aoradh.org - Voyage

If you are not blessed with your own massive yacht, then any ferry journey. Particularly (of course) just about any crossing in the wonderful western isles of Scotland.

I would suggest the deck, not the cabin- but this is up to you!

What do I need?

The meditation.

Remember also that there is no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing.

1. Introduction

I love ferries.

For many years, they symbolised the distant promise of escape from a world of work and suburban living. They went out into the sparkling, if scary, deep sea around these wonderful islands of ours. They symbolised escape from mundanity, and transport to… somewhere else. At least, for a while.

We can mark the development of our kids by photographs taken next to slightly rusty railings and sun-faded life buoys. William took his first unsupported steps on the upper decks whilst on the long journey out from Oban to Lewis. Emily spraying a whole bunch of fellow passengers with an arc of wind-blown vomit on a wild journey to Orkney will for ever be a family legend- only ever-so-slightly augmented over years…

Ferries are now part of my daily life-necessary for work, leisure or shopping trips, and so have lost perhaps some of their magic- but still, there is a slight tingle at the back of my neck as we head out once again into the moving waters.

Some of the symbolism of water-borne journeys of this kind are in the following poem. (For the uninitiated, Caledonian MacBrayne-Calmac for short- is the heavily subsidised ferry service serving the Highlands and islands of Scotland)

Caledonian MacBrayne.

In this world of wide-eyed wonders

I have loved to linger at those places

Off the beaten track

Places where haste seems waste

And tide and time wait for everyone

Courtesy of Calmac.

Over the soft morning air comes the murmur of machines

Somehow disconnected from the passage of ship

Over sea.

Diesel smokes the breeze, but above it all

The crews bacon tempts even the vegetarian

Romance was never

So gloriously utilitarian

And after the commercial break to my reverie forced by ticket collection,

We set out into the loch

And past the blur of portholes poorly painted

Some hidden hand pulls a curtain of colours

Brown changes blue green

Light hits the perfect prisms

Of the dancing waves

Leaping and flashing

Lapping and splashing rainbows in every direction

Out beyond the headland

We meet head on a new movement

Blown in from the wide ocean

And salt seeps into Scottish steel

Water washing streaks of rust to remind us of our journey

From riverbank

To breakers yard

Sea holds us now, above the deep darkness

Beneath the keel.

(Chris Goan, 4.1.06)

2. (Big) pondering…

If you are blessed by one of those magical sunlit days, when the water takes on the quality of hand crafted glass- magical and full of opaque movement- then you will need lots of time to just sit… and stare.

There will always be the promise of an emergence of creatures from the deep- porpoises, jelly fish- the fins and flesh of creatures from the other world.

Distant coastlines will pull you to look beyond- land always means something else when viewed from sea.

Or perhaps you are forced to find shelter from wind blown wind and spray, the sea can seem hard and angry, actively impeding progress.

Whatever the mood of the oceans, I find that staring at the sea moving past seems to allow a kind of fluidity to my thoughts.

It is so easy for unwelcome thoughts to crowd in at times like this- like oil slicks.

So perhaps it might be good to begin by turning to God.

Lord light my moments.

Lord let me learn to swim in your waters.

As this wake whitens, then rolls into the empty distance, I leave behind the days past, and ask for direction

Looking forward to landfall…

Lord forgive this failing traveller

Who seeks your blessing.

3. Buoys…

Bobbing on the sparkling waters around our coastline we have placed many floating reminders. Some are rusty relics of old shipping lanes now neglected. Others come equipped with bells, or lights, or bird-splashed neon paint.

Some are placed there by fishermen to mark a line of creels which magically summon food from the depths.

Their significance for passengers is small.

But for seafarers, they mean much more. They mean navigation, safety, sea-going courtesy, the promise of quiet waters and a safe anchorage.

Or they spell the presence of sharp reefs- the warning of impending disaster, and of the vulnerability of ship, in big, big sea.

Because you have decided to go on this journey with us, we count you not as passengers, but as crew. Active participants- able seamen (and women.)

What follows are some buoys of our own. We invite you to anchor them in the streams of your consciousness for a while.

What you see, when you see the sea, is only the surface skin of another world. It is no less real, but beyond our experience or understanding.

Mystery still surrounds it depths. Life still to be discovered.

The world is 70% water. So are you.

Setting out to sea involves faith. Faith in the ship builder, faith in the seamanship of its crew, faith that the sea itself will not whip itself into a rage.
In our modern age, technology seems to have removed uncertainty. GPS, lighthouses, sophisticated weather forecasting. Even accepting the fact that even now, ships still are wrecked, perhaps it might be good to imaging setting sail in a small craft, without an of these things. So go-on, suspend reality for a while and set your mind back to an age before buoys- to an age of the skin covered curragh, powered by sail and oar.

The knowledge and experience of fellow sailors will be vital.

