A Jasconius Christianity

Part Two of The Voyage of Brendan

It’ll be strange for a few of us, me writing about Christianity. Myself included. But I find myself wondering:

Why is church not like attending Camelot?

(I’m not referring so much to the sumptuous visuals, rather the sense of event)

Where is the Grail quests, the contemplative wonder, the vocational electricity?

The Christ at its centre is riven deep with strangeness. We find that the thin-skinned Galilee druid can be troubling company. I’m amazed I don’t go up in smoke every time I approach one of his stories. Maybe I do.

But I have to confess: I’ve often struggled to catch his frequency within a modern building. I don’t need doughnuts and coffee for surviving the seven minute sermon, it’s not a good trade. A tent could sometimes do it, a Byzantine cave or a scrub of beech at the edge of a council estate. I’ve often pushed my devotions out into fresh air like an owl seeking echo-location.

That’s all well and good, but we have to deal with the contact sport of other humans eventually, so we may as well craft something we long to attend. The rough and tumble of community can often work solitary epiphany into earned wisdom. You may have to grit your teeth on occasion, but it’s an alchemical fire none the less.

And I think of a Christianity remembering its own myths.

Not the stuff of empire and conquest, not the mega-churches and donation box, but the sheer radical eccentricity of its stories, the quiet devastation of love that circles the Beatitudes. The call to adventure. The voluntary abdication of consumer-friendly outcomes. Not building a shopping mall around a Grail. The unfashionable weight of such a thought. The five fathoms depth of it. That’s a rebel energy these days, a whispered thing.

I’ve seen too many strange religious ideas normalised, squeezed into modernity, made polite. Golden calfed. Had the stinger plucked. Rocking up at the temple and having at the money lenders is hardly that. As has been said by many before me, we risk the transformational becoming the transactional. Gimme, gimme.

But of course the holy wind goes where it will. Not strip lit but tallow wick, sky-vast and swift as a cheetah. It’s out ahead in the wild grasses. It’s waiting patiently at the crossroads. It’s not a bricks and mortar situation. That’s more for our benefit it would seem.

I find myself in the grip of a profoundly undomestic relationship to Christ. I had an entirely unexpected, full voltage encounter in my last protracted stint in the woods. I’ve been left in a kind of astonishment, but slowly a word or two is starting to stir. Something is announcing itself. Far away from what I presumed Christianity meant. I’ll write more as we go.

Things like this can be so hard to talk about - but I encountered an untameable presence in a Dartmoor forest in the middle of the night and it will not let me be.

It came like a Ropadh – blast of the wind

My druid is the Seabhac Gaoithe – wind hawk

What I thought I knew is Greamanna Seabhaic A Dhéanamh De Rud –

torn to bits by hawk bites

***

The Voyage of Brendan Part Two

The lads sailed into deep religious waters and were privy to many mysteries. They dipped into realms of profundity that only the curve of a wave offers. Straight line preaching became spiralling contemplation. Their consciousness stretched like a sail tight with wind. Even so, the task kept them pragmatic. The grinding stench of the tanning and the stale animal fat made them tremble, but they sang their way through it. Sang their way through getting their sea legs too. Green-faced pilgrims, the boat rolled sicky-like with every single wave. 

With wind keeping them brisk they stopped briefly at the island of the sheep––the Faroes. Still later, a place of smoke and flame––Iceland. Some say it was Hell they glimpsed. There was the endless clanging of an anvil from the shoreline, and taunting by shuddering, fire-eyed beings crouched on rocks. The monks kept their eyes on the swan track of their devotional mission.

Over time, they also found themselves drawn to an island, a smooth grey hill. Something in the shape calmed them after the dramas and giddiness of the waves. It was a companionable shape. They trooped out, stretched and made some prayers. They also wasted little time starting a fire and were terrified when the island started to shudder and shake. The monks scampered back to their skinny craft as the grey island shifted and dipped, and even swam away! It was in fact Jasconius, the largest whale in the sea. Safe in the boat, the men were in their amazement, stroking their salt-braided beards as the battle-scarred apparition dipped off into the waters. They had in fact been on the back of one of the most marvellous of God’s deep creatures.

Not too long later they discovered an island with a strange confluence of birds. Skuas, puffin, auk. A river led them upstream to a vast tree covered in birds as white as snowflakes. At sacred times of the day, the birds would both speak verse and sing hymns. In time, one of the smallest and most delicate flew down to Brendan. The sound of her wing-flap was that of a sweet, high Irish fiddle. She told Brendan that each of the birds had once been angels and informed him it would take him seven years to reach The Hidden Country. When Pentecost arrived, the men set sail again.

