Yesterday was in our planbook as "Church Day." We were going to walk around West Belfast and visit every church we could find, asking if they spoke Irish or had Irish language services.
I don't know why I even bother to come up with a plan for the day anymore.
If you haven't yet detected the pattern of our days here, I'll describe it for you. We start at Starbucks, fail to accomplish what we set out to do for the day, and accomplish something else instead. Yesterday morning we spent longer at Starbucks than usual. Ethan was lost to the world, fervently and feverishly writing his blog, so I took the time to follow up on some online leads we had gotten from the principal at An Droichead, occasionally glancing up to look out over Arthur Square and The Spirit of Belfast.
Arthur Square happens to be just a block north of City Centre, and in the center of the square is this big silver circular vortex of interconnecting rings called The Spirit of Belfast. I'm not entirely sure what it symbolizes, but it certainly looks cool.
We had gotten another hot tip from the An Droichead secretary that the John Hewitt Bar was "great craic," so we made that our goal and wandered up to North Belfast, relatively unknown territory in our travels so far. By what could be interpreted as sheer happenstance, we ended up meandering out onto this wide expanse of stone stretching out to a grand cathedral. After walking all the way across it unwittingly, we happened to spot a historical landmarker that identified the area as Writer's Square, a celebration of Belfastian writers carved into the stone beneath our feet.
Turning quickly round and looking down, we found that we stood not two feet from a familiar name.
Understandably, we were ecstatic that, at the very moment when our plan for the day was in question, we wandered onto a dedication to the man who inspired the title of this blog. Perhaps our wanderings shouldn't be interpreted as happenstance after all. I was reminded, again, that though things weren't going our way, and we weren't accomplishing what we had set out to accomplish, the Spirit was still guiding our steps in Belfast. We were not alone. And, though we couldn't see it, the Lord still had a plan for the day.
We took time to go back and retrace our steps through the square, reading about Belfast from the words of those who knew it best. How could we have missed the engravings on our first pass through the area? I think that maybe we were so narrowly focused on getting to where we had planned to go, the John Hewitt Bar, that we hadn't seen an opportunity for learning literally right in front of us. I wonder how much of the trip so far has been spent just like that. I wonder how much of our lives are.
Eventually, after taking a great number of pictures and reading everything carved into the ground, we were happy to discover that the bar we had set out to find was just across the street from the square. Again, I wonder how often is it the case that, when we let go of our goals to take part in the little opportunities that are presented to us along the way, do we find ourselves right where we wanted to be after all?
The John Hewitt reminded me of every pub I'd been in last summer. It was Ethan's first authentic Irish pub, so I let him soak in the atmosphere and did my best to point out all the little tidbits I recalled about how things are run. After lunch, we set out to explore North Belfast, planless.
I remembered that, while researching Belfast before the trip, I had seen something about a statue of C.S. Lewis somewhere in the city. Inspired by Writer's Square, we decided to seek it out. ... First we had to seek out wifi so we could find out where the statue was. North Belfast turned out to be not quite as wifi friendly as City Centre, and by the time we finally found wifi, we were all the way back at Castle Court shopping centre not far from where we started out. And it turns out that "The Searcher", the statue of C.S. Lewis entering the wardrobe, is across the river in East Belfast.
We decided to put off searching for "The Searcher" for another day, and to do some shopping while in Castle Court. I've been needing a new watch since before we left on this trip, and I had begun to despair that all the watches in Belfast were of the expensive, designer variety. That's when I discovered the beautiful store that is Argos. Basically the whole place functions like a giant catalog of technology. You browse everything they have on computer displays, write down the number of what you want, bring it to the cashier, and they go and get it for you from the back. I found the watch I was looking for for 20 pounds, and we ventured back out into Castle Court.
Every Irish language center we've visited so far has more or less drowned us in helpful brochures, pamphlets, guides, and maps, all stuffed to the brim with information on the state of the language in Belfast. Both of our bags were overflowing with useful information. What we lacked was a way to preserve and organize it all. So, next on our list of things to buy was some sort of binder to fill with pamphlets to hand over to the CeLT.
We couldn't find anything of the sort in Castle Court, and so we put it off as something to buy later and struck back out into the city. Going nowhere in particular, we came across a bookstore we had been in with J R. I thought I remembered seeing some Sherlock Holmes novels with new BBC Sherlock covers inside, so we went in. While Ethan perused the big Marvel book of The Avengers, I ventured upstairs searching for Sherlock. Instead I was confronted with organization binders at the top of the stairs.
Coincidence?
We got the binder, and Ethan got himself the complete works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Shortly after, we passed the store I had remembered, and I got a couple of BBC covered Sherlock's. Shortly after, we passed a foreign import store, and Ethan got himself some American peanut butter.
Loaded down with pamphlets, fresh optimism, and Sherlock Holmes, we returned to the hostel for the day and set about getting things organized. Ethan amassed all of the pictures we've taken so far on his Mac and started sorting them into folders by location and purpose while I cataloged the pamphlets into the new binder and finally set up a file-system for categorizing the information I was typing up on my external harddrive.
By the end of the day we had completely revolutionized our storage system and taken huge steps toward a unification of organizational schemes. Words associated with corporate efficiency are buzzing around in my head now. Production Costs. Ledger. Synergy.
We set out to do one thing and failed, and then, by the guidance of the Spirit and no will of our own, we accomplished something entirely different. Our work here is getting done in spite of us. Though we're completely dependant on the Lord, He isn't dependant on us... and there's something freeing about that.
The Spirit is indeed working in Belfast.
- Sam R. Franklin
Day 11 in Belfast
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