Kevin and the Blackbird

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A blackbird is looking at a man's hand.

It is a plain brown hand, a bit chapped, with dirt under the nails, and it is stretched out through a very small window and held perfectly still. The blackbird has seen many branches in its short life. It has never seen a branch with a thumb. But the hand is warm, and flat, and out of the wind, and the blackbird has been awake since before it was light, and it has, well, a delicate matter on its mind.

So the blackbird hops onto the palm.

The man does not move. There is, you will notice, a man attached to this hand, kneeling inside a small stone cell with his arm straight out through the window like someone feeling for rain. His knees are beginning to say things. His shoulder has said several things already. And the man has just understood, with a great clear calm, that this is going to take a while.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is of Saint Kevin of Glendalough, a real abbot of early Ireland, taken from the old Latin and Irish Lives of the saint, which were written down centuries after he died, and a few of the small conversations are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let's begin with a valley.

If you go south from Dublin, past the suburbs, past the last of the shopping centres, past a few more shopping centres that were clearly hiding, the land begins to lift. You come into the Wicklow Mountains. They are not tall mountains, as mountains go. A mountaineer from the Alps would call them hills and ask where the lift was. But they are broad and brown and bare on top, and they hold the weather the way a bowl holds soup. Cloud sits in them. Rain sits in them. And on the days when neither of those is sitting there, the whole place is so green and so quiet that you can hear a stream a mile away.

Tucked into those mountains is a valley. It was cut, a very long time ago, by a glacier, which is a river of ice that has all the time in the world and no sense of direction. When the ice melted, it left two lakes, one above the other, joined by a stream, with steep wooded slopes going straight up on either side. The Irish for the place is Gleann Dá Loch. That means the glen of the two lakes. Over the centuries the name wore down into Glendalough, which is easier to say, if no easier to spell.

Now, we are in the sixth century. Rome has fallen, and the world has not quite noticed what to do next. Ireland was never part of the Roman Empire at all, which means it had no roads, no towns in our sense of the word, and no one to tell it what a straight line was. People lived in small kingdoms, each with its own king, who was in practice a rather important farmer with a great many cousins. Cattle were money. A man's wealth was counted in cows. If you wanted to say that something was very valuable, you said it was worth three cows, or seven cows, and everybody nodded.

And into this world, a few generations earlier, had come Christianity. The old stories say that Saint Patrick brought it, and in an earlier episode we told how he came back as a bishop to the country where he had once been a slave. By the time of our story, the faith had taken root so well that something remarkable was happening. Men and women were going out to the wild places, the islands, the mountains, the lonely valleys, to pray. They were hermits to begin with. But holy people have a way of being found, and soon a hermit would have visitors, and then disciples, and then a few huts, and then a church, and then a hundred people to feed. And that is how a monastery began in those days: not with a plan, but with a man who went somewhere quiet and was followed.

So hold that picture. It is the sixth century. Rain is falling on a mountain. And in a noble family of Leinster, one of the cousins is about to be born who will not want to be a king.

His name, in Irish, was Cóemgen. It means something like fair-born, or well-born, or handsome by birth, which is a lovely thing to put on a baby and a rather heavy thing to live up to. The people who told his story later turned the name into Kevin, and Kevin it has been ever since.

The old Lives are sure that he was of noble family, and some tie it to the royal houses of Leinster. They are rather less sure of the details, and one or two of them, I'm afraid, contradict each other, which is what happens when you write a biography three or four hundred years late. They agree that he was born in Leinster. They agree that he was given to the care of holy men while he was still very young. And they agree that, as a boy, he was good, gentle and a little dreamy, the kind of child who forgets to come in for dinner because he is watching an ant.

Now, in those days, boys of good family were often sent to a monastery for their schooling, the way a boy today might be sent to a school with a very long name. They learned to read, which was not common. They learned Latin, which is a language that was spoken in the Roman Empire, and which the monks used to talk to the rest of Europe, rather like a modern international airport sign. They learned the Psalms by heart, all hundred and fifty of them. And they learned to copy books, one letter at a time, with a goose feather and ink made out of oak galls and, in some cases, a fairly short temper.

