back to Issue 16
by Julie Salmon Kelleher
The obvious question is, why?
Let’s be clear from the start: the answer will need to be metaphorical. The Voyage of Saint Brendan is a medieval Irish account with staying power, echoed in the journeys of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Empire Strikes Back. But as historian Philip Freeman points out, Brendan’s tale was written down three centuries after his life. Facts might have slipped. Storytellers could run wild. We are freed from the burden of literal belief in Brendan’s adventures: his voyage is a spiritual journey.1
In circles. Getting nowhere he hasn’t already been, for seven years.
This wasn’t Brendan’s choice. It was a holiday thing. Brendan himself had a goal and destination: the miraculous Land Promised to the Saints that he longed to see with my desire and all my thoughts. But instead of traveling there directly, he is put on repeat tour. A talking bird who is really a non-consenting fallen angel (we’ll get to that) lays out for him an annual itinerary:
You will celebrate the holy day of Easter and the time after the feast with us next year. And where you were for Maundy Thursday, there you will be again next year. Likewise the vigil of the night before Easter you will celebrate as you did before, on the back of Jasconius. Eight months from now you will come to an island called the Island of the Community of Ailbe. There you will celebrate Christmas.
I first read The Voyage of Saint Brendan the week after Christmas myself, and it seemed to me an entirely fitting allegory for the season. All the same people in the same boat, returning again and again to the very same places and problems and frustrations. The stumbling choreography of who will agree to visit whose house, and who gets stuck shuttling between them. The gifting mishaps. Fraught and conflicting positions on the conduct of children and pets. Someone who should have had more of that spiked hot chocolate, and someone who should have had less. There you will be again next year. I picture this bird with a voice like John Donne’s tolling bell. There you will be.
Must we? Truly?
People with even-keeled families may not understand this question. There must be families like that. I envision them with envy. But on behalf of the rest of us, I’d like to know what a journey means if it doesn’t mean getting somewhere. What are we to make of a season of peace without world harmony—or even just a tiny bit more harmony than last year? I’d take the settling of a family spat, or one small day of togetherness free from grumbling. And if we can’t have that?
I am so often off-keel, saying goodbye in a doorway hung in holiday lights, aching with how little time we have together and how often we get it wrong. But it’s not so different for Brendan: there you will be again next year. So if his voyage can’t promise us transformation, maybe at least it can offer some takeaways.
Takeaway the first: You don’t get to pick the people in your boat.
Brendan tries. He chooses fourteen reliable monks and they set upon the hard work of preparing to sail unknown seas in search of a miracle. And just when all the work is done—the boat built, the provisions gathered and readied and stowed in place—three more monks show up, begging to come along.
Great, thinks Brendan. Because there was a reason the three gate-crashers didn’t make his initial cut. I know why you have come, he says. One of you brothers has done something worthy and God has prepared a most suitable place for him. But for the other two he will prepare a terrible judgment.
As events reveal, Brendan is dead-on right in his predictions. Brendan is always right. Some saints attain saintliness after sin, but on this voyage at least, Brendan seems saintly from the get-go. If Brendan says two of the monks are doomed, they’re doomed.
It doesn’t matter. They get on the boat anyway.
Takeaway the second: You can’t help everyone.
Even a person with the heart and will and talent to help any straying soul in the world can’t help them all.
Saint Brendan helps Judas. Yes, that Judas, betrayer of Christ, who in a turn of events I’ll bet you did not see coming, is granted a reprieve from hell on a north Atlantic rock. Judas is tied to a stony island, pounded by waves and immensely relieved about it. Marine exposure beats the alternative, if you are Judas. God is giving him a break before the demons of hell return.
But Brendan agrees to hold off those demons for one more night, also by the grace of God, because—well, the ‘because’ is not entirely clear, even though the thwarted demons ask. How can you invoke the name of the Lord for this man, they demand, when he is the very one who betrayed him?
Brendan doesn’t answer them. He doesn’t explain why he can grant a night of peace to literal Judas, but he can’t spare his two doomed monks. And how is this not a character flaw? What is the use of grandstanding about Judas and grace, then turning your back on a friend? Most of us are not Judas, but any of us, or someone we love, could be one of Brendan’s two monks.The first of the two, on an island visit, steals a bridle from his hosts. The monks are traveling by boat, not horseback—in case you had any doubts about the arbitrariness, to the human eye, of fate or destiny or providence. This man doesn’t need a bridle. But he steals one anyway, and the theft is the end of him. The monk drops dead. It could be worse. Thanks to the prayerful intercession of his brothers, the dead man’s soul is taken up by angels.
