Inis Mór, Aran Islands

Aran is a magic place. I came to Aran innocently in 1982 for a two weeks holiday. That experience changed my life. By 1985, I had moved to live permanently on the island - entranced by Aran's magic.

Since then, I have seen others caught in the web as it were:- a young English man who came here for a weekend one hot summer in the late '80s, and has never left; a hot-blooded Latin woman who lingered too long in a local hostel and now has lived here for over five years; a student who changed his life's direction after camping here one summer - he is now here indefinitely, his studies permanently interrupted. All got entangled in Aran's web of spiritual delights.

My experience was the nearest I have come to being spellbound. A mysterious pull irresistibly drew me. Working through my intuition rather than my rational thought, I had a clear and almost instant sense that this was to be my place of resurrection. More than anything else, it was a sense that I had found what I had been looking for. I had not known clearly what I was looking for, but now I recognised it. All of a sudden, I saw my life up to that point as but a preparation for moving to live on Aran and the work that I would do there. Perhaps Abraham had the same experience when he arrived in the Promised Land!

In Celtic legends there are experiences recounted similar to my experience. Oisín was drawn to live in Tír na nÓg for three hundred years by Niamh of the Golden Hair. The great Cúchulainn was drawn away from his wife Emer when he fell in love with Fand, a woman of the Otherworld. She drew him into the Otherworld where they lived until Fand's husband Mananan the sea-god came and shook his cloak between them. This act prevented them ever meeting again through eternity. Diarmuid got caught in the geiss, or spell, of Gráinne and eloped with her when she was due to marry Fionn McCumhal. I did not fall in love with a woman, Otherworld or otherwise, but the experience I had of being drawn to Aran was much the same.

In 1982, I was a Roman Catholic priest and Marist religious, teaching in an all boys school on the east coast of Ireland. Every Saturday night large crowds of young people from all over the town gathered at our school hall for a youth prayer meeting. These were lively affairs. The music and singing were infectious and there was a strong sense of community. The young people shared their personal experience of God and a team of adults gave teachings, counsel and prayer support.

That year, the youth prayer group decided to take a summer holiday together. As a leader, I was to accompany them. Anyone who wished could come along, and we made it as cheap and affordable as possible. These young people were 15 - 16 year olds and had very little money. We hired a mini-bus to take us to Rossaveel north of Galway city, and from there we took two small 12-seater boats for the one and a half hour sea crossing to Aran. Sixteen of us travelled. We brought our tents and sleeping bags.

For all of us, it was our first time on Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran islands. At the time, tourism to the islands had not developed. Getting to the island was a hit-and-miss affair, and there were few facilities for tourists.

We walked to the 'camping site' which turned out to be a field with a water tap and a mobile home in which was located the toilet. We had the field to ourselves even though it was the middle of July. The sun was splitting the stones and we were on our holidays.

Each day we gathered in the morning and evening for prayer. At these times we shared the gospel reading for the day. I remember well that for a number of consecutive days the gospel began with Jesus saying: "The kingdom of God is like ...". Towards the end of our holiday, when our skin was tanned and we had walked practically every square yard of the island, we had one of our last prayer times together. The gospel that day was: "The kingdom of God is like a treasure hidden in a field which someone has found; he hides it again, goes off happy, sells everything he owns and buys the field." (Matthew 13:44-46). After the gospel reading, there was a time for reflection and sharing. I shared the thought that we were listening to this gospel in a field, and that I felt we had found a treasure in it. The treasure was not, of course, gold or gems, but the experience we had had together.

My sharing had a profound effect -- on myself! The more I thought about it, the more I realised what a treasure I had found. For those two weeks we had lived the way I had wanted to live but had not been able to. The institutional life of my religious order and the demands of my teaching work had prevented me. I had wanted a simple lifestyle without the clutter of material things. I had wanted meaningful prayer-time together with others where we shared personally and where prayers came from the heart rather than just reciting psalms out of a book. And I had wanted a lifestyle that was closer to nature. In Aran, without looking for it particularly, I had found all three. And I had found more.