Kevin did well at this. He learned everything he was taught, and he did it quietly. And the Lives say that when he grew up, instead of going home to be a nobleman, he asked to become a monk. His family, by the way, as in many such stories, was not wild about this. A son who might have been a king was now going to spend his life with his sleeves rolled up in a garden. But the choice was his, and he made it, and as far as we can tell he never looked back.

Then came the next step. As a young priest, Kevin felt a call, the call that came to so many in those days, to go further in. Not to a bigger monastery. To a smaller place. A quieter place. A place with nobody in it.

And so, the old Lives tell us, he went to the valley of the two lakes.

I want you to picture how he came there, because the picture is the whole story.

It's a grey day in early spring. A young man, not yet thirty, is walking up a path that is mostly mud with a little path in it. He carries nearly nothing. A cloak, a little bag of oatmeal, and a book of the Psalms in a leather satchel, which is the only thing he owns that he would be sorry to lose. He has walked for days. His boots have given up. And he turns a corner, between two steep slopes, and there before him is the upper lake.

It is a dark lake. It is the colour of strong tea, because of the peat in the hills, with very clear, cold water under the colour. The cliffs come down to it, so steep that the sun does not get into the valley until late morning and leaves again soon after lunch. A single raven is turning over the water. The only other sound is the stream coming down.

And Kevin stops and thinks, in the plain way that people think when they have been given something: here.

Now, there is a place in Glendalough today, high up on the south side of the upper lake, that people call Saint Kevin's Bed. It is a little cave cut into the rock face, over the water, reached by a narrow ledge. Archaeologists say that it was probably made much earlier than Kevin, by people in the Bronze Age, who may have used it as a tomb. Folk memory says that Kevin used it as a bed. I'd like to tell you that this is certain. I'm afraid it isn't. The old Lives say he lived for a time in a hollow tree and later in a small cell by the lake. The cave is a good story, and a draughty one, and it is where people have been pointing since the Middle Ages. The stories agree about the lake and the loneliness. They agree less about the furniture.

What the Lives tell us clearly is how he lived. He was alone, and he was very, very poor. He wore skins and a rough cloak. He ate what the valley gave: nuts, herbs, a bit of fish when the lake was kind. He prayed through the night, and, the old stories say, he stood up to his neck in the cold lake, saying the Psalms. I do want to say, here, that nobody is asking you to try that. Not tonight. Please stay under the blanket. The point of the stories was never that holy people should be uncomfortable. The point was that they were so happy to be with God that the discomfort did not seem to count. It's the difference between a man who goes out in the rain to be wet and a man who has forgotten the rain because he is watching a rainbow.

And here is something quite beautiful that the Lives keep coming back to. Kevin, alone in his valley, was not lonely. He had the animals. They come and go all through his story: a doe who, the old tale says, gave milk for a child he was caring for, the fish, the birds, the otters. The Lives love to tell how the wild things trusted him. And I think the reason they love it is this: in the old way of thinking, a person who lives at peace with God also begins, little by little, to live at peace with the whole of creation. It is like a house where one room has been set right, and the quiet starts to spread. We told a story like this about Saint Cuthbert and his otters. We have told it about Saint Francis and his wolf. And tonight, the animal in the story is a blackbird.

Now, here we need to leave the saint for a few minutes, and invent a young man.

Imagine a monastery, some years later. Kevin's quiet valley did not stay quiet. As the Lives say, and as always happens, people had found him. They came for advice. They came for blessing. Some of them came to stay. A few small huts went up beside the lower lake, then a little church of timber, then a larger one of stone, then a refectory, which is a fine word for a room with a very long table and a great pot. By the time of our story, Glendalough is full of brothers, and the brothers are full of porridge, and Kevin is their abbot, which he did not want to be, and has become, as the best abbots do, because everyone could see that he did not want to be.

And among the brothers is a young man called Fintan.

Fintan of the Ford is nineteen, and he has been at Glendalough for three months. He comes from a place where a river crosses a road, which is what a ford is, and he is as quick and bright as the river, and about as good at sitting still. He learned the whole of the Psalms in six weeks. He can copy a page in an afternoon. He talks fast, walks fast, eats fast, and if you gave him a bell to ring he would ring it twice as often as it needed. The older monks like him very much. They also look at him sometimes the way you look at a kettle that is just about to boil over.

