Brendan

by Morgan Llywelyn

  ‘The ethos for the our order—the mission which would underlie the rules—was to search for God in ordinary things.

  This was the most valuable lesson I had learned on my pilgrimage.

  ‘As with all monastic communities, solemn vows of obedience and humility were essential.

  I needed them as much as anyone else; perhaps more.

  ‘All labours were communal. The day was divided into three parts: five hours for prayer, five hours for work, and five hours for studying Scripture or other spiritual writings.

  Erc had instilled the need for balance in me.

  ‘The brothers were allowed clothing appropriate to the climate. Our food was plain but sufficient in quantity.

  No one at Ard Fert would suffer from hunger.

  ‘We were celibate but not sexless; our manhood found its full and joyful expression in our passion for God.’

  We remain good friends, my little apostle and I. His only purpose is to relieve me of urine, but in spite of being covered by clothing he is a keen observer of our surroundings. Many times he has responded with a throb of pleasure to delights I failed to notice: a bird’s song, the fragrance of a flower, hot sunlight falling across my groin. My little apostle may not participate, but he appreciates.

  After explaining the rules of the new order to the nascent monks, Brendán said with a smile, “You’ve never been monks and I’ve never been an abbot, so we’ll be learning together.”

  All of life is a school.

  I was so startled to hear the voice that it took me several moments to recover. I did not understand what it was trying to tell me; not then. But I would remember the words. And often repeat them.

  “One more thing,” Brendán told his followers. “There must be music. I want us to sing until the sound soaks into the walls.”

  “I can’t sing,” protested Anfudán.

  “Crows sing and so do nightingales,” Brendán said. “You may think you sound like a crow, but it’s all music to God.”

  Ruan smiled. His dark eyes often followed Préachán in flight. In the perfect design of the bird he saw something of God’s own art. He caught frogs and crayfish to offer to the raven, and felt privileged when Préachán finally accepted them from his fingers.

  On the morning of the consecration, while Bishop Molua was sprinkling the four corners of Ard Fert with holy water, Gowrán came running up the slope. He was breathless and red in the face. “Am I too late?” he called when he saw Brendán.

  Tarlách shouted, “Be quiet, you fool! You’re disrupting a consecration!”

  Brendán ran to the newcomer and seized his hands in welcome.

  Later Gowrán told him, “After we parted I wandered. Years passed; I fell ill. I remember collapsing beside a low stone wall. God sent some nuns to find me and carry me to their abbey.”

  Brendán sat up very straight. “Nuns?”

  “The sisters of Cill Íde. Their abbess is…”

  “You met Íta?”

  “She was very kind to me. I would have died but for her ministrations.”

  Brendán could not help himself. “Is she still beautiful?”

  Gowrán was baffled by the question. “Beautiful? She’s a nun.”

  “I…she…of course she is, I know that. We’re old friends, I was just asking about her health.”

  “Her health is excellent as far as I know,” Gowrán replied, watching the other man closely.

  Brendán felt that a further explanation was necessary. “Sister Íta fostered me.”

  “Ah. She didn’t mention it.”

  “You talked about me with her?” Brendán did his best to sound casual.

  But he had already given too much away and Gowrán was far from simple-minded.

  In the years to come, it was not Gowrán’s physical strength I relied on, but his sensitivity. He said little, observed much, understood everything.

  The nuns had rescued ailing travellers before, nursing them back to health—or burying them in consecrated ground when they were beyond help. Íta saw nothing unusual in Gowrán’s arrival until she sat beside his bed and heard his feverish ramblings; the disjointed recounting of his conversations with Brendán, son of Finnlugh.

  When he began to recover she urged him to talk more about Brendán. “He’s a friend of mine,” Íta explained, without going into detail, “and I am glad to have news of him.”

  “Brendán was good to me,” Gowrán told her. “People are not always good to me. I’ve been called a fool but I am not a fool.”