The crucial experience for me on Aran was the connection I made with the ancient spiritual and monastic sites of the island. In these places I saw evidence of people, from whom I was descended, living out a spiritual vision which was integral to their own culture and place. These monasteries were not a cultural imposition from outside, another form of colonialism, but were a unique expression of the Irish people themselves as they came to terms with their experience of God. This is what I wanted. This was my tradition -- a treasure, unused, buried in a field. I wanted to connect with this ancient tradition and live it today. I was eventually to say it succinctly -- I wanted to be a Celtic monk.

Back home, my mind was in a turmoil. The magic of Aran held me spellbound. Aran was now the only place that had meaning for me in the light of my spiritual quest. But I was committed to a religious order and my appointment required that I go back teaching in September. The summer was not fully over and I still had time to think and pray. I took my bicycle and my tent and headed off on my own. After a few days, I landed at my parents door in Dublin. They were staying at a summer house on a beach in North Dublin and I used the opportunity to walk the cliffs and quiet strands.

Two things happened to me while I was there. First -- I lost my keys. Living in a religious institution with a school attached meant having to have keys for everything. I lost the keys along the cliffs and though I walked the spot over and over again, I never found them. The second thing that happened to me, happened the same day. I climbed down a slippery cliff to a beach which no-one ever used. While walking it, it came to me not to leave this beach until I had made a decision about my future life.

The decision took about an hour. I decided that, if after nine days of prayer and fasting I still felt the same way about going to live on Aran, I would write to my provincial leader and ask him for permission to go there. The novena of prayer would bring me up to August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption, a good day.

As the days went by after this decision, I slowly understood what losing the keys had meant. I had lost my security. A prophetic prayer card a friend have given me some time previously was about to be fulfilled. The card showed a boat tied up in a small harbour, with the sun setting over the wide open sea beyond. Above the picture were the words: 'a boat is safe in a harbour, but this is not what boats are made for'. I was about to leave the security of the harbour for the open sea. The thought filled me with both excitement and fear.

On August 15th 1982 I wrote a letter to my provincial leader requesting release from my present work and permission to go to live on Aran as a monk. After a week or so, I got a response -- my request was refused. I spent the next year teaching as usual. The following year I was transferred to another job -- preaching retreats to adults and to school students. The desire to go to Aran was stronger than ever, and I continued to plead with my leader to let me go. The answer was always 'no'.

After two years of refusal, coming up to Christmas 1984, the tide changed in my favour. Our retreat house where I now worked was preparing to close and was going to be sold in the new year. Being a resident and working there, it was obvious that I was going to have to change my residence and possibly my work. Christmas was an awkward time to transfer people, as normally our province followed the school year which ended in the summer and people were transferred at this time,. I took the opportunity presented and asked if I could fill in the six months until the summer on Aran, as a sort of feasibility study. The request was granted and I was on my way.

My journey to Aran was a mystical journey full of signs. My father brought me to Galway with my bicycle, books, typewriter and a few other bits and pieces. He then left me. I had to do the remainder of the journey myself. I slept on the couch in the apartment of a poor family in Galway. These were friends of mine, but showing solidarity with poor people was and is important for me. At 5.30 a.m. the following morning I made my way to the boat which was departing from Galway docks at 6 a.m. I was the only passenger.

The boat, the Naomh Éanna (Saint Enda), made its way out of Galway Bay via Inis Oírr and Inis Meáin (the two other Aran islands), arriving at Inis Mór at midday. As we sailed, I read my morning prayer from the Prayer of the Church. The scripture reading read: 'I will restore the land and assign you the estates that lie waste' (Isaiah 49:8). How fitting for me on my journey from exile back into the midst of my own tradition?

This scripture passage was not new to me. It was read out to me in the Spring of 1983 at a spiritual conference. I had sought prayer and discernment from one of the main speakers at the conference, Robert Faricy s.j., who at the time was a professor of spirituality at the Gregorian University in Rome. Having told him I wanted to go to Aran to live as a Celtic monk, I asked him for his discernment. He prayed with me and opened his Bible at this 49th chapter of Isaiah. He began his reading: 'Islands, listen to me, pay attention remotest peoples...' (Isaiah 49:1). He confirmed me in my quest and encouraged me every step of the way. His advice to me at the time was to continue asking for permission to go until I no longer got a refusal. This I had done. Now, on my journey to Aran on January 9th 1985 I was again being given this reading.

