Brendan and the Island That Moved

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The fire is going very nicely. That is the first thing you notice. Seventeen men are sitting on a small, grassy, rather rubbery island in the middle of the ocean, and they have lit a fire, and they have put a pot on it, and the pot is just starting to hum.

It is Easter Saturday. They have been at sea for what feels like a year, and what has actually been about a fortnight. They are very hungry. Someone has found a bit of dried fish. Someone else has found a bit of dried fish that is slightly different from the first bit of dried fish, which counts as variety. And the abbot, who is sitting by himself near the boat, looking at the sea rather than the fire, has just said, in a mild voice, "Brothers, I think you had all better get back in the boat."

Nobody has moved. They are all looking at the pot.

"Now, please," says the abbot.

Underneath them, very slowly, the island has started to swim.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is the voyage of Saint Brendan, from a Latin tale written down about three hundred years after he died, which is a legend and is told here as a legend, and a few of the small conversations are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. One part of the old story, about some birds, we have left out on purpose, and we will tell you why before the end. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let us start with where Brendan comes from, because it is one of the loveliest places in the world and he never stopped talking about it.

It is the south west corner of Ireland. If you have ever seen a map of Ireland, you will remember it as the bit that looks as if somebody took a bite out of the edge of the land and left the teeth marks. Long fingers of rock stick out into the Atlantic. Between the fingers are bays, and in the bays there are islands, and behind the islands, on a clear day, there is nothing at all except the sea, going on and on until it turns into the sky.

That is where a boy called Brendan was born, probably in the year four hundred and eighty-four, or near it. The old books say the year; they do not say what the weather was like, but I think we can guess.

Now, Ireland at that time was a country of small kingdoms and cattle. Cattle were money. A man's wealth was counted in cows, a war was usually about somebody's cows, and the bravest thing a young person could do was to steal somebody's cows and, if possible, bring them back. Imagine a country where the bank, the car showroom and the farm were all the same animal, and the animal had opinions.

And the Christian faith had arrived in that country only about a lifetime before. Saint Patrick had come, as we heard in an earlier episode, and had done his long work, and the gospel had spread along the rivers and the coasts. By Brendan's day there were little monasteries springing up everywhere. They were not like the great stone abbeys that you might picture. They were a ring of small round huts made of wood and wattle, with a little church in the middle, a wall of earth around the outside, a kitchen garden, and a bell. The monks were farmers, copyists, teachers and, as it turns out, sailors.

Brendan was given, as a small child, to a woman called Ita to bring up. Ita is a saint in her own right, and a great one. She lived a few days' walk from Brendan's home, in a place that was later called Killeedy, and she ran a small community of women and a school for children, and she was famous all over Ireland for being kind, clever and impossible to fool. The old stories say that she had a way of knowing, without being told, what a person needed, which is the sort of thing that every foster mother in history has been accused of, and which, in her case, appears to have been true.

The story goes that Brendan once asked her what three things God loved most. She said, and I think this is one of the best answers in all of the saints' stories: that God loves a heart that is clean and has faith, a life that is simple and has a sort of contentment, and a hand that is generous. And what three things did God dislike most? A face that scowls at people, a person who is always sure that they are right, and a heart that is greedy. I don't know whether she said it quite like that. It is how the old story tells it, and I like it, so I'm putting it here, at the beginning, so you can keep it in your pocket for the rest of the night.

Brendan grew up. He studied. He was made a priest, and then an abbot, and he founded monasteries, one after another, and he became well known for his learning, his gentleness, and one more thing, which was that he never seemed to be able to look at the sea without wanting to know what was on the other side of it.

That is the history. That is the part that we can say with some confidence. A real man, a real abbot, a real school at Clonfert, in the middle of Ireland, beside a river. He died there, an old man, a good while after, and he was buried there, and for fifteen hundred years people have remembered his name.

And then there is the other thing. The story of the sea.

