Open to Renegotiation

Lisbon is not Braga. One way you can tell them apart is the different kinds of people here. One different kind of person is Seoirse Ó Deaghaidh (Pronounced “shorsh oh JA.”) That’s Ó Deaghaigh with an accent, “never, ever with an apostrophe.” Seoirse is Irish, though he’s not lived in Ireland for twenty years. He's one of our neighbors, but he might easily be mistaken for a leprechaun. His mischievous smile appears at doors and windows as if by magic when one is not expecting it, though one looks for it more and more. Sometimes he can be lured out of hiding with simple cell phone text messages: “Tea?”


Guess which door is Seoirse's









Having appeared, Seoirse keeps one company while one performs one’s menial tasks. He’s fascinated by practical matters. Occasionally, he provides an extra set of hands. Or he tells stories, or reads Sheamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize winning poet who used to date his sister:

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

Seoirse has lived all over Europe, so he has lots of stories to tell. But leprechauns must hide themselves because they cannot hide their feelings. They’re completely vulnerable when caught in the open. Seoirse alternates between weeping and laughter, chiding himself, when describing the Irish struggle for independence from Britain. He cried, too, when I laughed while talking with Drex on the phone. Laughter was forbidden in his father’s household. Owing in part to that prohibition, there’s tension between Seoirse and his Heavenly Father. As far as Seoirse is concerned, the two have not spoken for years, but he has alluded to being open to renegotiating that silence. Please pray he will.