On arrival in the bay at Inis Mór the tide was fully out and the water at the pier was too shallow for docking. We had to wait a further half hour. During that half hour the captain took pity on me and shared his lunch with me.

And so began an adventure which continues to this day. My journey has taken me deeper into the Celtic spiritual tradition. For ten years I kept one foot in the Roman tradition, from which I had come. However, I eventually came to the point where the two were not compatible in my life. I was performing the splits.

Choosing to place myself entirely within the Celtic tradition was a difficult decision. It was not as simple as leaving one denomination to join another. The Celtic Church does not exist as a denomination. All it is is a memory. While strands of Celtic spirituality are to be found here and there, these are not organised in any structured way. In stepping fully into the Celtic tradition, I was stepping into a vacuum. There

would be no support system for me, no colleagues, no obvious source of income, and no structures into which I could walk. The last of the Celtic monks had disappeared towards the end of the twelfth century. I was trying to bridge an eight hundred year gap. While on the one hand I felt I was burning my bridges behind me and walking into an uninhabited landscape, on the other, I felt like a lobster that had outgrown its shell. Regardless of the risk or the outcome, it was clear to me that this was what I had to do.

I now live as a priest, teacher, writer and guide in the Celtic tradition. I am married with one child. We have our own house church and celebrate the Eucharist with others every Sunday. My quest continues for a quality of life and a perfection of lifestyle that is imbued with the Celtic tradition. I want to discover and experiment with new forms of worship, a new theology and a new way of being church -- drawing from the Celtic tradition. There are regular requests for me to perform marriage ceremonies, baptisms, first communions and house blessings throughout the country. When pilgrimage groups, or groups of students, come to Aran, I am often asked to act as their guide. I have written a spiritual guide to Aran as a back-up to this work.

Having lived on Aran now for fourteen years, my journey has taken me deep into the vast richness of Celtic spirituality. I did not always know it was so rich. In fact I knew very little about it before I got to Aran. When I found that treasure in the field in 1982, I had no idea what value it would amount to. Since then, I have had a chance to sift through it. To my amazement, I keep finding more and more. The treasure chest has turned into the cooking pot of Brigid, or the cauldron of Dagda and contains a supply of food that never runs out. There is always more to be found.

Many people have asked me 'Why Aran?' My answer is that I had been looking for what I now call 'my place of resurrection', and in Aran I found it. I had experienced my life as being incomplete. Despite ordination, I had remained restless and unfulfilled. Instead of improving, my life was leaving me increasingly dissatisfied as my disillusionment with the church, with the priesthood and with my religious order grew. There was a strong energy in me urging me to keep searching until I found what I had not named, but knew I was looking for. Finding Aran gave me that experience -- a feeling of peace, a clear conviction that this was it.

Finding your 'place of resurrection' is a personal thing. It is the place to which you are spiritually drawn to spend the final years of your life. The term comes from the Celtic tradition. For many centuries, it was the practice for monks to wander from place to place, and monastery to monastery, until they found the place where they were to settle. In many stories of the saints, like Saint Gobnait on Inis Oírr or Saint Ciarán on Inis Mór, they received their direction in a vision or dream. Gobnait was told that she would find her place of resurrection where she saw nine white deer grazing. She found this place in Ballyvourney, County Cork and built her famous monastery there. Ciarán was told in a dream that a great tree would grow in the centre of Ireland and fruit from its branches would be carried by the birds to all parts. This was a very accurate prophecy. Ciarán's monastery of Clonmacnoise, where he died, is built at the centre of Ireland, on the crossing point of the river Shannon with the old road from Dublin to Galway. It housed students from all over the world and the numbers attending grew to five thousand.

I chose Aran because I was personally led to it and no other options were laid before me. In psychological terms it was an intuitive decision, rather than a rational decision. If it had been a rational decision, it would have made a lot of sense. Saint Enda, the founding saint of Aran, had come to Aran almost exactly 1500 years previously, in or around the year 485. When you realise that Saint Patrick came to Ireland in 432, just over 50 years before that, you can understand that what Enda was about to do on Aran was foundational. On Aran, Enda created the early model of Celtic monasticism, inspired by Saint Martin of Tours and the desert fathers of Egypt, and moulded by the culture, traditions and spiritual beliefs in Ireland at the time. Enda's model spread throughout Ireland and Enda earned the title 'The Patriarch of Irish Monasticism'.