But experience might breed caution. This voyage is impossible without an almost naïve spirit of adventure. Someone has to hear the call of a distant shore.

The land left behind is the sum of all that is known. Family, home, security- all these things are gambolled for an unknown prize.

But back to the 21^st C- with the sun flashing on radar repeaters and the noise of machinery below steel decks. Safer. Risk averse. Automated and well out of the way of most of the salt spray.

Where is the adventure now? Where are the distant shores?

And what of this ship in which we sail? What of our companions? What of the crew?

Lord stain me with salt

Brine me with the badge of the deep sea sailor

I have spent too long

On concrete ground.

If hope raises up these tattered sails

Will you send for me

A fair and steady wind?

4. Saints Brendan, Columba and all that…

Around the coastline of my adopted county of Argyll are places rich in the folklore of the Celtic sailor-saints. For them, voyaging was about mission. It was the very stuff of faith and life. It was the living embodiment of trusting in the living God.

Tides ebbed and flowed to His ordinance.

Storms came to test and to admonish.

The journey was blessed only by His provision

But arrival was never certain.

One of the best known books in the Middle Ages, written during the 10th century, is the Navigatio Sancti Brendani abbatis. It tells the story of the journeys of St Brendan

St. Brendan was born around 484 in the Irish County of Kerry. He was one of the most important missionaries in Ireland and Wales and led several monasteries in his long life. Brendan died in 577 or 578 as abbot of the monastery of Clonfert.

The monk started his journeys over the sea to the west around the year 545. Together with 17 monks he sailed in a leather fisherman's boat, a curragh. According to the oldest preserved version Brendan wanted to arrive at the Promised Land of the holy ones, paradise, of which another monk had told him. Before they arrived there, the sailors must have overcome numerous dangers and adventures- several ‘purgatories’, a few devils, as well as monsters of the seep. After seven years the monks arrived at paradise, but they were not allowed to stay there and so returned to Ireland.

The Navigatio is not a factual report: it served religious education. Middle Age literature or science did not describe things as they were, but rather attempted to make God known through rich story telling and mythology.

But already in the 17th century some scholars believed that Brendan had perhaps crossed the Atlantic. They had noticed that the story gives many possible exact geographical specifications- for instance the Faeroe islands could be identified. Also a volcanic eruption is described- perhaps seen at the south coast of Iceland? And there is a delicious description of being held fast in a sticky sea- perhaps this could be the Sargasso Sea with its driving carpets of berry seaweed.

The monks finally discovered the Promised Land at a coast completely covered by fog like Newfoundland..

Whether St. Brendan actually undertook an adventurous sailing journey we will never know.

However there's proof that such a journey would have been possible at his time with the available technical means. The adventurer and writer Tim Severin followed the tracks of St. Brendan in the 70's in a reconstructed fisherman's boat and landed on June 26th 1977 on Peckford Island near Newfoundland.

I like to think that Brendan did indeed go to America. And, promised land or not, had the good sense to return to Ireland and, most significantly, to the Hebrides, were several places are associated with him.

There are other stories about the lives of the Celtic saints. Many are about St Columba, who established his missionary HQ on the Island of Iona, and whose voyages were recorded with much creativity by his 7^th C biographer Adamnan. Whatever the lies behind the mythology, it is clear that these voyagers changed the face of the whole of known western civilisation. A lot of what we have become was built on their willingness to take the message of Jesus over the horizon, and into the unknown.

One of the accepted practices of these monks seems to have been Peregrinatio, or ‘Holy voyaging’, which in practice meant to get in a boat, and simply to set sail. No destination planned, simply trusting to tide, wind and God. The destination of such a voyage was not geographical, but rather spiritual. The goal was to arrive at ones ‘place of resurrection.’ Arriving at journey’s end inevitably meant an actual physical place also however- and it is these places that still hold the memory of these voyages in Argyll- in the place names, the folk lore, and also in the marks and mounds in the earth out on exposed headlands, or on tiny islands.

Many tiny Hebridean islands became the seat of voyaging saints. Some lived like hermits, sustained by distant communities, whilst other islands became seats of prayer and learning, sending further voyagers out into the unknown.

And what of us? Where is our pilgrimage taking us- our peregrinatio?

May you find your own place of resurrection…

5. Landfall…

The longing for landfall after time at sea becomes like a longing for life itself. The promise of home.

For sailors, the approach of a strange coastline is a time of huge danger. Hidden reefs, lee coastlines or sea monsters could yet spell disaster. Anxiety fills the boat. Arguments may break out amongst the crew. But these are the birth pangs of something new…

As you step onto firm ground, you might like to ask God to continue to lead you on the path to resurrected life.

Lord for the safety of solid ground, thank you.

For the fires of home, and the security you gave me, thank you.

But let the pull of the ocean stay strong in me.

Let my voyage be for you

And to you.

Chris Goan 2008.

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