The story of the sea was written down in Latin, by somebody whose name we do not know, three hundred years or so after Brendan died. It is called the Navigatio, which just means "the voyage", and it is one of the most popular books of the whole Middle Ages. It was copied out by hand again and again, and translated into French and German and Dutch and Welsh and Irish, and every monastery in Europe seems to have had a copy.

It is a legend. I want to be very clear about that, because we are going to enjoy it, and I don't want anyone to go away thinking that Saint Brendan's actual afternoons were like this. The old story is a wonder tale, like the ones the Irish monks told to each other on long winter evenings, and like all good wonder tales it is true about something other than the weather. It is true about longing. It is true about the way a person can spend their whole life looking for a place that God has already prepared for them, and the way that the looking, if you do it properly, is a sort of prayer.

So here is how it begins.

One evening, the story says, an old monk came to visit Brendan. His name was Barrind, and he had been to sea. He sat by the fire and he told Brendan about an island he had seen, far to the west, beyond the edge of any chart. He called it the Land of Promise of the Saints. It was green. It was full of light. There was no night there, or none that anyone could remember, and the monks who lived there were so peaceful and so happy that Barrind could hardly put it into words. He had only stayed a short while, and he had come home, and he had never been able to stop thinking about it.

Brendan listened. He did not say anything for a long time. And in the morning he called his monks together.

Now, he did not just go and get in a boat. That would be very un-Irish. First he did something much more sensible, which was that he went off by himself and fasted and prayed for forty days, to make sure that he was being asked and not merely being restless. This is a thing worth noticing about the old holy people. They were great travellers, but they did not travel because they were bored. They went where they thought they were sent, and they wanted to be quite sure.

At the end of the forty days he picked fourteen brothers. He told them what he had in mind. And, being good monks, and fond of him, and secretly rather excited, they said yes.

Then he went off to the west coast, to a quiet little bay, with a stream running into it, and they began to build the boat.

I want to stop here, because the boat is my favourite part of the whole story.

The old text tells us exactly how it was built, which is one of the reasons people took it seriously. They made a frame of wood, and the wood was ash and oak, light and bendy. They stretched over it the hides of oxen, tanned in oak bark, which is a thing the Irish knew how to do very well. They sewed the hides together. And then, and this is the detail that I love, they rubbed the seams and the hides all over with butter, to keep the water out. They put a mast in it, and a sail, and they took a spare lot of hides and butter for repairs.

So Saint Brendan's boat was, in the end, a very large, very well-moisturised leather bowl.

You may think that this is the sort of thing that nobody could ever really have sailed across the ocean. And that is what everybody thought, for about a thousand years. But in nineteen seventy-six an Irish-minded Englishman called Tim Severin decided to find out. He and a small crew built a boat exactly as the old book describes: ash frame, ox hides tanned in oak bark, stitched together, greased. They called it Brendan. And they set out from the west of Ireland and sailed, with a good deal of trouble and a good deal of luck, for the better part of two seasons, by way of the Hebrides, the Faroe Islands and Iceland, and finally they landed on the other side of the Atlantic, on the coast of Newfoundland.

The point is not that Saint Brendan went to America. We cannot say that, and he very probably did not. The point is that the boat, the one thing in the old book that sounds the most outrageous, turned out to be perfectly workable, which makes you wonder whether other things in the old book were a bit closer to the sailors' real experience than we thought. Icebergs. Great whales. Fire coming out of a mountain, which sounds a lot like Iceland. They were describing something. They had seen something. Whether Brendan or somebody like him ever saw it is a different question, and we do not know.

All right. The boat is built. The brothers climb aboard.

And just as they are about to push off, three more monks come running down the beach, shouting, and ask to come too.

Brendan looks at them. He says it is a pity. He says he has chosen fourteen, and it is fourteen. The three of them say they have come all this way and they would very much like to go.

The old story takes an unusually grim line here, which I'm not going to follow, and I will only say that it was a story told by people who liked a moral. We will have our three extra brothers and they are very cheerful and they behave themselves, and that is quite enough. Seventeen in a leather boat. It is going to be a cosy voyage.

They pushed off, on a morning with a light wind, and the first thing that happened was nothing.