Since the time of Enda, Aran has been a place of pilgrimage. It is truly a monastic island. Iona, its great sister island off Scotland, never had more than one monastery, while Aran boasts of at least ten monasteries and as many saints. Today, under the protection of the Irish Government, Inis Mór alone has 28 national monuments and over 600 other sites on its landscape of historical and archaeological importance. The island is an outdoor museum, the richest landscape of its kind in Europe.

The importance of Aran as a place of pilgrimage is supported historically. Roderic O'Flaherty in 1684 wrote:

The isles of Aran are famous for the numerous multitude of saints who lived and are buried there, or who trained in religious austerity and propagated monastic discipline in other parts; venerable for many sacred churches, chapels, wells, crosses, sepulchres, and other holy relics of saints still extant as monuments of their piety; reverenced for many rare privileges obtainable in the sacred places, and instant divine punishment inflicted on such as dare violate or profane them; frequently visited by Christians in pilgrimage for devotion, acts of penance, and the miracles wrought there.

In 908 A.D., Cormac mac Cuilennáin, bishop and king of Cashel, wrote:

There are four harbours between Heaven and Earth were souls are cleansed, the Paradise of Adam ... Rome, Aran, Jerusalem. No angel who ever came to Ireland to help Gael or Gall returned to Heaven without first visiting Aran, and if people understood how greatly the Lord loves Aran they would all come there to partake of its blessings.

On Aran, there was a continuous monastic presence from the late 5th century to the middle of the 16th century. For eleven hundred and fifty years Aran was a holy island focussed on living out a monastic vision. Take a map of the island, close your eyes and stick a pin into it. No matter what point you pick, within a short walking distance of it you will find the remains of a monastic presence.

There are thirteen saints who have given their names to places on Inis Mór. Their names are: Gregory, Enda, Benan, Columcille, Rónán, Ciarán, Sorney, Brendan of Birr, Conal, Berchan, Fursey, Colman and Brecan. Of these, nine are buried on the island. For them, Inis Mór is their place of resurrection. Their number is significant. When a monk set off to found a new monastery, he liked to have twelve disciples with him so that the community would be in imitation of Christ and his twelve apostles.

There is an ancient poem that expresses this and many other aspects of that early vision:

I wish, ancient and eternal King, to live in a hidden hut in the wilderness.
A narrow blue stream beside it, and a clear pool for washing away my sins by the grace of the Holy Spirit.
A beautiful wood all round, where birds of every kind of voice can grow up and find shelter.
Facing southward to catch the sun, with fertile soil around it suitable for every kind of plant.
And virtuous young men to join me, humble and eager to serve God.
Twelve young men -- three fours, four threes, two sixes, six pairs -- willing to do every kind of work.
A lovely church, with a white linen cloth over the altar, a home for God from heaven.
A Bible surrounded by four candles, one for each of the gospels.
A special hut in which to gather for meals, talking cheerfully as we eat, without sarcasm, without boasting, without any evil words.
Hens laying eggs for us to eat, leeks growing near the stream, salmon and trout to catch, and bees providing honey.
Enough food and clothing given by our Heavenly King, and enough time to sit and pray to him.

No-one knows who wrote this poem, it was written so long ago. Yet its aspirations continue to echo loudly within my own soul. I could sign my name to the bottom of that prayer.

The place on Inis Mór where I now live is called Mainistir. This means 'monastery'. It is such an appropriate address for me that had it not been part of my address, I might have called my house that name! As it is, we call our house 'An Charraig'. This means 'The Rock'. This name came to me as I read the scripture passage where Jesus says to Peter: "and on this rock I will build my church". On this rock of Aran, Saint Enda and his colleagues had built the Celtic Church many centuries ago. And on this rock I search for a new form of church inspired by this ancient model. The word 'rock' is a very appropriate word as a term for Inis Mór, as anyone who has ever visited it will agree. It is all rock - acres and acres of flat sheets of limestone on top of which is laid a criss-cross of stone walls.

