Gowrán put an arm around the young monk’s shoulders and led him away.
Brendán struggled to keep his grief in check, knowing that if he gave way the other monks would not be able to bear it. He waited until after the funeral; until Ruan had been laid to rest in a new robe of bleached linen with his crucifix in his hands. When the crypt was closed, Brendán fled to Brige.
His sister folded her arms around him. “Weep,” she said. And he did.
After the last tear had been wrung out of him he said, “Poor Fursu will blame himself all his life, but it wasn’t his fault. It was mine. I knew Ruan hated the sea, I should never have let him go with me. If I had really thought about it—really thought about him…
“The real cruelty of death isn’t the loss of life, Brige. As Christians we believe the soul is immortal. The pain comes from realising you never told someone how much you loved them until it was too late.
“I should have told Bishop Erc, but I was young then. Darting here, darting there, harder to catch than a minnow in a waterfall. I was so busy being me I didn’t give much thought to other people. After Erc died, I realised my mistake, yet I didn’t apply the lesson to anyone else. Now Ruan’s gone too. It all happens so fast….”
There were more tears after all. Brige held him and stroked his hair until at last he fell asleep, exhausted, with his head in her lap. She sat in the twilight, waiting for Bishop Molua to return to his house and take Brendán to Ard Fert.
Some of my crew claimed a giant serpent with writhing coils and flaming eyes erupted from the sea. Others insisted a gryphon swooped down from the sky with gaping beak and outstretched talons. I did not see the monster until it was upon us. Everything happened so quickly, I only had a fleeting impression of vast, leathery wings and the head of a lion.
Terror has many faces.
The monks cried aloud, begging God for mercy.
We were Christians. In our boat we carried no weapons, nothing dedicated to the destruction of life. The shadow of the monster blackened out the light as if the sun had set. We had bladed implements for preparing food and cutting wood, but in our distress we could not find them. We were helpless.
“Good Lord, deliver us!” I cried in the darkness.
Only my ears told me what happened next.
There was a scream, a loud rustling noise, then a harsh cawing sound, followed by another and very different scream. A mighty struggle took place just above us. Turbulence roiled the air as we—all except Colmán—cowered in the bottom of the boat. We pulled up our hoods and tried to make ourselves as small as we could.
We were not merely small, we were insignificant. What was happening had nothing to do with us, I realised. Other forces were at work. Wars are waged for many reasons between many antagonists, and the sounds are always appalling: the rending of flesh and the crunching of bone; the long slimy slither of intestines ripped from a body cavity.
When silence came the monks remained too frightened to move. Colmán was still standing, though like the rest of us he had covered his head. Now he threw back the hood. He said in a relieved voice, “Arise, brothers. The danger has passed. See for yourselves.”
We got to our feet and went to the sides of the boat. Huge chunks of bloody flesh were floating on the water. A frightful stench arose as if the meat had been rotting for a long time. My crew stared in fascination. Later some of them would claim the flesh was covered with scales. Others insisted it had patches of fur.
But that was not what I saw. Averting my eyes from the disgusting spectacle in the sea, I raised them in gratitude towards Heaven. Thus I alone witnessed the black raven’s feather drift lazily downward to settle, victorious, in the bottom of the boat.
We sailed on.
Chapter 23
‘After the death of Brother Ruan,’ Brendán wrote in his journal, ‘I abandoned my plan to visit Rome and Athens.’ That was the penance I assigned myself.
‘With God’s help I built several chapels on Corca Dhuibhne and founded another monastery on one of the islands that lay beyond the end of the peninsula. A number of people lived on the largest of these islands, An Blascaod Mór, the Great Blasket, so the monks and I built a church for them as well.’
Being out on the islands was as close as Brendán would allow himself to being at sea again.
Ruan’s death forced me to think about dying as I had never done before. The young believe themselves immortal, but I was older now.
He found Fionn-barr where he often was: on his knees in the chapel at Ard Fert. “Brother Abbot, as my spiritual confidante you’re the only person I can talk to about this. The resurrection was Christ’s victory over the grave, but…”
“Yes, Brother Brendán?” Fionn-barr urged.
“What about the rest of us? I used to talk a lot of fanciful nonsense about death and dying—until Ruan died. Then I discovered those words were no comfort to me. The blunt fact is, death is final. The man I knew has been destroyed. All that he was is lost.”
Fionn-barr laid a steadying hand on his arm. “I’m a bit older than you and I’ve had more time to think about such things. Instead of being interesting, they begin to be urgent. Listen to me, Brendán. Everything that lives, dies. There are no exceptions. We are born to die and whatever happens along the way is extra. Death seems to be the whole point of life. So it must have a purpose.” He fixed a stern gaze on the younger man. “Why do we die?”
Brendán slumped deeper into his misery. “That’s what I keep asking myself. Why?”
“But you already know the answer.”
Brendán looked up in surprise. “Me?”
“You’ve said it often enough. ‘All of life is a school.’ Where did you hear that?”
“I’m not sure. It just came to me one day.”
I wasn’t about to say what he wanted to hear. I have some humility.
