The Gulf and the Silence

Electricity vs Prayer

‘Ideas create idols. Only wonder leads to knowing.’

St. Gregory of Nyssa

Today was to be the day when my new series, The Sunday Pilgrimage, began. But the Earth had other ideas¹. On Friday, Storm Eowyn, apparently named after a character from Lord of the Rings, roared like an army of uruk-hai across Ireland. It brought down hundreds of trees, tore off a lot of roofs, and left 700,000 of us without electricity. Here in rural Galway the lights were out in the townlands for days. Many still are. Galway City lost its water supply. We lost all the things that happen when you press buttons without thinking about it.

Silence came.

We have a box of candles, matches, batteries and hurricane lamps stored for just this kind of occasion. Big bottles of water too, because our well runs on electricity. So do our solar panels, which switch off when the grid does. The stove that heats our front room is connected to a back boiler, so we can't allow that to get too hot either when the grid is down. We've been talking about getting ourselves a generator for years, but we never get round to it.

So much for self-sufficiency.

I read a novel recently: This Is Happiness by Niall Williams. It's set in rural County Clare during the 1950s, during the electrification of the country. It's beautifully written and funny and moving. It seems to have no agenda and yet it shows well enough the mixed emotions that the coming of the electric wires brought to the countryside here. What was gained (easy to measure), what was lost (hard or impossible to measure) - but also what was illuminated. Not just previously-hidden bald spots and wrinkles and layers of dust that a darkened cottage would never reveal even in high summer, but a world that, once the switches came, could never come back again.

An older, stiller, subtler world.

I won't say it came back again for the 48 hours that we were wire-free in our house. But something came. Some other rhythm. I sat by the fire with a whisky and did nothing at all. We read books instead of websites. Teenagers had no choice but to emerge from their bedrooms. We're a low-tech household compared to most, but let's not fool ourselves - we live in the miasma created by the grid. We are the grid.

Without it, everything changes.