Fintan's trouble is that he cannot bear to wait. Anything that takes a long time makes him feel as if his skin is too small. And in a monastery, I'm afraid to say, nearly everything takes a long time. Bread takes a day. Barley takes a year. A prayer, he is discovering, takes the whole of your life, and does not give you a certificate.

On the morning that matters, it is the end of April, and Fintan is in the kitchen, looking out of the door at the rain, which has been falling since Sunday, in the thorough and unhurried way of Wicklow rain. He is peeling turnips. He has peeled a great many turnips. There is a large pile of them. He is beginning to suspect that there is no end to the turnips.

"Brother Mochua," he says.

"Mm," says the cook.

Brother Mochua is a large, slow man with arms like hams, and he has been the monastery's cook for twenty-six years. He has never once been seen to hurry, and yet, somehow, dinner is always ready. It is a mystery that Fintan has been trying to understand for three months.

"How long do you think the rain will last?"

"As long as it lasts," says Brother Mochua.

"But how long is that?"

"Longer than you want," says the cook, "and shorter than you fear. Peel."

Fintan peels. He thinks about the rain. He thinks about the turnips. And then, because he has to say something or burst, he says, "Brother, I do not understand how Father Abbot does it."

"Does what?"

"Waits. He waits for everything. Yesterday I saw him stand for an hour at the edge of the lower lake looking at nothing. It was raining. He was getting wet. Nothing was happening. And he looked, well..." He hunts for the word. "Content."

Brother Mochua puts down his ladle. It is a very large ladle, and it takes a moment.

"Ah," he says. "That's not nothing he's looking at."

"It looks like nothing."

"I know," says the cook. "That's the trouble with it." He picks the ladle up again. "Now if you really want to learn something, there is a thing that happened to the abbot a long time ago, when he was a young man in the valley and there was no monastery at all, and I had it from the old brothers who were there. Would you like to hear it?"

"Is it long?"

"Very," says Brother Mochua, and for the first time all morning he smiles.

Fintan, in spite of himself, puts down the turnip.

This is what Brother Mochua told him, and it is the story the old Lives tell.

It was a Lent. That is the forty days before Easter, when Christians pray and fast and clear away the clutter, and in those days the monks took it very seriously. Kevin had a small prayer-cell by the upper lake, a stone hut so small that a tall man could touch both walls if he stretched, which is exactly what he did every morning, partly to pray and partly to check.

And Kevin had a custom. He prayed with his arms held out. This is very old, by the way. Christians have prayed this way since the first centuries, standing with the hands opened wide, in the shape of a cross, because that is the shape of the one who was lifted up for us. You have seen priests do it at Mass, and some of the saints did it for hours. It is a way of praying with the whole body, saying: here I am, I have nothing in my hands, you may put in them whatever you like.

So on this particular day, Kevin knelt in his cell, in front of the little window, which was just big enough for a man's arm. He stretched out his right arm through it, palm up, into the cold air. And he began to pray the Psalms.

Now, a Psalm takes about three minutes. There are a hundred and fifty. You see where this is going.

He had got to about the sixty-third psalm. Perhaps you know it. It begins, "O God, you are my God, for you I long. For you my soul is thirsting. My flesh is pining for you, like a dry, weary land without water." And it goes on to say, near the end, "In the shadow of your wings I rejoice." Which, if you are about to hear what happens next, is a rather good line to be saying.

A blackbird came to the window.

The old Lives call it a blackbird, and I'm going to call it that too. If you have never seen one, imagine a bird the size of a small loaf, glossy and black, with a bright orange-yellow beak, as if somebody had dipped it in marmalade. The male is the black one, and he sings, in the early evening, from the top of a roof or a hedge, the finest song in the northern world. The female is brown, and she does the building, and I'm sorry to say that she does most of the work. This was a brown one. She had a beakful of moss and dead grass. She had a plan.

She looked at the window. She looked at the hand. It was out of the wind. It was warm. It was flat, and open, and quite empty, and, as far as a blackbird could tell, exactly the right size.

She hopped onto it.

