Thousands will answer the siren’s call on Reek Sunday
Mountains are deeply alluring. Great, eye catching, domes thrusting heavenwards, they have been endowed through the ages with mystical qualities and venerated as the earthly abode of saints and deities. It is the enigmatic quality of high places, their prominence and permanence against our transience and triviality that draws us to them in every age.
So, starting early on Sunday morning, thousands of believers — many of them in bare feet — will respond to the ageless siren call of the highest place. In multitudes, they will travel the same physical journey to seek deeper meaning on a tough spiritual excursion to the summit of Ireland’s holiest mountain. And indeed Reek Sunday is just the best known example of many pagan-era, climbs that have been incorporated into the Christian calendar as Pattern Days and still continue on mountains across Ireland. Materialism may squat immovably at the core of modern life, but the multitudes following a 5,000 year old tradition on Sunday next are living proof of a continuing desire for higher meaning that temporal wealth inevitably leaves unsatisfied.