“Whatever the source, you spoke truly. I knew it the first time I heard you, just as I know when a harper strikes the right chord. If all of life is a school then death is just another lesson, Brendán.”
We build ourselves stone by stone, as one builds an oratory. Friends and foes alike contribute useful material. Some of it we have to dig out for ourselves. The hardest lessons become the foundation of the man.
The monastic movement in Ireland was going from strength to strength. Brendán’s follower Fionán founded a community on the pinnacles of a submerged mountain rising from the Western Sea, almost a day’s sailing from Altraighe-Caille. He dedicated the site to the archangel Michael and called it Sceilg Mhichil—Michael’s Crag.
A boat landing was prepared at the base and more than six hundred steps cut into the shaley sandstone. Near the north summit Fionán built a cluster of beehive huts, round on the outside but square on the inside, and a stone oratory in the shape of a boat. The monks who lived on Sceilg Mhichil would subsist on fish, seabirds and their eggs, and a few vegetables grown in crevices in the rock by mixing seaweed with bird droppings to form soil.
They would be anchorites: recluses for God.
Applicants were interviewed at Ard Fert before being accepted. Considering the hardships of the life and the inaccessibility of the location, there were a surprising number of them. Monks courageous enough to join Fionán far out in the ocean had one overriding purpose: to prepare themselves for the final journey to God.
Like Brendán, they were men who had absorbed the beliefs of a much older faith and adapted them to create their own version of Christianity. Where better to practice such a religion, they thought, than in one of the Thin Places? According to Celtic belief, Thin Places were areas where two disparate worlds touched, such as land and sea, or mountain and sky. In Thin Places the boundaries between this world and the next were almost non-existent.
Sceilg Mhichil, halfway between earth and heaven, was the exemplar.
Brendán was making his way back to Ard Fert from a meeting with Bishop Molua when he saw a figure on the path ahead of him, a figure that seemed familia
r. He trotted to catch up. “Colmán? Can that possibly be you?”
The man turned around.
His face was more freckled than ever, but the red hair was grizzled with grey—what hair remained. His head was shaved from ear to ear in a monk’s tonsure.
“Brendán?” he asked tentatively.
“Have I changed so much?”
“Have I?”
Both men laughed.
Brendán escorted Colmán into the monastery and insisted upon washing his feet and giving him a bowl of wine and some bread before they settled down to talk.
“After our meeting I thought about things you’d said,” Colmán related. “Not often, but often enough. My life went on; I fought more battles—won some, lost some—and killed a few men. I began to wonder if they were sins on my soul; if I had a soul. So I went in search of a priest. We talked and I thought about things he said. Not often, but enough. First thing I knew I was being baptised.”
“So you joined a band of people who would accept just anybody?”
Colmán grinned. The grin was still crooked. “You have a good memory, you. I’ve been a Christian for seven or eight years now and I’ve never regretted it. For once I can be certain I’m on the winning side.”
“In the fight to save our souls from the devil, victory’s not assured until the last moment,” Brendán said.
“That’s why I decided to enter a monastery: no king demands that a monk to take up the sword. Besides, I thought there would be fewer worldly temptations.
“I’ve always liked women; a lot. Once I told a woman that she had eyes like two pearls. The chief of my clan had some pearls he’d acquired in trade; they were grey and lustrous and so were this woman’s eyes. Then something sparkled in them and I realised her eyes were not opaque at all, but as deep as my heart.”
Colmán drew a deep, slow breath. “She died,” he said. “The woman with the grey eyes. That’s me done with women. I came to join the brothers on Sceilg Mhichil because they never see a woman. Or even the shadow of one.”
Brendán leaned one elbow on the refectory table and studied his friend’s face closely. “Suppose there really were no women on earth, not anywhere. How would you feel then?”
The response was immediate. “I wouldn’t want to live.”
“All right,” said Brendán.
In his journal he wrote, ‘I persuaded Brother Colmán to join us at Ard Fert instead of Sceilg Mhichil. He brought qualities which the other brothers lacked.’
Colmán was concerned about the condition of his body as well as his soul. With the abbot’s permission, he devised a programme based on the training of warriors. He soon had the monks of Ard Fert fighting mock battles with wooden staffs; leaping and lunging with great enthusiasm and laughing like boys again. Brendán’s erstwhile crewmen had grown sluggish by the time Colmán arrived, but he cured them.
Although he was faithful to his vows, inevitably a monk encountered women around the parish. Brendán noticed Colmán following them with his eyes. One in particular: a small but sturdy woman with chapped red hands.
Not every man is meant to be a monk. In different circumstances, I myself…
When he knew Molua was busy elsewhere in the parish, Brendán visited the bishop’s house. Brige met him at the doorway and, as always, threw her arms around his neck. He returned her hug, then took a step backwards and tried to see his sister as another man might see her.
Small but sturdy. Chapped red hands. A warm armful of woman, but not young anymore.
We are none of us young any more.
“Have you ever regretted not marrying?” Brendán asked his sister.
She put her fists on her hips. “I’ve had the care of two demanding old men in my life,” she replied more sharply than he expected. “What would I want with another one?”
“I thought you liked taking care of people.”
“Did you ever ask me? Did anyone ever ask me?”