  “I’m sure you’re not.”

  “Brendán made me aware that I am a pilgrim too. I need more guidance, Sister Íta. I’ve been wandering and wandering and I know God talks to me, but I don’t understand what he says.”

  Íta looked sympathetic. “I’m afraid that happens to us all, Gowrán. The important thing is to want to understand. Being with others who are on the same journey helps. Brigid of Cill Dara has recently opened her abbey to monks as well as nuns, and I am inspired to follow her example. Perhaps your friend Brendán will join us. Would you consider the monastic life, Gowrán?”

  “I might.”

  “Think about it,” she suggested.

  But before Gowrán could make a decision, Íta received Brendán’s letter.

  The abbess of Cill Íde went to the chapel alone. As she knelt in the house of God, her lips framed the word: “abbot.”

  Past a certain point, there is no going back.

  “If you do decide to join a monastery,” Íta had told Gowrán, “I can tell you where to find your friend Brendán.”

  From the beginning, Ard Fert blossomed.

  ‘There were not enough hours in the day to contain our happiness,’ Brendán wrote many years later. ‘We prayed together and studied together and worked together, and no task was difficult because it was shared. God was our silent but supportive companion in all our endeavours. Lacking fields to farm, the brothers farmed the sea. Most of them were local men to whom boats were almost another limb, but a few of those first monks came from further inland and had to be taught the skills of seamanship. They rejoiced in their learning as I had once rejoiced in mine.

  ‘They did indeed sing as they worked, and their joy spread outward in concentric circles. When I began receiving applications from would-be novices, the guesting house in Tearmónn Eirc was appropriated as a novitiate for the monastery. Next came the scriptorium, to which we added a separate workshop—Brother Ruan needed space for his illuminations.’

  Two of the three I sought had joined us. It was too much to hope we might add Colmán to our brotherhood. The warrior might well be dead.

  The dissolution of boundaries between Erc’s Sanctuary and Ard Fert resulted, in a practical sense, in the expansion of the diocesan seat. Bishop Molua appointed an energetic young parish priest for Tra Lí and spent more of his time on organisational matters, though he lacked Erc’s ability in that regard. Brige’s duties also were enlarged; soon she was asking other young women to help her.

  When Brendán caught a glimpse of his sister in full sail, performing the never-ending tasks appropriate to her station, he felt comforted. They had almost no time together and yet they were together; there was a female presence in his life.

  It would have been a desert otherwise.

  In the refectory Brendán did not sit at the head of the table but halfway down the side, between Brother Gowrán and Brother Ruan. The abbot enjoyed good conversation but preferred to eat in a companionable silence. He was taken aback when he heard one of the brothers tell a prospective novice, “The abbot is so humble he eats amongst us rather than ruling from above.”

  Brendán confided to Brige, “I’m not comfortable with my reputation; it’s based on the tales other people tell about me and the Irish tendency to embroider a story.”

  “Both of your pilgrimages,” she reminded him, “were real.”

  He patted her hand. “Thank you for reminding me.”

  The arrival of a letter
was always an event, whether it came in the hand of a runner or the pack of a trader. Fionn-barr wrote, “You have brought me out into the world again, Brendán. Inspired by your achievements at Ard Fert, I have founded an ecclesiastical community in the Corcaigh, the marshy place, on the River Lee. There is a growing demand among the Irish for centers of worship.”

  We yearn to believe, but do we also yearn to worship? It seems so, which prompts the next question: why? Would an omniscient, omnipotent God require us to worship him merely to satisfy his vanity? I think not.

  Perhaps we were given the need to worship to impel us to do something for ourselves. To seek that which we worship; to grow.

  Chapter 20

  As one year gave way to the next, Brendán feared he was no longer growing. He was always busy but it was external busyness, not the inward burnishing of a soul. With Préachán clinging to his shoulder, he began visiting the strand again, and the boats. And the sea.

