Christ is risen! It is almost the 16th of May
and that means that Saint Brendan's feast is upon us
and because I love saint Brandon so much, and because he's also one of the
protectors of our Chapel with Saint Sisoes the Great of Egypt, I want
us to talk about Saint Brendan very, very briefly today. All I want to do
is have a heart to heart conversation with you
about why a human heart my heart can still love so much a saint who lived
such a long time ago - he lived in the fifth sixth centuries
and in a completely different context from
the world we live in today. Before we begin I want to thank everyone for
all the support you have been sending to our monastery,
it is so needed, so badly needed, so thank you very much. Thank you also
for things like subscribing to our channel,
for sharing this video with your friends, for
buying our prayer ropes, our icons - as you can see,
absolutely randomly, by accident 100%, this beautiful prayer rope is just lying
about on the shores of the island, and there's also a small icon here
of St Brendan and St Ita, and - in fact - I will speak to you about this icon
later on in the video, just briefly, because you cannot mention Saint Brendan
without saying a word or two about Saint Ita, his
Foster Mother. There are three main reasons why I
feel so much love for this saint and I want to share those with you, in the hope
that perhaps your hearts will respond to
Saint Brendan and then, his prayer will be yours as
well. Before anything else, the main reason why I feel so connected
and so close to this wonderful saint is how
absolutely personal, how profoundly personal he has
been all his life. He was entirely his own
person in Christ and there was no attempt on his side to
dilute things down, to make himself into something else, into someone else,
just because that is what the world around him expected of him.
This is something we all do to some degree. We all
end up playing a role, playing a game not only in relation to people around us
but very often, unfortunately, even in
relation to our own beings. We want to be a certain way, so we
pretend we actually are that way to the point that we end up believing
our own lie. And there's nothing more horrible than
that, because that makes everything fake - your prayer is no longer
your own, your hopes and your fears, your joy
and your sadness are no longer your own. They belong to that
fake persona we have created. Saint Brendan
has always been his own person. You know that the Celts had this tradition of
Pilgrimages for Christ or Pilgrimages with no destination.
No other saint has pushed to such extreme
this particular tradition. He served the Church
for all his life, he founded monasteries, he was educated by wonderful saints like
Saint Ita or Saint Finnian. He himself trained a
series of other saints, he was baptised by a saint, he was
ordained by a saint, and yet none of these relationships
defined him. He struggled all his life, trying to
keep himself who he is in Christ. He struggled all his life not to allow
any place, any status, any relationship to define
who he was. He wanted his roots, the roots of his being, to only be
fed from Christ and Christ's teaching and the Kingdom. There is nothing else
about Saint Brendan that speaks to me as much as this
struggle to keep oneself nakedly honest before Christ, before one's own
conscience and before the world, because the closer
you are to yourself, the more real
and authentic and solid - like this rock - your prayer will be, your feelings will
be and the understandings of your mind and
your experience will be. If we fake things, everything
that we feel and we learn, all our prayer will be fake as well.
His desire to be who God wanted him to be
kept him away from allowing personal relationships to define him. And that, to
us, may sound like a very cold-hearted sort
of attitude to the world, but there's nothing further from the
truth. In fact that is the main reason why I have this
icon with me today. Saint Ita was the saint who taught him
when he was a child. We know that Saint Ita is known to this day
as the 'Foster Mother of Christ's Saints' because she has
educated and taken care of so many children,
some of whom - seven or eight of them - are canonised the Saints of the Church
themselves. Saint Brendan the Navigator was one
of them and his love for Saint Ita and his respect for
Saint Ita continued until the end of their lives.
In fact, if you pay attention, you'll see that the aura of Saint Brendan and the
aura of Saint Ita are one with Christ in a circle
of grace, and i've done that on purpose, because I wanted to depict the depth of
their love, which is not expressed here, in this
world, but in their Oneness in their Creator.
The best way to love the world is not to consume yourself
and to waste yourself onto the worries - the separated dissipated worries - of the
world, but to become who you are. There is
no greater gift that Saint Brendan, or you, or myself can give to the world
except to become the saints whom God wants us to become.
When Christ created Saint Brendan he created this
wonderful Saint, and when Christ created me and you, every one of you, Christ
created, at least potentially, these wonderful beings who
in the world could bring such holiness, such source of love and forgiveness. If
we become the saints whom God created us to become, we pour
into this fallen world a drop of holiness,
and that holiness can change the world, because we are one in Christ, we are
one being in Christ, and my failings in my spiritual life
and my success in my spiritual life, such as the success and failures of
every one of us, affect the entire world. There is
no greater love for the world and there is no greater gift we can
give to the world and those whom we love except for us to become
Christ-like, to become the saints whom he created us to be. There is so
much love in Saint Brendan, and no other story
depicts that so well as the story about Saint Brendan
and his monks meeting Judas himself, Judas the disciple
who betrayed Christ. There is a story that they met
him while they were sailing to the Isle of
the Blessed, and Judas was abandoned on this tiny
islet in the middle of the ocean--a dark, cold, wet island hit by storms and the
waves--and Judas told Saint Brendan that this was his
time away from hell on Sundays and on feast
days. And Saint Brendan's heart felt so much
compassion, so much love, even for Judas,
that for a night he kept vigil and protected through his prayer the
soul of Judas himself against the attacks of the demons who
came to drag him down into hades. And that brings me to
the third reason why I love Saint Brendan so much:
I love him for his struggle to always keep things real, honest,
and painfully personal in his struggle for Christ.
I love him for the love he feels for me and the world, and for expressing
that love in the sense of becoming the Saint whom
God wanted him to be and not wasting his holiness. But I also love him
because he didn't fail in the way in which
so many of us fail today, although he was
so deeply personal, although he is the poster-saint
of authenticity and of trying to keep your personhood
real and clean, he never failed to found his monastic life and his
struggles on the Tradition of the Church. In other
words, Saint Brendan never became one of those
flower power, sun worshiping, stone worshiping
Christians that the world is filled with today.
His monastic life, his priesthood, his struggles were all founded on the
solid foundation of the church and of the
church tradition we know. Saint Brendan fasted;
we know he prayed; we know he was under obedience to his spiritual
teachers; we know that he kept a vigil as we've seen in his story about protecting
Judas against demons. His Christianity,
his monasticism, his priesthood, everything about
him is safe, because it is founded on Christ's teachings, not on his
own desires and his own preferences. His
struggle to be authentic, to be himself, is not based on pride, but on humility
and tradition. There is so much love in Saint Brendan,
and there is such a safety in honoring him and
praying to him that my heart is just singing with joy. His heart was
so full with Christ's love, he had become so christ-like, that in his heart
he had love and compassion for the entire world,
for all humanity from Adam through Judas, all the way to me and you.
My love for Saint Brendan is entirely nourished by his love for me
and the world; my heart simply responds to the love it perceives in the heart
of this extraordinary Saint. May Saint Brendan bless all of us
so that we may love the world so much as to give our entire life to become the
saints whom God created us to become,
so that through this drop of holiness that we bring into the world the entire
world may be saved, from Adam to Judas to the last man God will create.
May God bless you, dear ones.
Christ is risen!