That was a surprise to the monks, though perhaps it should not have been. They put up the sail, and the wind dropped. They took the sail down and picked up oars, and rowed. They rowed for a day. Then the wind came back, and they sailed. Then it dropped again, and they put the oars out again. And at some point Brendan told them to ship the oars and put the sail down, and said, "Brothers, God will steer."

You may think that this is a terrible plan. Honestly I think the old Irish monks would have agreed with you. But there was a long tradition among them of a sort of pilgrimage called, in their language, the "peregrinatio", which meant that you set out from home, without a particular destination, and you let God decide where you would end up. It was a way of giving up your home for love of him. And a monk who did it was not so much looking for a place as trying to be a person who could be sent.

So they drifted. They drifted for fifteen days, the story says, and the sea was calm, and the sky was wide. They said their prayers three times a day and sang the psalms, and in between the psalms they talked about food, and at the end of the fifteen days they were very pleased with themselves, and they got to the first island.

It was a bare, rocky place, with a high cliff, and a stream tumbling down the side of it. There was not very much on it. But there was, in the middle of the cliff, a little hole in the rock, and in that hole there stood a small, kind-faced dog, who looked at them, and wagged his tail, and went off up the path in front of them as if to say, "This way. Everything's ready."

Everything was ready. At the top of the path there was a hall with a table laid. There were beds. There was water for washing their feet. There was food, and it was good. And there was nobody there at all.

Brendan looked round. And he told his brothers, very firmly, that they could eat and sleep and rest, and that they must not take anything away with them. It was a gift, and they could receive it as a gift, but they were not to treat it as a shop.

And one of the brothers, who had been a little too thoughtful about the silver bridle hanging on the wall, did the wrong thing, and was gently told off for it, and was sorry. I will leave him to the old book. But I want you to notice what the lesson is, because it comes back all through the voyage. Everything on the journey is given. Nothing is earned. A person who sets out to sea for the love of God is going to be fed, now and then, by hands they cannot see. And the only thing they are asked in exchange is to say thank you, and not to grab.

A few days later they came to the second island.

This was a very different sort of place. It was green and low, with soft grass up to the shore, and on the grass, scattered everywhere as far as the eye could see, there were sheep.

They were enormous sheep. They were white, whiter than any sheep that the monks had seen in Ireland, and as big as a good-sized calf. They did not seem to be afraid of anyone. They didn't seem to have a shepherd. They stood about on the grass in the evening light, chewing, looking at the boat with that calm, faintly insulted expression that sheep have in every country in the world.

"This," said one of the brothers, "is not a place I expected."

"No," said Brendan.

"What are we supposed to do with them?"

"I think," said Brendan, "that we are supposed to eat one of them at Easter."

For it was nearly Easter. The old book has a rule about this, which is that in the course of the voyage Brendan and his monks keep Holy Week and Easter in the same places every year. It is a beautiful touch, because it makes a sort of clock out of the story. They are lost on the ocean, but they always know where they are, because they always know what day it is, and the Church's year goes on around them like a lighthouse. Wherever you are in the world, even in a leather boat, even at the edge of the map, on Holy Thursday you remember the Supper, on Good Friday you stand at the cross, and on the night of Holy Saturday you wait.

They kept the holy days among the sheep. On the Saturday night, in the dark, they sang the Easter vigil, and the sheep stood round and listened. There is no record of them saying anything. I think they were moved.

The next morning, which was Easter Sunday, there was a big bird, a sort of sea-eagle, circling overhead, and a few of the brothers thought it was an omen, and Brendan said that it was a bird. And then a man came out of the grass, a servant, whose name we are not given, and he brought bread and fish, and he said that this was the feast of the Lord's rising, and they must eat.

I really do like that. If you've ever been far from home at a feast, you'll know how much it matters that someone, anyone, has laid a table.

It was after the sheep, on the way to the third island, that the monks came to the place that everybody remembers.