It was hard for the lads. The monks were as skinny as whippets, dashed and bashed by the waves, all the time heading west but no hint of land, no flirtation of island. But Christmas has its mercies and they one day saw the snowy tumps of hills over the bleak and endless green and grey waves. There was a man with a bush of white hair on his lean head, waving them in. It was the monastery of St. Ailbe he took them to. It was a strange place but leaning to the wonderful. There were eleven monks who dwelt in the ecstasy of silence, though the abbot spoke briefly to the travellers. Once they were fed on roots and bread, he explained that they never turned meat over the fire or cooked at all, but they were mystically provided with bread, that the lamps never burnt down and the eleven monks never aged a day. By this night they were eighty years into their sit on the island, not muttering even a word till now. When the lads slept, an even greater wonder was revealed to Brendan. The abbot took him to chapel and they sat quietly in the dark.

Of a sudden, an arrow of fire flew through the window, brushed the altar lamps and sped out, the lamps now brimming with oil.

Oh, to be such an arrow lighting lamps for others. To be such a bright friend.

A strange rhythm presented itself to them over the years. A wise man told Brendan that they were to seek out Jasconius the whale again. To clamber onto his immense back and celebrate Easter. From Easter to Pentecost they were to sail back to the island of hymnal birds, then Christmas to the time of Epiphany they were to dwell with the silent monks of St. Ailbe. This circuitous progression, so illogical in its way, was to bring Brendan and the monks closer to many hidden wisdoms.

These are oceanic disciplines required to cross the waters to the holy island.

Brother whale, sister bird, mother silence, father boat.

***

Truth in her dress finds facts way too tight,

In fiction she moves easily.

Tagore

The story tells us that a soulful journey is going to lead us to Hell––at least a glimpse. It’ll get rough at some point. But there’s a difference between witnessing it and being stranded there. A station, a season, a passage not final stop. Still, the lads must have wondered what on earth was going on at that moment. That kind of jeopardy was hardly what they set out for, dreams of fruit trees and sun and marvels in their mind. But the stories you and I remember, the myths we rightly cling to always contain a dramatic dip, a tremendous testing somewhere in the middle. Whilst Brendan’s journey can be tracked as a physical reality (see Tim Severin and team’s extraordinary crossing of the Atlantic in the seventies), we can’t help but read an interior narrative to it as well. Most of us are tuned to live within a symbolic landscape, to interpret experiences on more than one level. Such it is within The Voyage of Brendan.

I spoke before about working to a different plan. Not the consensual march but the precarious wander. The tap dance not the goose step. To those watching from a distance, they are going to wonder why––like the monks––we seem to sometimes be going in circles. But Plotinus claimed soul knowledge was circular in ambition, not straight. There’s as much wisdom available when the sail goes slack as when the wind gets behind it. That’s easy to nod along to, but terribly hard to stomach as a reality. Modern boat makers often comment that Brendan’s boat would have stunk, with all that rancid butter and animal fat. Combine that with the endless rocking and rolling and you really may get to rue the day you set out. Hold your nerve pilgrims.

I long for the islands of songs,

Over this heaving sea of shouts.

Tagore

We are designed to quest, it’s just in us. It’s down in each swirling cell. Sperm meets egg against all possible odds. We began with the adventure of lovemaking, so of course we will continue to seek it out. These Odysseys, these Red Bead Women, these Camelot commissions, these Handless Maidens all involve setting out and navigating mystery. You know this, but somehow it bears regular reminding. Why? Because as I wrote previously we are surrounded by facsimiles of the questing spirit but really there’s no departure in it. It’s meant to be sated by a movie, or a hike, or a meme that pops up on social media as we ‘live our best life’.

To be fulfilled by that is unlikely to be anywhere remotely near our best life. Now, to be passing by a fiery island of ghoulish cries with a small group of compadres, exhausted and boggle-eyed but holding firm to a vision of The Hidden Country, that may be nearer the sweet spot. Zero risk, no danger, not much happens. We are still tuned in to what has been called the ego-drama not the Theo-drama. We still are calling the shots, dragged along by our endlessly fanned desires, pretending something is happening. We are surrounded by highly intoxicating non-events.

The questing impulse, inherently romantic in the best sense of the word, doesn’t go away. But not tended to appropriately latches on to nationalism, conspiracy theories, or fanatical beliefs of one kind or another. And The Hidden Country stays resolutely hidden.