The second straying monk does fare worse. He is damned and taken by demons. Woe to me, Father, he cries back to Brendan. I am taken from you and do not have the power to return.
It kills me, reading that. He would return, if he could.
It kills me, thinking of the people we shouldn’t have lost.
So many of the things that happen to us in each small circling boat cannot be changed. I say to a child who has been deeply, cruelly disappointed by a family member he should have been able to trust: “Nobody would choose to be that way, if they could do better.”
I do not have the power to return.
The lost are lost. Brendan, who had mercy for Judas, is unsparing of his fellow traveler. Woe to you, my son, he says, for you have received in this life the punishment you deserved.
Deserved for what? Deserved why? Unable to resist, because…? Surely the monks and Brendan prayed and hoped for this second monk as well as the first. Surely we hope for all our brothers and sisters, our elders and children.
It is among the worst of questions: why a person who knows a behavior is destructive carries on with it anyway. Why some people find their way out and others don’t.
Takeaway the third: Give it up with the whys.
Don’t expect a lasting answer to the question we started with. The Voyage isn’t big on whys. Consider the tale of Jasconius, Brendan’s greatest hit, a story appearing repeatedly in illustrations on medieval and Renaissance sailing maps.2
Brendan and his monks anchor on a rocky island without any grass. There were a few pieces of wood on it, but no sand anywhere.
Really, there’s nothing fishy here. Nothing you would have noticed. At this point these monks have been on so many islands, I expect they’re just glad for the wood. You don’t get hot food on a tiny medieval exploring vessel, so the monks hop out and gather the fuel and build a fire. They stretch their limbs. They watch the flames begin to rise. They wait for their sea legs to adjust, to lose that sense the ground is heaving.
Except the ground is heaving.
The brothers don’t know what’s happening yet, but it’s not good and they run, tossed and lurching into the water and out to the ship where Brendan pulls them aboard.
That’s right: Brendan pulls them aboard because Brendan never left the boat. He knew all along that the island was not an island. It was the giant whale Jasconius, who does not appreciate having a fire lit on his back. The monks in the boat—wet, spent, astounded on the roiling sea—watch as the whale hightails it for the horizon.
When I read the Voyage in company, here’s where everyone loses it. Brendan knew the island was a whale? And he didn’t tell anyone? What is the point of foreknowledge, if you don’t use it for prevention? What was Brendan thinking, in his boat, watching his companions build a fire on the back of a whale?
Maybe Brendan said nothing because he believed in fate. We already know how difficult it is to rescue anyone. If Brendan knew the whale was a whale, did he also know his men would climb out onto it no matter what he said? But that explanation doesn’t hold up. At other points in the Voyage, Brendan won’t let his land-hungry monks hop out until they find a proper harbor.
Maybe Brendan understands it’s not such a bad thing to build a fire on a jittery whale. So many annual upsets are bearable. So what if at our holiday gatherings we know someone, reliably, will have a little blowout—and we simply hope this someone will be four years old and not forty? So what if we don’t look forward to someone’s diet evangelism or politics? It’s worth it, to keep up our closest connections. Jasconius ends up on Brendan’s annual itinerary, one of his closest connections. Nobody died. Let’s meet again for the holidays next year!
But there’s a third option: maybe there’s no reason Brendan does what he does. That’s just how it is. Why? We’ll never know.
Nobody explains anything around here.
Not even Brendan, who knows so much, is entitled to explanations, and he wants them. He begs for them. On the first circuit of his voyage, on the island where he receives his itinerary, Brendan finds a truly hospitable refuge. A little river makes a safe harbor exactly as wide as his boat. The ground holds steady beneath his feet. A magical spring supplies his monks with all the sustenance they need. They discover a grand and amazing tree, host to a flock of singing white birds as numerous as its leaves.
The birds are too much for Brendan. He has already, on this journey, seen a bridle-thief ascend to heaven, a whale-island, and many more voyaging marvels: a messenger dog, those demons, some oversized sheep. But it’s the birds that drop him to his knees. Weeping, Brendan begs to know why there are so many of them, and for once, he is answered. The birds explain:
We are from that great destruction of the ancient enemy.
Got it. When Satan rebelled and was defeated, the birds were on hand.
But we did not sin with them by our own consent. After we had been created, the fall of that one and his followers ruined us as well.
Satan made them sin? Sin how? Ruined in what way?