It was just before the next Easter. A whole year had gone by. They'd been blown north and south. They'd seen a mountain with fire on top, and a column of something silver and sparkling in the water, which might have been ice and might have been something else. They had been through two storms and one very quiet week. And then, on the Saturday before Easter, they saw an island.

It was a small one. It was low and dark, and there was no tree on it, and the grass was thin. But there was a flat place on the shore that looked fit for a fire, and they were tired of eating cold food in a damp boat, and so they brought the ship in, and Brendan, who was always the last to land, helped the others out.

It was a very quiet island. The rock beneath their feet felt a little odd, a bit smoother and warmer than rock should be. But the monks were hungry, and the day was nearly over, and they lit a fire.

I told you at the start how this goes.

They had put the pot on. They were looking forward to dinner. Brendan, who had stepped away to say his prayers, had come back to the boat to fetch something, and as he stood there, with his hand on the ropes, he felt the ground tremble.

It was a very small tremble. A sort of shiver. The kind of thing you might feel in an old ship when the tide changes. He looked at the fire. He looked at the monks. And he said, in a mild voice, "Brothers, I think you had all better get back in the boat."

Now, I want to say something at this point about how the monks behaved, because it is the best part, and because it is where the old book is at its funniest.

They did not scream. They did not run in circles. They got up quietly, and they walked to the boat, and they climbed in, and they pulled the oars out, and they pushed off from the shore. And then, from a safe distance, with the whole of the Atlantic Ocean for a front lawn, they all turned round together and looked back.

The island was moving. It was swimming. It was making its way, with great dignity, to the open sea, with the fire still burning on its back, and a small thread of smoke going up into the evening air, and the pot, I regret to say, sliding gently down the side.

And a very small voice said, "That was a good pot."

Brendan laughed. I'm sure he did. He was a man who laughed a good deal, according to every account, and I can see him in the stern of the boat with his hand over his mouth, and his shoulders shaking, and seventeen wet and worried and rather hungry monks looking back at him.

And then, when he had got his breath back, he told them what it was.

It was not an island. It was a great fish. Its name, the old book says, was Jasconius. He was the largest of all the creatures that swim in the sea, and he was always trying, without ever managing, to bring his head round to meet his tail. He had been asleep for so long that grass had grown on his back and, in a thin sort of way, a few trees. He had slept on while the monks came ashore, because, as Brendan said, he was a creature who was meant to live in the sea and was happy to be left alone.

And Brendan said something then that I have thought about a great deal. He said that God had let them see it. And it was not meant to frighten them. It was meant to show them, in a way they would remember, that the world was bigger and stranger and more full of life than they had known.

If you think about it, that is a fairly good description of what the sea does to a person. You spend your whole life on the land, thinking that the ground is the ground. And one day you stand on a patch of it that is breathing.

Now, I've promised you that this is a legend, and here is where I should say so very plainly. There is no such thing, so far as we know, as an island that is a whale. But there are a great many sailors' tales about it, from all over the world, from Arabia to Scandinavia, and the monks who wrote the Navigatio may well have had some of them in mind. In the Book of Genesis, God makes the great sea creatures on the fifth day and calls them good, and I think the old storyteller would have liked that. A big, patient, friendly creature, who was very surprised by the monks and not in the least cross about it, and who gave them all a good lesson in humility and a pot to remember it by.

And the whale, by the way, comes back. Every Easter. That's the sweetest part. They find him again, on the Saturday before the feast, in the same place, and he lets them stay, and he lets them sing the vigil on his back, and he never says a word. I would like to think that he enjoyed it.

I said that I would tell you about the birds.

There is an island in the old story that is full of white birds. They sit in the trees and they sing the psalms, in clear voices, at the hours of the day, and one of them speaks to Brendan and tells him that the birds are angels who sided neither with God nor with the rebels in the great fall of heaven, and so, as a sort of half-punishment, they live in the form of birds until the day of judgment.

