Saint Brendan's Prayer Looking West from Dun Chaoin Over the Blasket Islands A poem by Fr. Gregory Elmer, O.S.B.

Sky, sky, sky is the word,
Just one shout in the direction
Of the blue vastness which weighs
Nothing and everything,

No one word can convey
How sky stings, pierces and turns
Inside out the heart of a man,
Scourges him delirious with the question
He is but cannot frame, because
Sky frames all questions, always
Stretching the asked and the asker
To the limitless blue
Upon blue upon blue deeps,

Questioning, which is fire,
Spangling night in glinting shoals
Of sidereal time, till the mind
Reels, besotted with splendour,
Questioning, which ignites the body,
Burns up every leaf of the mind,
Consumes the mind's roots, the heart,
In the smelter of spirit, till the soul
Pools, gleaming, breathing red gold,

Sky, all world, sky lights up,
Kindles with the coming sun,
Throws everything into unbearable relief,
We twist, maddened by the light
Of dawn, closing its disclosing
With departure, we stumble away,
Ever looking backwards to behold
The staggering Beauty for which
We were born belonging,
Any shadow will do,

Where we hope not to die of regret,
Because we forget just enough
To remember only sorrow, or better yet,
To feel nothing at all,
Than surrender to sky, star sky,
Grievous sky of radiant daybreak.

Is there one, is there anywhere
One Who will bend sky down, rend
Its awful vastness and descend,
The day reined in within His ardent
Glance, His wounds the burning stars
Which cover me with constellations
Of compassion, and be, Himself
My firmament and friend?

June 5, 1995
Dun Laoghaire, Ireland
Gregory Elmer O.S.B

THE IRISH MONKS' CELLS were made of daub and wattle, or cobbled up from stone, without mortar, in an ancient self-reinforcing way, corbelling, into the so-called "behive cell." Those pictured here were built by the disciple of the great St. Brendan the Navigator, St. Fionan, in the early 600's. They are perched 700 ft. above the roaring Atlantic on Skellig Michael, "a desert in the sea," off the tip of the Kerry Peninsula. They testify to the supreme Passion of Jesus which gripped men to "lose themselves," beyond the circles of the world, in this transforming, intimate communion with Jesus and His Father in the mysterious Gift of the Holy Spirit.

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