A film that sings of the old faith of Ireland, what has replaced it and what might yet come again

“When God made time, he made enough of it,” Brendan used to say to me. God rest him – he was a pillar of St Dominic’s in London, one of many Irish men and women who came to London in the 1980s looking for work, but never forgetting “the old country” – its unhurried pace of life, seasonal rhythms and easy hospitality.

Pat Collins’s 2023 film That They May Face the Rising Sun is set in that time and culture: not much happens beyond the everyday. The camera gently slows us down as it lingers on the lake and hills of a remote farming hamlet, and on simple scenes of meals and agriculture. It is a world away from the economic success and aggressive secularisation of modern Ireland.

But like many good historical films, it’s perhaps more about the present – or even an imagined future. Inspired by the last novel of John McGahern, it departs considerably from the original: we never meet the parish priest, beyond a reference to a pensioners’ outing he’s organised. Nor the local IRA member: refreshingly, politics has no place in this film. Rather, the focus is on the power of a local community.

We begin with birdsong, opening into a sunrise accompanied by Bach, achingly beautiful. Then we glimpse old Jamesy pushing his bike up the grass path to Joe’s and Kate’s house. Joe, a writer, fortyish, has returned home after success in London (the voiceovers as he writes are lyrical); Kate, his German wife, is an artist. Jamesy lets himself in without knocking, and over a whiskey chides them gently for missing Mass again. “I’m sure you know we don’t believe,” says Kate. Jamesy admits he doesn’t either: “I go to look at the women and all the other hypocrites and for the whole performance.”

And this sets the tenor for the film. The only time we see a church is people coming out of it, after a wedding. But it’s far from gloomy or defiant. Instead we see people who, even amid poverty and loneliness, are – yes, and in an art film – actually quite happy, and unashamed to say so. Joe and Kate are loveably impractical – their self-build summerhouse is making no progress beyond a bare wooden frame, Joe marvelling at “how the rafters frame the sky”. Patrick drily remarks that he could be locked up for saying it. But he helps Joe and comes in for lunch, one of many meals during which Joe and Kate listen to their neighbours without saying a lot: just a little gentle wisdom, dispensed with a smile.

Indeed, one critic complained that Joe’s and Kate’s characters aren’t really developed. There are moments – Kate’s indecision whether to take over or relinquish the gallery in London, whose director is leaving; her hurt when Patrick tells her she ought to have children; Joe’s face at Patrick’s persistent rudeness. Otherwise, they’re enigmatic. Only occasionally do we see them alone, in the tender affection of life-long partners, best friends, a couple whose love is equal and free. So Joe cooks, but when the neighbour congratulates Kate on the food, he smiles and says nothing. They’re almost angels.

It’s really from their effect on others that we learn about them. Joe goes out on Christmas morning to find curmudgeonly Patrick in his tumbledown cottage; again, he listens. Patrick thinks priesthood would have suited Joe, and we learn that Joe left seminary after a year. Was this conversation a confession? In this light, Joe’s and Kate’s Christmas lunch – with wine – seems eucharistic. Joe cooks the meal again, like a priest celebrating Mass; the advice becomes pastoring. When Johnny returns from London after losing his job and relationship, coming back to an awkward domestic situation, Joe drives him into the village, and takes extra time in the pub simply to listen. There are drinks on the house to mark Johnny’s return – these are kind people, who also give extra food to poor Bill, born illegitimate and effectively an enslaved labourer.

And there’s a death. It’s Joe who volunteers to lay out the body with another neighbour, humbly accepting directions on how to place the rosary. During the wake, the laity lead the rosary in the house. There is a priest: this is folk religion, without questions of faith. Joe and Kate are there for their friends, but they don’t pray.

At the words of the Salve at the end – “blest Advocate, turn thine eyes of mercy towards us” – Kate’s chest heaves. Is it the poignancy of hearing lovely words she doesn’t believe? Or the stirrings of faith at last? As an Italian friend of mine, long settled in Britain, suggested, does Kate realise that she’s both an outsider and welcome? Just before, we see a picture of Christ and His Mother – does it occur to her that maybe that’s how their neighbours see Joe and herself?

If so, is it a film about making a brave new religion for Ireland? Or a new form for the old one, with artists as the priests? Are all these everyday confessional and eucharistic moments – perhaps Kate’s artworks, making something new from the local tradition of wool-carding, taught to her by an old neighbour – a cypher for this?

But at the burial in the cemetery of a long-gone monastery, there’s a surprise I won’t spoil. And in the film’s elegiac quality, its reflection on the passage of time, there’s something of Ecclesiastes.

“The rain comes down, the sun shines, grass grows, children grow old and die: that’s the holy all of it,” says Jamesy, musing on his advancing years. Children. “The country used to be walking with people,” says Patrick, which might explain his irritation at Kate’s childlessness. We only see one child, probably there on holiday, helping her granddad with the harvest.

A film is a school for seeing, said my film prof. Perhaps it shows us McGahern’s own fraught relationship with the Church, and that of many Irish people today, rejecting Catholicism but grieving for their loss, having no story with which to people a tomorrow. But for those of us who do believe – is there a hint here of how we could evangelise?

By being the good friends who love tenderly, who listen, who feed the poor and lonely, who are there: the silent presence of Christ and Our Lady? They who were unafraid to be fun, to be unconventional; she the singer-songwriter of the Magnificat, He the convivial guest and storyteller? Can we be makers of spaces where the Lord makes all things new?

Photos: stills from film (IMDB, Martin MaGuire).

Fr Dominic White OP is Prior of Blackfriars, Oxford.

This article appears in the Lenten March 2025 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre and counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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