I live with my wife and child in a wooden hut which we have built ourselves. We are in a secluded part of the island, down a narrow lane towards the sea and removed from other housing. We have also built a stone-thatched cottage which houses guests and volunteers and a printing press. We have a plastic tunnel, animals and gardens.


We are neither a monastery nor a community. I tell people that we are an Aistir (pronounced ashtar). This is a word I have invented to replace the word monastery. Aistir in Gaelic means journey. We are journeyers, and we welcome other journeyers, as the monasteries did. Aistir contains the last two syllables of the word Mainistir (monastery). This is significant as it means we have omitted the syllable 'mon' which suggests we are all celibate or single. I am not in favour of an imposed celibacy, nor do I think it is a Gospel value. Many Celtic monks did have partners. Finally, the first syllable of Aistir comes from the word Aisling which means a vision or a dream. This word has always been part of our vocabulary since we came to Aran. We are following a vision or a dream. The word Aisling is now the title of our magazine.

So to sum up -- An Charraig is an Aistir, a place where journeyers gather as they follow their dream, a place that takes its inspiration from the Celtic monasteries of old and gives it a contemporary expression.

Just below our house is a 'clear pool for washing away our sins by the grace of the Holy Spirit'. It is a pool that Saint Ciarán found when he built his own hermit cell here in the early 6th century. Since that time it has been called An Tobar Beannaithe, the Holy Well of Saint Ciarán. We regularly gather around this pool to practise the ancient ritual of 'the rounds'. This means walking around the well in a clockwise or sunwise direction carrying pebbles in your hand and saying standard prayers. In Gaelic it is called a turas deiseal, literally a journey rightwards. Only the innocent or the wicked would dare to go around the well in the wrong direction. It would at best unravel the blessing and at worst bring a curse.

The key to understanding these rounds is the realisation that it is an imitation of the sun going around the earth. In the northern hemisphere the sun appears to rise in the east, travel in an arc to the south, and then sets in the west. The rounds imitate this journey and in so doing they connect you to the life-giving daily dance of the sun and the earth. It is a fertility ritual.

You begin the rounds with seven pebbles in your hand. These pebbles are available from a stone saucer where the journey begins. As you do your first round you recite the standard prayers taught to you as a child -- the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Nicene Creed. Then you drop a stone back into the saucer and begin your second round. And so on. Seven times you go around, marking the seven days of the week and linking yourself further with the cosmological cycle. Then you approach the holy well itself, and prostrating yourself on the ground, you reach deeply into the well to lift a palmful of clean, pure, holy water. Mythologically, you are reaching into the womb of the earth. The earth is our mother, the Goddess, and this is where new life comes from.

Further down the hill is another water source. This time the water flows out of a rock in a fifteen foot cliff, as it did for Moses in Exodus 17. It flows down into what was initially a pool, but is now a concrete holding tank. However, the spot is known as Poll an Bhradáin. This translates as The Salmon Pool. Before the tank was built, the water gathered in a pool before making its way onwards to the sea. It got its name The Salmon Pool from a miracle that happened during the time of Saint Enda.

In the late 5th century, Enda had arrived on the island to set up his monastery. 150 monks had come with him and they had landed at this point, in the bay directly below. They had an immediate problem of finding sufficient food for such a large crowd. However, no sooner was the problem recognised than it was solved. In the pool the monks found a salmon bigger than you could ever imagine. It was big enough to feed the 150 monks and so they were satisfied. From then on the place was known as Poll an Bhradáin, the Pool of the Salmon.

In the Celtic tradition the salmon is symbolic of wisdom. Fionn McCumhal ate the Bradán Feasa, the Salmon of Knowledge caught in the River Boyne, and acquired all the knowledge that was to be known at that time. For Christians in Greece, Christ was symbolised by a fish, the Ichthus -- letters that stood for 'Jesus Christ, God and Man'. For Celtic Christians that fish is the salmon.