It is a lovely scene to read. It is a nice thing to imagine. And it isn't true, and the Church does not teach it, in either East or West. There are no halfway angels. There are the angels who love God, who are all around us and always have been, and there are those who turned away, and there is no third camp. Angels are not birds, they do not wait about, and they are certainly not in a state of mild embarrassment. So when we get to that island, in our version, we'll simply skip it. The monks sail on by. They hear the birds singing in the trees, and it is the birds' own singing, and the birds are birds. They are very happy birds, and I think God is pleased with them, and that is all.

Right. Back to the voyage.

Years went by. The old book says seven, and I think seven is the right sort of number for a story like this one, a number that means "a long, full time." Every year they came back to the same places for the same feasts. Easter on the whale's back. Pentecost at sea, with the psalms sung into the wind. Christmas with a community of old monks on an island of green fields, who sang the Office perfectly, and fed them, and sent them off in the morning with bread.

There were storms. There was one storm that lasted so long that the monks lost count of the days and the hours. There was a day when the sea was so clear that they could see right down to the bottom, to the sand and the stones and the great shapes of fish moving about, and one of the brothers, who was not feeling brave, asked Brendan to please sing the Mass a little more quietly so as not to wake them up.

There was a day when they saw a pillar in the sea, so tall that the top was lost in the cloud, and so clear that it looked like crystal, and when they drew near it, they found that it was a great column of ice, glittering in the sun. Some of them had never seen ice, except on a puddle. They sailed round it, in a sort of reverent silence, and one of them wept at the beauty of it, which I think is quite reasonable.

And there was, one grey afternoon, a lone rock out in the middle of the sea, with a man on it.

He was an old man. He was very old. His hair and his beard were white and so long that they covered him like a cloak, and he sat there on the bare stone, with an otter, the story says, bringing him fish. His name was Paul. Paul the Hermit, he was called. He had been there, he told them, for sixty years, and had lived on the otter's fish, and on prayer. And the old Paul looked at the monks in their leather boat, and said that he had been waiting for them.

Now, there is a real Saint Paul the Hermit, who lived in the desert of Egypt in the third century and was visited by Saint Anthony, and I think the writer of the Navigatio is borrowing his name and his fame on purpose, as a sort of tribute. This Paul, on the rock, is part of the legend, and we shouldn't confuse him with the other. But I do like him. He tells Brendan something that every one of us needs to hear at some point. He says that Brendan has not much further to go. He has seen the world. He has seen its wonders. He has been brought through the dangers, and now he is going to the place that he was looking for.

"But first," says the old hermit, "go back to your own country, and tell them what you have seen."

And so, at last, they found it.

It was the end of a very long spell of fog. The fog had been thick for three days, so thick that they couldn't see the prow of their own boat. And then it lifted, all at once, and they sailed out into a clear, golden light, and there, in front of them, lay a wide, green, shining country.

There were trees heavy with fruit. There were streams as clear as glass. The sky was bright and the air was sweet, and there were flowers everywhere, and a smell of something like apples. Everything was ripe at once. It was as if the whole of the land were a single moment of harvest.

They walked in it for forty days, the old book says, and could not find the end.

Then a young man met them. Or a man who seemed young. He greeted them by name, and embraced them, and said that this was the land which God would give to his saints. It had been hidden, he said, all this time, until the right moment. And now they were to take some of the fruit and some of the precious stones that lay in the stream beds, and go home. For the time had not yet come for them to stay. They had work to do.

I don't think there is a lovelier idea in any of the monks' stories than that. They have crossed the whole ocean. They have been through ice and fire and storm. They have eaten on the back of a whale. And at the very end, standing in the place they were looking for, they are told, kindly, to go home.

And the reason is that heaven is not a place you can grab. It is a place you are given. The saints in the old story do not storm the gates; they walk up, and they are welcomed, and they are sent back, because the people they love are still on the road. The Promised Land of the Saints is not the end of the story. It is a glimpse of the end, held up like a lantern, to help the rest of us keep walking.

So they turned their boat around, and a wind came out of nowhere and took them home. They sailed more quickly than they had ever sailed. They saw the coast of Ireland, and the familiar hills, and their own bay, and they landed, and the brothers at the monastery came running down the shore.

