And here I was looking out over the conundrum called Cork City, trying once again to make sense of life. Other people came to Ireland for a week or two, unlimbered their bank cards, got drunk in a castle, bashed golf balls through the rain, then followed their post cards home to reality: the office, the landscaping business, the spreadsheets, and lawsuits in L.A. or London.

Oh no, not me. I had to seek the whole Tír na nÓg. That’s the isle of the happy, the land of eternal youth, the mystical reality that fabled Irish dreamers from St. Brendan onwards quested for in order to stop time. Until the year 2000, I had been running my herd in exemplary order: three kids with perfect American teeth, big Connecticut house with heated swimming pool, mortgage paid like clockwork. But I was stuck with a sense of the repetition of mid-life and wanted an adventure. My very Irish-American wife felt the same, and so, one day we up and moved our children to the land of our forebears. There I learned that Tír na nÓg could appear without warning.

The phone rang, then stopped. I was musing by my bay window when it rang again.

“You’re coming to the cathedral tonight, right?” This was not a vicar or a priest calling, but a former oil rigger who graduated to selling oil fields, and then chucked that career to become an oil painter, a calling he pursued with his fingers, rather than a brush. It had come to pass that Bill Griffin was holding an exhibition of his artwork in the most hallowed church in Cork City, the sombre French-Gothic styled fantasia of St. Finbarr’s.

“Of course, Bill. I’m looking at it this moment,” I said, which was true. My house high on a hill offered a panoramic view of the entire city, from its inner warrens wrapped by twin branches of the River Lee to the spires of St. Finbarr’s soaring like exclamation points.

“Good, because I’m stuck. I need a bartender.”

“You what?”

Here he roared with his trademark mead-hall laughter.

“At St. Finbarr’s. We’re serving wine and it’s going to be packed. Can you come early?”

“Well I guess so,” I agreed. My teenaged daughter and son were ensconced in their Irish boarding schools, while our youngest at twelve, Owen, was at his rowing club and had a lift home arranged. My wife Jamie was attending a theater opening in Dublin.

“Give me a few minutes,” I said and hurried toward the door. By now, I had enjoyed many adventures in my adopted land, but this one took the biscuit—serving as the first bartender in a cathedral in the history of Ireland! The thought nonetheless gave me pause. St. Finbarr’s was an iconic place. It stood on ground first sanctified by a seventh-century mystic who had spent years praying by the mountain source of the River Lee, where he lived on an islet in a lake that came to be called Gougane Barra (“the rocky cave of Fionbharr”). A worker of miracles, the saint eventually travelled downriver to build a monastery whence to spread the word of God to his fellow Celts. That priory is considered the birthplace of Cork City, and the cathedral was built on its ruins.

And I was supposed to serve as its bartender?

To get to St. Finbarr’s, I first had to traverse our neighborhood. This was a curious world in itself, a red brick terrace that was watchful as a moving curtain, and a far cry from the forest solitude my children had enjoyed in their previous lives back in Connecticut.

It was a challenge to exit my cul de sac without being detained. Ahead, a bearded poet prepared for his evening run, and beside him a gentle old man sat murmuring to himself in the spring sun. Little boys kicked a soccer ball between the parked cars. Beyond them all, a white-haired grandmother was sweeping her stoop so I knew it was between 6:00 and 6:10 p.m., the precise time she did this every evening. Her job was to brush aside chaos, which blows around Ireland like a supernatural force.

At the next corner I came to an escarpment with a prodigious, if more cockeyed view. Below sat the island of downtown Cork with its eighteen bridges. From its enormous outer harbor a procession of trawlers and container ships pushed up the estuary toward the docklands where the River Lee splits into its twin branches that encase the town. Over the rooflines below, all I could see was a progression of the boats’ smokestacks sliding forward as if my adopted city were being invaded by top hats.

