A Tree Most Fruitful

This poem of mine was inspired by the vision of two early Irish monks. Several years ago I was on the beach with my family at Inishmor in the Aran islands where it took place. St. Ciarán lived in the sixth century, and after spending time with St. Enda on Aran island, responded to a vision and founded a small monastery on the banks of the Shannon river at Clonmacnois in County Offaly. Over the centuries it grew into a vast monastic complex now in ruins, and its famous school became known as a “university of saints and scholars”. It remains an important place of pilgrimage.

A Tree Most Fruitful

 

One by One

the pilgrims come,

drawn from every

sea-washed shore.

 

Expectant hearts

ascend a green hill

to find

the broken

chapel wall,

the haven of my resurrection.

 

Towering crosses

carved from stone

taught the Word,

faithful lanterns for

an eager nation.

In the company of angels

I watched the centuries unfold,

like a protective hen

guiding her young.

How I grieved to see it brought to ruin,

senseless wrath and plunder.

Yet buildings come and go,

flotsam on the stream of time.

Beyond melancholy

dilapidation,

spirit-given visions still endure:

 

The fiery sun sank beneath the waves,

Aran Island bathed in salty twilight.

In wet sand I sat with holy Enda,

to us was given sight in luminous darkness,

the future of our people laid before us:

a great Tree,

rooted deep in Ireland’s heart

and watered by a river.

Birds beyond number

sheltered there,

filled the island with their song,

bore its fruit to distant lands

beyond our comprehension.

 

Sent forth with Enda’s blessing

and the teaching of the saints,

on the banks of the Shannon

I planted seeds of prayer and fasting,

and still they come,

still they come,

to be renewed

beneath the clouds

and taste the fruit

imperishable.

 

 

 

St Sunniva

Tomorrow, July 8th, is the feast of St. Sunniva. According to tradition, she was an Irish princess in the tenth century, who was brought to Norway with some companions as slaves. They escaped the threats of some disreputable local warriors by hiding in a cave, which was miraculously blocked by a stone. But although they escaped that threat, they were walled in and ultimately perished. A grim story, perhaps, from a hard and grim time, the “Century of Iron”!

Not too long after a passing fisherman noted a glow emanating from the cave, and upon investigation a delegation of the King and Bishop found her body miraculously preserved from decay. Soon a monastery, Seljekloster, was built, and the cult of Sunniva quickly became very important in western Norway, the land of my grandfather.

Seljekloster today.

Ever since I read about St Sunniva in Sigrid Undset’s Saga of Saints, a book I highly recommend, I have had an enduring devotion to her. Perhaps it is because she brings together the two sides of my heritage, the Irish and Norwegian, and the richness and complexity of the story of the spread of Christianity in the North. It is also undoubtedly true that I am always moved by some of the precious portrayals of her in medieval art which survived the Reformation, and still express across the centuries to the viewer and pilgrim her combination of gentleness and intrepid fortitude. These qualities undoubtedly helped sustain her faith in the most difficult of circumstances, a displaced refugee in a tough and unforgiving landscape, amidst a group of warriors who, as they and their descendants began to embrace and try to comprehend their new Christian religion, came to see her as a beacon and holy witness to the Light in the North, a role perhaps that she can play again.