymns, worship songs, etc. posted today:

• Near the Cross at Seasonings of the Heart
• Arise, My Soul, Arise at IMD 2.0.
• God the Spirit from The Valley of Vision at Thirsty Theologian
• The Collect for the Second Sunday in Lent at Magic Statistics
• Praise, My Soul, The King Of Heaven at Jam and Books
• Update: Great is Thy Faithfulness at Aim to Please Him

Have you posted a hymn for Sunday and I missed it? Let me know by leaving a link in the comments or by emailing me at the address in the sidebar, and I’ll add your post to the list.

Saturday's Old Photo

It’s cold out, so this picture seemed appropriate for today’s old photo. My sister and I are showing off our brand new parkas in this family picture.We’d just moved to Minnesota that fall, and the coats we’d used back in Illinois weren’t appropriate for the colder northern winters, so we’d gone with my mother to J. C. Penney’s to buy us each a parka.

 

These are what we picked out. If I were writing this unprompted by my mother’s notes on the back of the photo, I’d tell you that the coats were a lovely shade of blue, and then I’d pat myself on the back for my accurate, detailed memory of my childhood. However, my mother’s notes say they were red, and you can trust her on that. That is, I guess, a little warning to us all that while I’m always certain that what I write in these little pieces is factual, I can get my facts wrong. I remember loving the fuzzy feel of these parkas. I wore mine for a couple of years before I outgrew it, and then my poor sister got my hand-me-down, so she wore the same parka, just different sizes, for four years.

 

When we moved to Minnesota, we lived in the parsonage at Northern Bible Chapel. The pastor of the church owned his own home, so my dad and mom cleaned the church in exchange for a deal on renting the parsonage. On our first Christmas there, which would have come a month or so after this picture was taken, Mr. Klein, an elderly man from the church who didn’t get out much because he couldn’t leave his sick wife for long, knocked on the door and delivered a package for each of us girls. He’d bought us little white zippered Bibles—the very first Bibles we owned.

 

Update on Thursday, March 8, 2007 at 12:15PM by rebecca

Hmmm….the little Bibles, I’ve been reminded, were red, not white.  Later I had a white zippered Bible, but that did not come from Mr. Klein.  So our parkas and our Bibles matched, and I was wrong on the color on both accounts.