Comfort or Compass?

Part Three of The Voyage of Brendan

These last few weeks have been a delight. I’m really enjoying this. Today is our last journeying with Brendan before we start out on a new theme, The Woman Who Married a Bear: Old Arrangements with the Wild. I’ll also be continuing to add fortnightly audio for paid subscribers in the form of Sunday Stories. Lots of plans for that.

I’ve been very touched by many of your comments. I ponder them. I appreciate the thoughtfulness and the kindness. There’s a lot of us having similar sensations at this time in our lives. Even the idea of a kind of bush Christianity can be provocative, and I appreciate how some have expressed that whilst still staying open to what’s unfolding in the essay.

I’m twenty-five years in as a wilderness rites of passage guide, spending many hundreds of nights under oaks and by rivers, and never thought I would need to go near such a thought. It’s a wonderful thing at mid-life to be absolutely humbled in that regard.

It must somehow have slipped my previously defended and rather weary mind that Yeshua took himself out for forty days and forty nights. I’ll say a couple of things then leave it for a while.

We remember Yeshua tells stories so vast a bird can nest in them. He teaches by lakes and restores himself in the wild for the most part. He arrives in Jerusalem on a donkey, promptly taking himself to the temple to bring mayhem to the money lenders. This is not a domestic figure: he’s not white, he does not have his own TV network and he is not seeking our approval. He is a level of reality so acute we barely know what to do with him, even now.

Storyteller, healer, teacher, exorcist. More than that.

King of the one-liners, peril of the debate, genius wielder of the short story. Inviter to fresh and troubling ideas. A performer of symbolic actions with an agile tongue and vast imagination. Every parable a stained glass window through which we view the realest real. The learned gawp, scowl and scuttle back to their laws. There’s immense compassion but little comfort about Yeshua.

It costs Yeshua, his accomplishments.

Foxes have holes, birds have their nests, but the Son of the Man has nowhere to find shelter.

The man of no shelter called to the parts of us that lurk with the dead. The man of no shelter would bark at the wind and it would change direction. The man of no shelter could multiply sustenance to feed strangers and enemies. The man of no shelter allowed himself to be anointed for burial even before he was dead. The man of no shelter spoke to the three times denier in us, with the terrible sobering of the cock crowing. The man of no shelter is the myth-world man, walking amongst us.  

And the Pharisees watch it all and say:

Indeed

Indeed

Indeed

You shall not suffer a witch to live.

It was a Lakota Sioux medicine man, Wallace Black Elk, who first petitioned me to consider Yeshua again as an adult. Said he’d met their people thousands of years ago.

Everything true is talking to each other.

***

The Voyage of Brendan Part Three

Swish, swish, swish. All this endlessly opening and closing of consciousness in the small brown rowing men. Close your eyes and you are out there with them.

After several of these seasonal directions, Brendan and the men came to an outcrop with a cave on it. By the cave was the tiniest man. He was naked but for a flood of hair and beard that covered him. He was called Old-Man-Fed-By-Otters. These boys of endless rolling deep, these monks of the giddy swill, these lads of gull and brine came humbly to greet a true sprig of the ancient, a man who had been companion to St. Patrick and had sat it out on the island for ninety years since his death. He told them that after one last peregrination on the back of Jasconius, one last suffusion into the hymnal of birds, one last dip into silence, then the road to the destination would be swift. And so it was.

There would be lowdown shivering and sirens singing, nights when the stars rearranged themselves higgledy-piggledy and confusing over the men’s heads. Jerkins ice-frozen on the outside, horrible-hot and subsumed with itch on the inside. More nights when they heard their loved ones calling from the darkness.   

Come Brendan

Come Seamus

Come Aiden

Just a few dark splashes and we will be reunited.

Get behind me.

After forty days there came a swallowing of the holy boat, a consumption, a profound and encompassing fog. The kind there always is when you have almost arrived at your longed for ambition. But the lads, now as good as mermen, waited patiently and prayerfully in their vessel. After one hour a clear great light cut through the murk and a way was revealed. The Hidden Country was revealed. For forty days they explored, sensing its vastness was almost without end. It was just as had been whispered, the herbs bloomed and the fruit hung heavy and happy. God was emphatically resident in such a place, the good news, the tremendous news, long established.

They came to a mighty river which Brendan knew they should not cross. At this river was a man who greeted each of them by their name. He explained the implications of their delays, that they had been placed there for them to grow wise by the journey as well as the destination. That it was perfect in shape, genius in design. Finally turning to Brendan he gently told him to gather supplies and return safely to Ireland.

“And, dear good Brendan, prepare for your own journey into the marvellous. Those vastest of travelling days are coming to you. It is your death I am seeing, but not before you get home.

You were right to stop at this river. That passage is only yours. Soon you will cross it, but you alone.”