An ancient castle, called Blarney, lies about five miles from Cork, Ireland, where tourists will stand in line for an hour to wind up gray, stone steps, clinging to a rope, reach the heights of the battlements and kiss the Blarney stone. The kiss is said to bestow sudden eloquence, a gift that is no stranger to the charming Irish, and performing the feat alone also bestows another attribute--courage.
The stone is about four feet below the parapet on the outside of the castle, and it used to be that to kiss it, you had to be held by the legs, head downwards, over the battlements. To be willing to pay such a price for that kiss, you must have had something really important you wanted to say.
These days iron bars protect all of us kissers, from a total backwards view of the plunge down the castle walls, but you still have to be a contortionist to get in position.
As we inched our way to the castle heights ready for the kiss, I learned the difference between baloney and blarney. “Baloney is when you tell a 50-year old woman that she looks 18. Blarney is when you ask a woman how old she is, because you want to know at what age women are most beautiful.”
The Blarney stone is haunted with legend. Some say it was the rock that Moses struck with his staff to produce water; others that it was Jacob’s pillow that the prophet Jeremiah brought to Ireland.
What is probable is that during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the ruler of the castle, Dermot McCarthy was required, as proof of his loyalty, to surrender the fortress to the queen. He said that he would, but every year something would arise to prevent his surrender. A history says, “His excuses became so frequent and indeed so plausible that the official who had been demanding the castle in the name of Queen became a joke at the Court. Once, when the eloquent excuses of McCarthy were repeated to the Queen, she said ‘Odds bodikins, more Blarney talk!’ The term Blarney has thus come to mean 'the ability to influence and coax with fair words and soft speech without giving offense.”
Such a gift, indeed!
Once I had kissed the Blarney stone, I noticed, that our Irish guide must certainly have kissed the Blarney stone herself, because her speech was laced with Irish sayings and witticisms completely foreign to us Americans.
“That certainly put the cat among the pigeons,” she said, speaking of a little problem.
“It’s as useless as an ashtray on a motorcycle,” she laughed, not knowing that was an image a little foreign to a busload of Latter-day Saints.
She reminded us that Murphy’s Law is Irish:
Nothing is as easy as it looks.
Everything takes longer than you expect.
And if anything can go wrong,
It will, at the worst possible moment.
Of course, the Irish, who make talking an art form, have a whole range of blessings and wishes:
May you live as long as you want, and never want as long as you live.
A toast to your coffin. May it be made of 100-year old oak. And may we plant the tree together, tomorrow.
May you never forget what is worth remembering, or remember what is best forgotten.
May you be in heaven 1\2 hour before the devil knows you’re dead.
Still, awash amidst this Irish eloquence, one saying stood out to me above the rest, at first because it made me chuckle. To call someone slightly off, inadequate or at least obviously lacking, the Irish say that he is “two sandwiches short of a picnic basket.”
Ever since I kissed the Blarney stone, that phrase occasionally tickles my mind—only not directed toward someone else. I have reinterpreted it. I say it to myself when I can’t juggle the hundred balls that are thrown at me all at once every day; when I try hard to be on time and instead I’m late; when with my best efforts at improvement, today looks just like yesterday; when life expects more of me than I can sometimes deliver. In other words, I sometimes say this to myself during the normal vicissitudes of this hectic life we all are racing through.
Then I say, I guess on that one I was just two sandwiches short of a picnic basket.
It sounds gentle to me, a bit forgiving, a humane and slightly humorous way of saying, “Whoops! Yet again I demonstrate fallibility.”
I can say that without self-reproach or condemnation because it reminds me that ultimately the bridegroom has invited me to a feast, and what I have to do is accept that invitation with all my heart.
With my best efforts I will still probably arrive two sandwiches short of a picnic basket, but He has enough to fill my baskets to overflowing. He feeds me milk and honey without price and He always gives enough and to spare.
My picnic basket being full is not all about me.
So I kissed the Blarney stone, burst into eloquence with new Irish sayings, and came back to the familiar and wondrous ground of my being—the atonement. I am not here to fill my picnic basket. I never could. But for Him, empty baskets are waiting to be filled, and I know in whom I have trusted.