Step by step, I proceeded down the escarpment and, for no apparent reason, began thinking of an art video I had just seen of a man who starts walking across town and finds that he is beginning to defy gravity. He is so very light that he maneuvers sideways and begins planting his feet up a tree. At its pinnacle he realises the most beautiful thing of all—he is free.

That is what one gets from moving abroad—a strange and fresh new perspective, I thought, as I headed down to Cork’s main drag, Patrick Street.

“How are ye, boy?” several citizens greeted me in the native style. Everybody in boisterous Cork, including broken-down octogenarians, can and will be hailed with that aural slap on the back. We had found no such exuberance in chilly Connecticut, and Jamie and I prayed that the madcap spontaneity of Ireland would enrich our children, too.

As always, Patrick Street was abuzz: a frazzle-haired Russian electric guitarist blasted Jimi Hendrix agonistas while Jamaican acrobats tossed each other around like mutual irritants; a few yards beyond, the local Peruvian bunch worked their Pipes of Pan act into Andean dimensions of monotony even Prozac could not channel. Fore and aft of these buskers, Romanian gypsy women sat on their squares of cardboard, whimpering, “Help me please, Mister!”

Such was the new life I had found.

Bill thinks big. So when he decided to have a gala exhibition of his paintings, he ignored Gallery This and Gallery That and walked about, scanning the horizon. With under a quarter of a million people, Cork is a small canvas whose focal points are vivid. Its most magnificent are the towering 240-foot spires of St. Finbarr’s, which first started climbing into the sky in 1865.

“That might do,” Bill thought, brushing aside the fact that the cathedral was a high seat of the Church of Ireland, which means Protestant, and that tribe in this country tends to venerate both order and tradition. In short, St. Finbarr’s was the last place anyone would expect to host a raucous event such as Bill had in mind.

But Bill loved this Gothic shrine, from its gargoyles leering beneath soaring spires, to its vaulted entrances wreathed by haunting bas relief figures from the Last Judgement. Carved by nineteenth century master masons, those tableaux cast uncompromising eyes upon every human who prepares to venture past to seek God. The cathedral’s seventh-century patron saint was said to be so holy that he was called into heaven to be consecrated while still alive. To this day, pilgrims visit Finbarr’s island hermitage in West Cork to parade around his holy well, always in the direction of the sun, and leave strips of cloth—called “clooties”—as tokens of devotion. A few miles away rests another holy well—one of three thousand in Ireland—where Finbarr’s confessor Olan prayed away as well. Beside this arises a rune-inscribed standing stone capped in quartz. Supplicants used to make their so-called “pattern” circles there with that heavy quartz stone on their heads, seeking healing and fertility from pagan and Christian spirits according to their whims.

Bill was pursuing spirits himself, occasionally letting his paintings be guided by visions that come to him after ingesting psychotropic mushrooms. These mycological agents have flourished in Ireland since the ages of the Druids and may explain more ancient religious ecstasy than the modern world can comprehend. Bill works with his fingers for fear that a brush slows inspiration and often composes in darkness as if to make room for a higher light. He thus had no trouble approaching the Protestant bishop of Cork and pronouncing that he, too, was drawn to the sacred. “This cathedral’s beauty is stunning,” said Bill. “But I believe thousands of people in Cork have never even been inside it. Maybe a showing of modern art will draw a lot in.”

The Right Reverend scrutinized the odd supplicant and responded, “This isn’t a circus we’re running here.”

Bill played a clever card. “Aren’t cathedrals also shrines to human art? Hasn’t that always been their role—to display our highest strivings? Why must they only host art that is old?”

The Bishop was stuck with a predicament: Two thirds of the urban Irish had stopped going to church, and the crisis of observance had become especially acute for Protestants, since that dwindling breed comprises just over two percent of the Republic of Ireland’s population. It is hard to inspire crescendos of worshipping plainsong when the pews are nearly vacant.

So it was that a lordly vicar and profane oil rigger broke bread. Bill closed the deal and his inner wheels began to spin. Soon, he convinced a certain liquor distributor to provide free cases of wine and persuaded half the mad, party-loving town—the Irish equivalent to New Orleans—to think that his was to be a premier cultural event.

