excerpt
“Beware of pride, Caitlin,” Padraig admonished. “‘Pride goeth before destruction.’ Learn another lesson from your father. He was a proud man. He sought self-sufficiency and in doing so displayed spiritual pride, what the Greeks called hubris. They warned—and no one knew this better than Finn MacLir—that hubris was certain to attract the gods’ disfavour. Hubris is the sin of sins, the primal cause of sin. It consists in man’s belief that he can lift himself to the level of the divine. Beware of that, Caitlin. Only by recognising our complete worthlessness can we find salvation, entirely through God’s grace.”
Caitlin looked steadfastly at Padraig. Then she said slowly, as if weighing her words, “If you thought you could ever win my father to Christianity with a message like that—recognising our complete worthlessness—you must be very, very stupid, Padraig. No wonder my father had nothing but utter contempt for your beliefs.”
Caitlin could see from the narrowing of Padraig’s eyes and the tightening of the muscles in his jaw that her words had hurt him; but she was relentless. “He scorned your God, Padraig. He scorned all the gods. You call it hubris, the sin of sins. Finn MacLir was guilty of it, blatantly guilty. Yet he defied the gods to the very end. And even in the clutches of death they could not break his spirit. He was a man, Padraig, a proud man, and proud to be man. And I am proud to have been his daughter.”
Caitlin rose angrily, strode out of the room and slammed the door behind her.
҂
She brushed the small heap of dust into a shovel and tossed it outside through the door of the cottage. The cool evening breeze whirled it away towards the stone wall by the head of the loaney. Michael would soon be coming up the loaney from the house, and Caitlin looked for the big, familiar figure, his shoulders almost as wide as the rough path between the walls, his hair almost as yellow as the flowers on the whins. But he did not appear. He had gone to the village to talk business with Joe Carney, the skipper of Finn’s fishing boat, the Drumard Maid. Michael wanted to sell the boat, and Joe wanted to buy. Perhaps they had made a deal and gone to the Harbour Bar to seal it.
Caitlin’s gaze shifted from the shadowed loaney to the direction of the harbour at Corrymore, far below her, and the ruins of Killyshannagh Church. Below the green sod and the dark earth down there, unseen from…
Manolis Aligizakis 