And Brendan, who had been away for seven years, came up the beach, with his cloak gone grey and his boat in ribbons and his arms full of stories. Some of the monks wept. Some laughed. One was heard asking whether anybody had remembered to feed the cat.

That is the end of the voyage. And now we can slow down, and look at the end of the man.

Brendan went on living for a good many years. He went back to his work. He founded more monasteries, including the great one at Clonfert, which became a school, and a place that people travelled to from far and wide. He taught. He wrote, or the monks wrote for him. He gave away what he had and was, so far as anyone remembers, as cheerful as ever.

The old life says that when he was very old, he went to visit his sister, who was an abbess, in a convent nearby. She was ill, and he stayed with her. He died there, peacefully, in her arms, they say, or very nearly, and his body was carried back to Clonfert and buried in the church. He was said to have been about ninety-three. The year was probably five hundred and seventy-seven, or a few years after.

His feast day is the sixteenth of May. He is remembered in both the Catholic and the Orthodox calendars. And all over Ireland, and beyond, there are little places named after him: a bay, a mountain, a well. The mountain, on the Dingle peninsula, is called Mount Brandon, and it is one of the highest in Ireland, and there is an old pilgrim path that goes up it, with a ruined oratory at the top. They say that on a clear day you can see all the way to the west. And I like to think that there are people who still climb it in the evening, to look at the sea, and wonder what is on the other side.

He is the patron saint of sailors and travellers, which is only fair. And if you have to cross water this week, whether it is an ocean or a ferry, or the sort of night in which the dark seems wide as the Atlantic, you could do worse than ask for his prayers.

Let me tell you now what is true in all this, and what is not.

Saint Brendan was real. He was an abbot of the sixth century, born in what is now County Kerry, fostered by Saint Ita, and he founded the monastery of Clonfert. These things are recorded in the early Irish lives of the saints, and in the lists of saints that the monks kept, and we can trust them as far as that sort of source can be trusted.

The voyage is a legend. The Navigatio was written down three centuries after his death, in Latin, by a monk we cannot name, probably in Ireland or in a monastery with Irish connections on the continent. It draws on older Irish sea stories, which scholars call immrama, and on the monastic custom of pilgrimage, and probably on the experience of real sailors, who really did go out to the Faroes and to Iceland in skin boats long before the Vikings. It was never meant to be a logbook. It is a long prayer, shaped like an adventure.

The island that is a whale is a story that was told about many saints and many sailors. Tim Severin, who built the leather boat, did not claim to have proved that Brendan reached America. He only showed that a boat like the one in the book could cross the Atlantic. That is all, and that is a good deal.

The invented parts are the small conversations, the dog, the pot, the jokes and the cat. The bird island we left out because it teaches something that the Church does not teach. And the saint's remarks about the three things that God loves are told as they are told in the old Irish tradition, about Ita, and we are not in a position to prove who first said them. But they are good remarks, and they are worth keeping.

Now, the night is getting on, and the sea is getting quiet.

Imagine the leather boat, out on the long water. The sail is down. The oars are in. There are seventeen men, and some of them are asleep, rolled in their cloaks on the bottom boards. One of them is singing very softly, under his breath, a psalm that he learned as a child. And the boat is rocking, the way a boat does, in a rhythm that is older than any of them.

Brendan is sitting in the stern. He is looking at the stars.

He is not worried. He has no idea where they are, and he does not need to. He has done what he was asked. He has said his prayers, and he has trusted the sea, and he has trusted the God who made the sea, and he knows that morning will come, and that there will be land when it does, because there always has been.

The water is black and silver. The wind is soft. Somewhere far below, a very large and very patient creature turns over, in its sleep, and goes on dreaming.

And the little boat goes on, on the long dark water, into the night, and the stars, and the morning.

That's the story of Saint Brendan for tonight. His feast is the sixteenth of May, in the Catholic calendar and in the Orthodox calendar alike. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. May the Lord who walked on the sea be with you in the deep water, and bring you safe to harbour, and may his peace be on you in the dark. Goodnight, and God bless.

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