Now, Kevin felt this, as you would. A small weight on the palm. A pair of tiny, scratchy feet. He did not move. He did not open his eyes. But I think we may be allowed to guess that a part of him said, very quietly, ah.

And the blackbird, finding that the branch did not argue, put down her moss. She turned around once. She settled. She began to build.

I should say something about how long this takes.

A blackbird's nest is a surprisingly careful piece of work. First comes a cup of grass and twigs. Then a layer of mud, which she presses into shape with her breast, turning round and round. Then a lining of fine dry grass, so that the eggs rest softly. A good blackbird can do the whole thing in a few days, but she's a perfectionist, and she was building in a place she had never built before, and she did not, I imagine, have a lot of experience of fingers.

And then, when the cup was ready, she laid an egg.

That one egg, small, pale blue-green, freckled with brown, lay in the hollow of the saint's open hand.

And here, Brother Mochua said, is where the old story becomes a story about Kevin and not about a bird. Because every part of him wanted to pull the arm in. His shoulder was on fire. His fingers were going numb. The Psalms, which he had been saying beautifully, had by now become a muddle in his head. If he drew back his hand, the egg would roll, the nest would fall, and the bird would be frightened away. If he stayed, he would have to stay until the egg hatched.

And everyone knows how long that takes.

"How long?" said Fintan, in the kitchen. He had picked up another turnip, but he was not peeling it.

"Two weeks," said Brother Mochua, "more or less. Blackbirds sit for thirteen days or so. And then there is the time to build, and the time to lay, and so on. In all, it is longer than Lent, if you have the arithmetic. The Lives, being the Lives, do not worry about this. They say only that he held out his hand until the egg hatched."

"For two weeks? Without moving?"

"Well," said Brother Mochua. "I wasn't there. I have it from a man who had it from a man who had it from the monks who were here when it happened. I will say only that if it did not happen exactly so, it happened in some way very like it. That man did not waste his Lent."

Fintan considers this. "What did he do?"

"What do you do," says the cook, "when you can't go anywhere?"

"I would go mad."

"Very likely. But Kevin did not go mad. This is what the story is for. He stayed. He had nowhere to go. So he stayed in the place where he was, and he prayed. Not the grand prayers. The small ones. He prayed for the bird. Then for the egg. Then for the other birds in the valley. Then for the farmers down the road, and the monks he hadn't met yet, and a fisherman who had once been rude to him, and the man's mother. And a strange thing happened, the story says. The pain became part of the prayer. The waiting became the prayer. Because when a man cannot do anything, he finds that he can still love, and that it is the one thing he can do all day long."

The rain keeps falling. A pigeon lands on the kitchen roof and slides off. Fintan looks at his hands. They are young hands, quick and ink-stained, and for the first time he wonders what it would be like to hold one of them perfectly still.

I'm going to slow down now, and I'd like you to slow down with me.

Imagine the cell. It's small. It's grey. There's a smell of wet stone and old straw. A single candle, if there's a candle, has burned down. On the other side of the window is the lake, silver, and a long way off the sound of the stream, and in the near distance a cuckoo, which is the sort of bird that never builds a nest of its own and is therefore quite unsympathetic to this story.

The man kneels. His arm is stretched out. In the palm of his hand there is a nest. In the nest there is an egg, and over the egg there is a small brown mother, with her eyes half closed. She breathes. He breathes. And the Lives say, in their old simple way, that the man did not feel his weariness at all.

There is a line in the Psalms that the saint must have said many times that fortnight. It is from the eighty-fourth psalm, and it says, "Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for her young, at your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God." For a monk who loved his Psalms, that must have been a strange, sweet moment: to find himself the altar where a bird found her home. Because that is what he had become. Not a wizard. Not a miracle worker, as the story tells it. Just a man whose hand was open when it was needed.

Three days passed. Four. A week.

Down in the valley, the news began to go round. The farmers who brought him oatmeal found his bowl untouched and a little way off the cell they stood in respectful silence, and looked at the window, and went home. A woman came with a basket, and the story does not give her name, so we'll call her Gobnait,, and she looked through the door and saw the man kneeling with his arm out, and the brown head of the bird. She put down the basket, and she did something that I rather like. She did not say a word. She went and stood quietly outside the door, and kept the cuckoo away.