We wander through the many regions of the air and firmament and earth, as do other spirits… But on holy days and each Sunday we take on the bodies you now see, so that here we may worship and praise our creator.
I don’t know what any of that means.
But it is interesting that the moment of Brendan’s breakdown, the moment when he who does not offer explanations is finally driven to ask for them himself—that moment comes when things are going well. Is Brendan such a pessimist that only a happy encounter can throw him off?
When there is no happy encounter, Brendan calls for trust in the uncertain journey. When the winds die down and even the water congeals around the expedition’s oars, Brendan instructs his monks to lower their sails and go where the current takes them. And the current takes them in twenty days of even tighter circles than those on their annual rotation.
Circles within circles.
What kind of spiritual journey is this?
Takeaway the fourth: It’s always been circles from the start.
After sailing around in little circles in congealed water, while sailing around in larger circles for seven years of holidays, Brendan finally does reach his Land Promised to the Saints, only to meet a young man who tells him he’s on the last curve of another circle still:
Now return to the land of your birth, carrying with you the fruit of this island and as many stones from here as your boat will bear. The day of your pilgrimage draws near when you will sleep with your fathers.
Brendan’s death is itself described as a return, a circling back. He will die in the land of his birth. He will find his fathers again. Inevitably, in our family voyages, the crew of the ship will come and go. Eventually, each person’s story ends the same way.
We have always known this.
This voyage is doomed not only for erring monks, but for those of us who, like Brendan, want to believe we’re headed somewhere different: those of us who want to believe in progress of any kind. “This is nothing new, Mom,” I say about a family member in the same rut they’ve been in for years. But probably other people are saying the same about me. Deep into my middle age, I’m not the person I thought I would be. I am maybe a B+ daughter. I count it as sanity not to want a grade on my parenting. I have been the person who will say the sarcastic thing merely for love of the pithy rightness of it. And if as I grow older it is sometimes easier to be constructive, to opt out of the sharp retort, then that self-control is offset by a loss of confidence. I accomplished more when I was less afraid of doing it wrong.
Sometimes I have had it with the boat. Sometimes I shut the door to my room for an hour on Christmas Eve.
But through that door, I smell evergreen and beeswax candles. I hear beloved voices. I hear the scream that comes from people playing a board game, people who just rolled the most unlikely roll of the dice: the kind of unexpected twist that is why we play.
Takeaway the fifth: Still, the twist is not the game.
In a later turn of the same circle, when Jasconius begins to stir and swim away, Brendan and his monks cry out in joy and chase the whale to the next stop on their annual route. If you cannot rest, you might as well enjoy the ride. In all their circling, Brendan’s voyagers learn that much.
But the twist, the surprise recovery, the turn—anticipated or unexpected—is not the true holiday game. That game is the same thing one more time. We come back to what we know already, because we know—no twists allowed—that it won’t last, that we all move on. We come back because, beyond explanation, we have decided it matters. And we want to hold it while we can.
In the end Brendan does earn one solid answer why, when he reaches his longed-for island. Behold, says the young man who foretells his death, this is the land which you have sought for so long. You were not able to find it immediately because God wanted to show you the many secret wonders of the great ocean.
This is the tough part.
The wonders of the great ocean, the wonders of the world include harbors that are actually beasts, losing your companions to self-inflicted injuries nobody understands, the kind of person who would betray Jesus, the obligation to be merciful to the kind of person who would betray Jesus, the heckling of the demons who object to mercy, the days where you are so lost you might as well drop the sails and go wherever. And how maddening, how maddening that wherever should be your wondrous experience. How maddening your lack of direction, the unfathomable people in your boat, your sailing forward together when will and agency and effort so often amount to nothing. And yet without a sail, you move on anyway. You weather the next turn of the year.
The wonders of the world.
The belief that redemption can work its way through even such flawed material as yourself, the silly little boats you construct on the waves, the silly little fires you build on what is not even close to rock, not even sand.
To love this? To love not only your fellow mortals on the journey, but the journey itself and the perilous sea?
That is Brendan’s miracle.
1 This medieval historical context, as well as all quotations from The Voyage of Saint Brendan, are taken from Freeman’s translation in The World of Saint Patrick.
2 Chet van Duzer. “Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps.” Library of Congress Lectures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUvMr86UZq4
Julie Salmon Kelleher holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago, and was awarded an NEH Fellowship at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She teaches Humanities and Writing in the Honors College at Western Washington University. Her publications include work in scholarly, commercial, and creative journals, including Mythlore and Relief.