  One evening Ruan saw Brendán returning from the bay with a far-off look in his eyes. “You’re going on another pilgrimage, Brother Abbot,” he remarked.

  “How did you know?”

  Ruan shrugged.

  Bishop Molua was less sanguine. “An abbot cannot keep going on pilgrimages because he’s restless—you have responsibilities.”

  I was beginning to hate that word.

  Molua was disappointed and I could not blame him. I wasn’t conforming to the model my predecessors had created for abbots. But a conformist is not creative. A conformist only does what others have done before him. Bishop Erc believed creativity identified a person as being spiritually alive. I agreed.

  God made me restless for a reason. It was up to me to find out why.

  For his second voyage Brendán had a definite destination in mind. He wanted to visit the land the Romans called Brittania. Patrick’s birthplace was an appropriate subject for a pilgrimage. He constructed a larger, sturdier boat and invited four monks—Eber, Aedgal, Cerball, and Gowrán—to be his crew.

  After Brendán made the announcement, an angry Ruan burst into the abbot’s cell. “You can’t leave me behind again! I was your friend before any of the others, Brendán. I insist on going with you this time.”

  Brendán raised his eyebrows. “You insist? Obedience is the first rule of the order, Brother Ruan. I had a good reason for not choosing you; we’ve been over this before.”

  Ruan was not mollified. “You think you’re being kind to me because I hate the sea, but I don’t hate it half as much as I hate seeing you and Préachán sail away without me.” It was the longest speech Ruan had ever made. Brendán’s eyebrows went a notch higher.

  “What about your work?” he inquired. “You can’t illuminate manuscripts in a boat.”

  “Serving God is my work,” Ruan said with dignity. “I can do that anywhere.”

  Still Brendán hesitated. “We are made as we are for a reason,” he told his friend. “I was made restless. You were made to hate the sea. God has his reasons; I don’t think we should go against them.”

  “Let it be on my head, then,” said Ruan.

  Certain bright spots gleam in the memory when all else fades. Some are important, some just…are. The day we first put the new boat in the water, a wide high sky and a sharp wind blowing, and the brothers as excited as the boys of Cill Íde. Four men at the oars and one at the rudder. A raven in the prow. And myself at the sail.

  Glancing over my shoulder and seeing Ruan smile.

  The direction the voyage took was not left up to wind and wave. Brendán studied the night sky intently, reading the map of the stars.

  I overheard one of the brothers call me ‘the Navigator’ behind my back. He could have said it to my face; I considered the title a compliment. The name stuck.

  They made landfall on the western coast of Brittania close to the border of Alba. After securing the boat they wandered some distance inland, seeking Patrick’s birthplace. Préachán was more interested in the huge fat moths he kept seeing. He awkwardly abandoned Brendán’s shoulder for a hunting expedition, hopping along as if pedestrianism were natural to him. Brendán started to intervene, then decided against it.

  He has to live his life.

  In time Préachán caught up with them again, looking very pleased with himself. Part of a moth’s wing still protruded from the side of his beak.

  The monks had no success in finding Patrick’s birthplace. None of the natives they encountered had even heard of the man. The Irish had to be satisfied with a limited tour of the land that had endured the invasion—and departure—of Caesar’s legions.

  The latter had been more destructive than the former.

  In Britannia the foreign conquerors had found a complex, and in some ways highly sophisticated, tribal culture and torn it apart, replacing the ancient ways with strict order. Roman order was anathema to the free-spirited British Celts, but over almost four centuries they had learned to adapt. They had accepted Roman social structure, Roman bureaucracy—and, when it came, Roman Christianity. Then the Romans pulled out.

  Anything remotely resembling civilisation went with them.

  We picked our way across fallow fields and stumbled along a broken Roman road. It was an education to see what could become of iron and ambition: the trappings of empire. Rusting bits of metal half buried in the dirt. Weeds pushing up through cracks in the pavement, and the forest crowding in. I told Préachán, “The end of the world will look like this.”