Brendán was taken aback. “But you seem so content as you are.”
“What good would it do me to act otherwise? I could be as sour as vinegar but that wouldn’t change anything.”
When we were children a casual remark of my sister’s had expanded my horizon. From the vantage point of empathy I reached out to her.
“If you could change things, what would you do differently?”
Brige did not answer at first. Even a hypothetical offer of power was unfamiliar to her.
Brendán waited.
“I would be a nun,” she said softly.
“Because you want to, or because that’s what Bishop Erc wanted for you?”
“I don’t know what the bishop wanted and it doesn’t matter now anyway. When I visit you at Ard Fert and hear the brothers singing…when I see the comradeship you share…when I feel the sense of peace within the monastery walls…my whole heart leaps with longing.”
Chapter 24
“I’ve stayed in one place for longer than I can tolerate,” Brendán finally admitted to the abbot. “God wants me to be moving again. Brother Colmán has suggested we found a monastery on the estuary of the River Shannon, in the tribeland of his mother.”
Fionn-barr asked, “Are there any monasteries nearby?”
“None, he tells me.”
“Then go with God’s blessing.”
“One thing more, Brother Abbot.”
“Yes?”
“I would like to found a nunnery for my sister.”
In his journal, Brendán recorded, ‘Together with my sister, Brige, Brother Colmán, and several other monks, I travelled from Ard Fert to found a monastery on Inis Dadroum, the Island of Two Backs, in the Shannon estuary. Afterwards we built the nunnery of Annagh Down, named for the Marsh of the Fort, by the shore of Lough Corrib. The bishop of the diocese performed the consecration, and six good women joined my sister to take their vows.’
During that time Brendán had watched Brige and Colmán closely, to detect any indication that he was making a mistake. In his imagination he could see the two of them married; could see himself as an elderly monk sitting on a little stool by their hearth while their children played around his feet and tugged on his robe.
But that would never be. Brige was too old anyway. And from the beginning, I believe, God had other plans for her.
Colmán recognised that too. A tiny lamp that had never really been lit went out. He threw his heart and soul into the monastic life and became the stalwart of Ard Fert.
Brendán wrote, ‘In the Year of Our Lord 545, Ciarán, who had been trained at Clon Ard and at Magh Enna, founded the monastery of Clon ma Nois on the banks of the Shannon, beside the great road leading to Tara. The twin pillars of monasticism and literacy had become increasingly important in Ireland.
‘The battle of Cul-Dreimnhe was fought because of a book. A widely-travelled monk known as Colm Cille had transcribed a manuscript without the knowledge of its author, who was very much alive and took umbrage. The author applied the matter to the high king, Diarmaid, for judgement. Diarmaid decided on behalf of the aggrieved author, stating, ‘To every cow belongs its calf.’
‘Colm Cille and his followers joined in battle against the king and his followers, with the usual bloody outcome but no definitive result.’
Once the monastic movement took hold in Ireland it spread like fire through dry brush. Ard Fert was filled to the brim; more accommodation was needed for the numbers who wanted to join the order.
I had thought pride and ambition were stifled in me but I was wrong. Or perhaps it was God who made the suggestion, to test my humility. If so, I failed.
Brother Abbot was surprised by the request. “You want to found another monastery and become its abbot, Brother Brendán? You had Ard Fert, yet you willingly relinquished the abbacy to me. Why start over again?”
Brendán possessed the rich vocabulary of the Gael and a working knowledge of Latin and Greek, yet he could not find words to describe the force which impelled him. The apparently random dis
order of life that blew seeds across the earth and stars through the heavens.
He only knew that he was being driven. If not on sea, then on land.
Outward.
‘In the Year of Our Lord 556, the monastery of Clon Fert, the Meadow of the Grave, was founded. The name was chosen because of an ancient tomb we were careful to leave undisturbed. The brothers included most of those who had been with me from the beginning. Although they had to travel a considerable distance to the new monastery, their departure left room for new brothers to enter Ard Fert.’
For a healthy man in dry weather, Clon Fert was fifteen days’ brisk walk from Ard Fert but only three from Annagh Down. Brendán chose to build on an island in a bog, thus fulfilling Erc’s requirements for a diseart, a deserted place. With the help of the nearest Christians, he and his monks erected a large earthwork bank to protect the monastery from floods and the depredations of wild animals. Timber and sandstone were used in construction, which combined features from both Ard Fert and Clon Ard. A church stood at the exact centre. Facing east.
During the years when I was founding monastic communities in Ireland I had never visited Cill Íde, though once or twice I had passed within a day’s walk. A temptation avoided is a temptation denied. It made me stronger. We corresponded frequently and I was content—if not as blissfully content as Brige at Annagh Down. Naturally I invited Íta to the consecration of Clon Fert. I didn’t think she would come.
Ninnidh was the first of the invited guests to arrive. He was carrying a magnificent gilded book satchel with him. “This is something I collected on my travels,” he told Brendán, “and I want you to have it for your new monastery.”
Brendán fumbled with the elaborately engraved silver clasp, which was set with beads of amber. “You’ve brought me a book? I’m impressed, Ninnidh.”
Brendan Page 23