And the egg, in the hand, in the nest, in the dark, grew. Inside the shell, as inside every egg, something astonishing was happening. The one small cell had become a heart, and a beak, and two small closed eyes. Quietly, with no one's help but God's, a bird was being made.

On the thirteenth day, or the fourteenth, there was a sound.

It was the tiniest sound in the world. A small tap. A small crack. The mother stood up, and shook herself, and there on the saint's palm, wet and bald and quite ridiculous, with a mouth far too big for its face and eyes like closed purple buttons, was a baby blackbird. It opened its beak as wide as a baby blackbird can, which is wider than you'd credit, and made a noise like a squeaky gate.

Kevin's eyes opened.

He couldn't turn his head, because his whole body had gone stiff, like a hinge that hasn't been oiled in a year. He couldn't see the bird properly, only the shape of her against the grey light. But he felt the small damp weight of the baby in his hand, and he heard it squeak, and I think we are allowed to say that the young hermit smiled so broadly that his face hurt.

The story does not say that he got up that day. The mother had to feed her chicks. There would be more than one, by the way, since a blackbird lays several eggs, though the Lives let us keep the one. A blackbird nestling needs about two weeks more before it leaves the nest, so the saint's arm would have had to stay out, and the story, I think, would be exhausting if it went on to say so. What the Lives say is the thing that matters: that he held out his hand until the egg hatched. That he did not grow impatient. That he did not drive the bird away, though a fine monk, and a sensible one, might have done so, saying, "I have the Psalms to say." That he gave a small creature a place to be born.

And that, afterwards, the people who heard of it began to say that the valley had a saint in it, not because he did marvels, but because he was kind in a way that cost him something, and went on being kind after it started to hurt.

In the kitchen, the rain is stopping.

You can hear it stop. It doesn't end all at once. It thins out, and drips for a while from the thatch, and a little gold light comes sideways across the yard, and a thrush, a thrush, the brother of the blackbird, starts up in the hedge, as if the clouds had been waiting for a signal.

Fintan has not peeled a turnip in some time.

"So that is how he does it," he says at last.

"That's a way," says Brother Mochua. "I won't say it's the only one. But yes. A man who has held out his hand for a fortnight for a blackbird does not find an hour at a lake very long."

"I thought he was doing nothing."

"He was doing the one thing all of us are put here to do. Staying put. Loving what's in front of him. Not running ahead." The cook looks at him sidelong. "It is not a thing you learn by being told, mind. You learn it by failing at it for thirty years. I have been failing at it since I was nineteen."

"You seem very good at it."

"That," says Brother Mochua, "is what failing at it for thirty years looks like."

Fintan laughs. It is a short, surprised laugh, and it surprises him, because he did not know he was going to. Then he picks up the turnip again, and looks at it, and for the first time since he arrived he looks at it properly. It is quite a handsome turnip. It is purple at the top and white below, and has a small hairy root like a tail. He doesn't hurry. He takes off the skin in one long curl, slowly, and sets it in the bucket.

"Brother," he says. "I think I will go and sit by the lake this afternoon."

"Doing what?"

"I don't know. Nothing."

"Take a cloak," says Brother Mochua. "It's still wet."

And that afternoon, when the work was finished, Fintan of the Ford went down to the lower lake and sat on a flat grey stone. He sat for what felt like an hour. A good deal of it he spent thinking about his feet. Then, slowly, something else began. The surface of the water settled. A trout rose, and drew a ring that spread across the lake and touched the shore. The mountain looked at itself in the water. A blackbird, somewhere, started singing, with that lovely, slow, liquid song, as though it had all the time in the world. And Fintan, for the first time in his life, found that he was listening.

He didn't tell anyone. It was a small thing. But I think that is how most of the important things happen in a monastery, and out of one.

Let's turn now to the end of Kevin's story, and let it slow down.