  Christianity had survived in this place, but with a unique texture. The strands were woven by passionate Gaelic highlanders descended from the Irish Dal Riada; by clever, lowland Picts who used ogham; and by the remnants of British tribes who no longer knew how to form a cohesive society. The monks encountered a few Christians, but they were not made welcome. The natives were understandably suspicious of outsiders.

  When Ruan heard a rumour of abandoned books in a deserted Roman villa, Sechnall and Cerball went with him to look for them. They returned to the boat with armloads of plunder.

  Brendán seized upon Athanasius’s Life of Antony. Bound in mildewed leather, the manuscript itself was still intact.

  “Athanasius was the bishop of Alexandria during the fourth century,” Brendán told his companions. “I studied about him with Bishop Erc. Athanasius gained fame through his opposition to the ‘Arian Heresy,’ which denied the divinity of Christ and made him subordinate to God the Father. The heresy had seized the imagination of powerful intellectuals such as Emperor Constantine. Constantine forced Athanasius into exile not once but twice, yet he never recanted and ultimately triumphed. Here in my hands I hold that triumph. Words, brothers. Written words!”

  The discovery set the tone for the voyage. Brendán and his monks slowly made friends among some of the half wild natives; visited Roman forts disintegrating from weather and neglect; chanted the divine office in churches where only two or three old women comprised the congregation—and searched for books. Searched for the spoils the conquerors had left behind.

  The Isle of the Britons had been claimed for Christ, but the Christians were too busy trying to survive in a changed world to learn how to read. They let the Irish help themselves to manuscripts that they would only burn for fuel.

  “Does every addition require a subtraction?” Brendán wondered aloud to the raven.

  Préachán busied himself preening his feathers. He might never fly again, but he remained prepared.

  When they returned to Ard Fert, the abbot assigned a new task to Brother Ruan and Brother Sechnall. “I shall send Dianách to find a bard and bring him here; not a Christian, but one of the…”

  “Pagans?” Sechnall interrupted.

  “I wasn’t going to say that. I just want a bard who hasn’t been influenced yet by Christianity—someone who can recite the ancient tales as they have always been told, warm with living breath. And I want you to write them down.”

  Occasionally Brendán slipped away from his duties to stand in the doorway and wa
tch. Listening to the bard. Hearing the deep sure voice of a man whose soul still lived in another time.

  The words, the words, the precious words! The memories of individuals and the history of our race, caught like a flower in ice and preserved for the time to come.

  When Brendán announced he was planning yet another voyage, Bishop Molua realised, even before he spoke the words, that they had been inevitable for a long time. “Continuity is important in a monastic community, Brendán. If your travels mean more to you than administrating a monastery, I think the time has come to consider another abbot for Ard Fert. It is customary to appoint new abbots from within their own order. Is there one above others who…?” He left the question open, offering Brendán the tribute of naming his successor.

  Brendán studied the backs of his hands. They were broad and strong, with flexible fingers and powerful sinews; hands capable of much more than the gentle duties of an abbot. “The brothers here are all good men,” he said thoughtfully. “Yet none of them has the exact combination of qualities needed for an abbot.”

  Molua’s eyes tightened at the corners. “And you do? I’m not so sure anymore. There is too much rebel in you, Brother Abbot.”

  Brendán looked up. Met Molua’s eyes. “There is one man who would be ideal in my opinion,” he said. “He’s not in Ard Fert, but he could continue what I’ve begun and probably do it better.”

  The bishop was clearly angry now; Brendán had pushed him too far. “If you expect me to flatter you into staying, you’re making a mistake. I suggest you write a letter to the person you mention—preferably tomorrow.”

  I contrived to look contrite.

  The very next day I wrote a letter to Fionn-barr. He knew of the burdens on my soul, and I knew he had completed the establishment of his Christian community by the Lee and was looking for a new way to serve God.