A common theme in Irish spiritual storytelling is the appropriation of the old form the new. Historical figures informed old Gaelic myths. Gaelic myths were adapted by Christianity. Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa adapts facets of pagan and Christian belief to share a new myth: the myth of material progress. In an Ireland suddenly on the cusp of industrialization and globalization, people dance for wireless radios instead of instruments in ceremony and respect for parentage is extended not in the interest of fulfilling commandments, but for the promise of a new bicycle. Invariably, this new faith leaves the vulnerable behind, like the old. Old artisans are traded for new machines. Soldiers are torn down by ever more complex weapons of war. Yet the drum ushering toward the new thing cannot be ignored and it doesn’t stop.

In a secular society, we think we can escape myth, but really we only replace them. Dogma is dogma, regardless of whether it came from Peter, Paul, John, and Luke or Adam Smith. Perhaps society cannot function without a communal understanding of the “end goal”. As the grip of fundamentalist Christian views began to slip in Ireland, a new set of priorities was inevitable. Friel’s Lughnasa is the lightning of optimism between the promise of that new faith in material progress and the reality, the expectation that things can get better and work out, that the next day can be brighter if we just listen to this new story.