He lived in Glendalough for the rest of his life. The monastery grew. People came from all over Ireland, and, as the centuries went on, from beyond. There is a medieval saying, which I'll give you as the saying that it is, that to go seven times on pilgrimage to Glendalough was as good as going once to Rome. Nobody could have proved this, and it is not a rule of the Church. But it tells you how dear the valley was. In time it had seven small churches, a cathedral, a tall round tower, a cemetery with great old crosses, and a school that was known across Europe. The round tower still stands, thirty metres high, with a pointed cap like a candle snuffer. It was built much later than Kevin, as a belfry and a lookout and a place to keep the treasures safe. But when you stand beneath it, you understand how far the quiet of one man's prayer can reach.

As for Kevin himself, the Irish annals tell us that he died in the early seventh century. The date they give is about the year six hundred and eighteen. The old Lives say that he lived to a very great age, and give a number so large that I will not repeat it, because a number like that is a way of saying that a life was long and rich, and not a record of the calendar. What we can say is that he was old, and that the brothers loved him, and that he died among them, in peace, in the place that he had chosen.

His feast is the third of June, which is early summer in Ireland, when the days are long and the evenings stay light almost until bedtime. It's the time of year when the blackbirds are busiest. They sing in the dusk from the top of every hedge, and if you open a window, even in a city, you may hear one. I like to think that it's not a coincidence.

I would like you to think about the thing that Kevin did. It was not very large. It would not have made a headline, even if there had been headlines. A man put out his hand and did not take it back. That's all. But if you think about it, most of the good in the world has the same shape. A mother who sits up all night with a child. A nurse who stays on after her shift. A neighbour who keeps the door open. A person who does not hurry the one who is slow. None of these is a miracle. All of them, held out long enough, begin to look like one.

Now the poet, Seamus Heaney, wrote a famous poem about this story, and he wondered, in his clever way, how much the saint's arm must have hurt. I think that is a good question. I think the old Lives would agree that it hurt very much. And I think they would add that love has never been the same thing as comfort, and that the saints, who love most, are often the ones who are most willing to be uncomfortable for something small and living and in need.

So when you lie down tonight, and your own arm is under the pillow, or your own hand is open on the blanket, think of the hand in the window. Think of the blackbird. Think of a man who was so still that something small could be safe. And let your own shoulders drop, and your own hands open, and let go of whatever you are holding that you don't have to hold until the morning.

Notes for the curious.

What we know: Saint Kevin, in Irish Cóemgen, was a real person, the founder and first abbot of the monastery at Glendalough in County Wicklow, and the Irish annals record his death in the early seventh century. Glendalough grew into one of the great monastic centres of Ireland, and its ruins, the round tower, the stone churches and the old cross-marked graves, can still be visited. The caves above the upper lake are old, but the idea that Kevin slept in the one called his Bed is a tradition, not a record.

What is legend: the blackbird and the egg come from the medieval Lives of Kevin, in Latin and in Irish, written centuries after he died, and they belong to a family of Irish stories about holy people and animals. We have told it as the old story says. The very great age that the Lives give Kevin we have left out, as is usual for numbers of that kind. We have also left out a famous later tale about Kevin and a young woman at the lake, which is a late story, and not a happy one for bedtime.

What we invented tonight: the young monk Fintan of the Ford, the cook Brother Mochua, the farmer's wife Gobnait, the thrush, the turnips, the rain, and nearly all the conversations. The idea that the story of the blackbird was passed down in a kitchen is ours. Kevin's own words are never quoted, because we have none. The Psalms are real, and the lines I quoted come from the sixty-third and the eighty-fourth. If you would like to read further, the best place to begin is any good history of early Irish monasticism, and the guides to Glendalough published by the Office of Public Works.

That's the story of Saint Kevin of Glendalough for tonight. He is an Irish saint from the centuries before the churches divided, loved in the Catholic Church and kept by many Orthodox too. His feast is the third of June. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

Here is a short prayer for tonight, our own, in the spirit of the old Irish prayers, and drawing on the psalm.

Lord, you gave the sparrow a house, and the swallow a nest for her young. Make us gentle with small things. Teach our hands to stay open when it would be easier to close them. Give us patience with the slow, and peace with ourselves when we are slow. Keep safe tonight every creature that is sleeping out in the rain, and every person who cannot sleep at all. And through the prayers of your servant Kevin, let us rest in peace, and wake in peace. Amen.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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