Aran, as many people observe, has few trees. It probably never had many trees, as there are no bogs or turf on the island. This is explained in folklore as a curse placed on the island by Saint Colmcille. Colmcille as a young man came to visit Enda and to experience his monastic experiment. He asked Enda for a small patch of land on which to build his cell. He was not warmly received. Enda felt intimidated by Colmcille, because Colmcille came from a more powerful family. His words to Colmcille were: "If I give you a piece of land on this island, it will lead to you being remembered here instead of me". The disagreement even came to blows, and the marks on the rocks below Killeany are there to prove it. They are said to be the marks of Colmcille's ribs. Colmcille left the island in disgust, and was so angry that he placed three curses on the island. The first curse was that the island would have no soil. The second was that it would have no fuel. And the third was that it would always be ruled by outsiders. No fuel meant no trees and no turf.

Nonetheless there are some trees around my dwelling. I would not call it a wood as in the poem. We have two ash trees on the south side of the house, a few elderberry and blackthorn trees scattered around the site, and below our garden to the north are some sycamores and maples. We then have a wonderful selection of birds living with us throughout the summer which adds greatly to the pleasure we get from living here. The elderberry provides us with flowers for wine and berries for jam. As for blackberries, these bushes are everywhere.

Our house is, as in the poem, facing south -- we built it that way to utilise the gift of the sun. We have built a glass lean-to the full length of the house and this catches the sun in both summer and winter and heats the house. However, in the summer the two ash trees are in full foliage and these help to shade us from an overdose of heat.

The rest of the poem is equally accurate in describing An Charraig. We do not have twelve young men all the time, but there have been occasions when there were up to twelve men and women staying here. We have a little prayer hut that serves as our chapel and we also use the roofless church of Ciarán's monastery below us. Most of the time, weather permitting, we hold our worship outdoors.

As the poem says, we have hens to give us eggs and bees to give us honey. We get vegetables from our garden which has good fertile soil nourished by the seaweed we drag up from the sea. Around us on the laneways, in the fields and on the shore we can find wild leeks, wild garlic, nettles, wild sorrel, sea lettuce, blackberries, and many other edible plants, while the sea close by offers us fresh fish, shellfish and edible seaweed. We have the majority of our needs met from the surrounding area and the whole setting and lifestyle that we have chosen facilitates time for reflection and prayer.

The poem quoted above names a vision for a life that gives expression to Celtic Christianity in the monastic tradition. That vision was first expressed by Saint Enda when he came to Aran at the end of the fifth century. It is a vision that was spread throughout Ireland by people who were influenced by Enda, and later it spread throughout Europe. That vision is still alive, fifteen hundred years later -- it still inspires and it still makes sense.

Inis Mór has the most famous and impressive cliff-fort in all of Europe, Dún Aonghusa. Situated on the edge of a 100 metre sheer cliff edge, overlooking the Atlantic ocean, it offers a breath-taking experience that produces feelings of awe, wonder and fear. For some, there is a feeling of being at the entrance to the Otherworld. This may well have been the belief of those who built it, at least 2500 years ago. There is certainly a magic about the location which is added to and contained by the stone walls and other structures of the fort built there.

If Dún Aonghusa was not situated on Inis Mór, people would still flock to see the other forts located on the island. Dún Dubhchathair (the Black Fort) is another cliff fort that, although not as impressive as Dún Aonghusa, has its own character and attraction. Dún Eochla and Dún Eoghanachta are ring-forts built on high-points of the island that offer wonderful views in all directions. There are the remains of other forts on the island, but these are in ruins. The oldest monument on the island is a dolmen called the Bed of Diarmuid and Gráinne, which is between four and five thousand years old. This dolmen is a wedge tomb. It was probably used to bury the bones of important people.

These ancient sites suggest that Inis Mór had a spiritual attraction for people long before the Christian monks arrived. One could think of these ancient forts and the dolmen as outdoor temples. It was at places such as these that the celebration of the Celtic seasons and the solstices took place. There is clear evidence from archaeological digs that wealthy and sophisticated people lived on Inis Mór during these times. There is little doubt therefore that they came to the island with their druids, their rituals and their magic. It may be, indeed, that the island was regarded by the Celts and earlier peoples as a sacred place, a home for the gods, or an entrance into the Otherworld.

One way or another, Inis Mór in its entirety is a sacred place for me and for many other contemporary people. Its magic has not worn off with time, rather it has intensified as I grow to appreciate and understand it more and more. Aran is a place where the gods come to meet me. The Divine is more tangible here than anywhere else I know. It is my place of resurrection.


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