By: Jeff Meade

A few years ago, I attended Sunday Mass at St. John the Baptist Church in Ballyvaughan, County Clare. I'm probably not what you'd call an orthodox Catholic, but I'm entirely in accord with the church on the essentials. I've always loved the Lord's Prayer—for obvious reasons, I think. Mine is a pretty stripped-down faith, and "The Lord's Prayer" reduces the things I believe to what's most important ... and the prayer could hardly come from a more authoritative source.

I also love the Irish language, although my mastery of it has never progressed beyond, "Hi" and "How are ya." I can also say a pretty decent "Goodbye." Native Irish speakers no doubt would be relieved to hear me say it.

Those two seemingly unrelated loves came together in one memorable moment at that Mass, when It came time for the congregation to say the "Our Father." I assumed it would be in English. It was in Irish, of course. And they sang it. That moment stays with me still.

I've wanted to hear "Ár nAthair" again, but no one back in Ireland—not the little church itself, the diocese or what have you—ever returned my e-mails.

Then it dawned on me that Terry Kane, one of our great Philadelphia-area singers in the Irish language, might know it. I asked her, and she did—so I asked her to record it for me. The recording that follows is the result.

If Terry sounds a bit raspy, it's because I caught her at the end of a long day of gigs during March—a very busy time for Irish traditional musicians. And the circumstances of the recording are perhaps equally inauspicious. I was at Finnigan's Wake covering the Hibernian Hunger Project's Irish Stew Cook-Off, and Terry was in town for a gig. So we met at Finnigan's and looked for a quiet place to set up my little handheld recorder.

Of course, finding a quiet room at Finnigan's in March is pretty much impossible. And then it dawned on both of us that there might be one room in the house where we might find a bit of quiet. Predictably good acoustics, too. So I handed the recorder to Terry, and into the basement ladies room of Finnigan's Wake she went.

And so, here it is, "The Lord's Prayer" in Irish, recorded in less than sacred circumstances. Terry's lovely voice really brings it all back for me. I hope it does the same for you.

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