“How could I not love Cork?” I thought as I shook Bill’s hand and eased into the cathedral. My work table at the front of the church was draped in linen, just like the one on the altar three hundred feet away. But I guessed only one bottle of sacramental wine was kept on hand back there. Under mine, there appeared to be dozens. After uncorking a few, I ventured down the side aisle, where Bill’s paintings hung under subdued lighting, and I filed past dozens more stationed at the transept with its magnificent organ. Many of Bill’s works looked magical to me—there were pictures of confused dunces, dazed mariners, Hindu holy men, all finger-daubed as if from visions and yearnings of unfettered immediacy.

Suddenly, the vaulted doors started groaning open and banging shut. Here in short order appeared the curiosity shop of Cork life: the Lord Mayor with her necklace of heavy gold chain; charming ladies with their suited barristers; newly wealthy entrepreneurs with trousers flecked with plaster drippings from their latest building sites; and motley denizens of Bill’s favorite pubs, many of whom had never paused over a painting before in their lives. Soon I discovered that the one thing they had in common was thirst.

I poured a polite glass of wine for an attractive woman of my acquaintance and proffered it with a smile. This was met with disdain.

“You’re in Ireland for God’s sakes,” said Aoife. “We don’t serve half glasses here, certainly not when they’re free.”

A man called “The Bird” asked for two.

“Why do you want two, Bird?” I asked.

“Because I have two hands,” he said.

“The IRA shot a man on the street outside this door, just for being a Protestant,” someone with similarly urgent fingers said. It was a fellow called “World War,” who knew too much about every battle in history.

“Oh, my God,” I thought, shovelling him a helping of red without making eye contact.

Things got worse.

I stopped filling glasses and switched to merely uncorking the bottles, at a rate of perhaps two a minute. Still, I could not keep up. Two hundred tippling Catholics had invaded this sanctuary of the formerly ruling Anglo-Irish gentry, and a sizeable minority were having their rollicking revenge. Word spread to the homeless shelter and that adventurous bunch came to my linen-draped table with hands outstretched. One fellow lay down for a snooze in a crypt outdoors. Finally, two women set to fighting before the altar, and the distraught bishop appeared in a flurry of green and white robes.

“This is very bad form! I’m afraid you must all leave now!” he said and threw open the exit doors. Bang went the lever on the latest Irish attempt at a grace note.

On the way home, I climbed past a handsome brick-faced Victorian-era hotel that was once known as “The Hospital for the Incurables.” Now it had a wide screen TV in its comfy bar and a health club, as countless ones had sprouted across the country.

Below loomed the current hospice, within whose lawns there often shuffled the apparent last nuns in Ireland, tiny, age-bent creatures like the remnants of a lost tribe.

Outside, a cluster of young Polish construction workers clambered past uttering their “Zs” and “Cs”, four of the four hundred thousand Eastern Europeans who had poured into Ireland, a country of just four million, after their homelands gained accession to the EU in 2004. Twelve hundred years of Viking, Norman, and English invasions brought fewer immigrants to this island. But the country mostly just shrugged and hired the flood of Poles, Lithuanians, and Latvians en masse to tend to its pubs, scrub its floors, and feed a construction boom that would eventually become a fiendish Pandora’s box.

Finally, I told the truth. “There was too much jackass behavior that night in the cathedral, and I’m getting tired of all that. It’s like everybody’s play acting to try to be more Irish or something than the next, and maybe I am doing the same thing myself.”

Bill squinted my way. His fingers tonight were blue. “It’s the feckin’ drink that infests the whole culture. It turns us all into fools, and I was embarrassed by some of what went on as well.”

I suddenly blurted out my concerns. “Sometimes I worry about the direction this country is going in and even whether it’s the right place for my family. I have this fantasy about finding some bolt-hole in the country to share ...