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A saint is one who exaggerates what the world neglects.
—G.K. Chesterton
Skellig Michael is a 700-foot-high pinnacle of water-and-wind-worn rock that rises like Excalibur out of the Atlantic waves off the southwest coast of Ireland. If you have ever been there, you do not need it described; if you have not been, no description is adequate. The same is true of that part of reality called the sacred.
I make my reluctant pilgrimage to Skellig Michael in near total ignorance, based solely on three sentences in a guidebook. I expect the usual visitor center and gift shop. Instead, the voice of the fisherman's wife on the phone says, "Be at the Portmagee pier at 10:30 tomorrow morning. If the weather is good enough, my husband will be there in his boat to pick you up." The weather the next day is unusually fine, and down the inlet we watch him chug, my son Nate and I, his only passengers for the day.
We hop on board and start out toward the sea. The engine of the fishing boat is loud enough to make talking difficult and it fills the air with diesel fumes. It's just under an hour out to Skellig Michael, depending on your boat and the conditions. You don't see the island when you start out from the harbor, but soon you are passing looming Bray's Head and there it is on the horizon, the first step into the Atlantic. Tiny at first, it's shrouded today in a thin white haze. It looks mystical—in part because I expect it to look mystical. I think of Avalon, the island to which King Arthur was carried on the barge of singing women, there to recover from his wounds and, someday, return again to a new Camelot. Will my own wounds be soothed today?
Approaching Skellig Michael from the north, we are following a path taken so many centuries ago by a boatload of monks looking for a place to battle the flesh and the devil. They saw themselves as engaged in a war whose object was to be like Christ–that is, to be more like what they were created to be. They saw themselves as spiritual warriors. Their aim, however, was not to kill someone else, but to destroy false selves, to shed counterfeit versions of their own life, so that they might help bring into reality the kingdom of the High King of Heaven.
As is so often the case in fable and tale, we have a harbinger that we are approaching a special place. About half way out, I spot a dart of color winging past the boat at frantic speed. It is a puffin, that compact burst of bird and bill that spends the majority of its life in air and water, touching the land only in obscure places to devote a short time to the birth, feeding, and protection of a puffin chick.
Puffins come to Skellig Michael at the same time we had come to England, in late March, their bills in the process of changing color from the dull yellow of winter to bright red, blue, and yellow of summer. It is May now and they have taken over Skellig rabbit holes and other burrows. But they have approached Skellig Michael cautiously, as I am doing. When the puffins first arrive from unmarked journeys in the North Atlantic, they keep their distance from the island, floating for days in the sea, within sight, but not venturing on the island itself.
I understand their caution. If Skellig Michael is, as they say, a sacred place, then I'm not sure I want to be there. I remember what happened to the poor sap who tried to steady the Ark of the Covenant when it was falling off the wagon. Iona and Lindisfarne have small numbers of people living safely on them today, undoubtedly a few no better than I am. But Skellig Michael is now alone again, severe and solitary, not a place you'd want to spend the night. Perhaps it does not suffer tourists gladly.
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