St. Kevin

Kevin of Glendalough is one of the great Irish hermit saints whose historical existence is real and whose legendary life has grown to considerable proportions over the centuries. He died around 618, probably at an advanced age, having spent most of his life in the Wicklow Mountains — first as a solitary, then as the reluctant centre of a community that his very withdrawal had helped to create.

His original vocation was solitary in the most thoroughgoing sense. He withdrew first to a cave on the upper lake at Glendalough — a cave so narrow, the tradition holds, that he could barely turn in it — and lived on whatever the wilderness provided, sleeping on the stone floor with a rock for a pillow, spending long periods in the posture of prayer with his arms extended. The legends that gathered around this period of solitary life are characteristic of the Irish tradition: the blackbird that came and nested in Kevin's outstretched hand while he held the prayer posture, and which he refused to disturb until the eggs had hatched and the fledglings departed; the otter that retrieved his psalter from the lake where it had fallen, bringing it back dry and unharmed. These are not biographical records; they are the Irish tradition's way of saying something true about a man's relationship with the created world around him, and about what concentrated prayer looks like when it becomes habitual enough to seem natural.

The monastery that grew at Glendalough despite Kevin's eremitical intentions became one of the great centres of Irish Christianity — a place of pilgrimage, of learning, of monastic life sustained across many centuries. The round tower that still stands there, the cathedral ruins, the pilgrimage route called St. Kevin's Road, are Kevin's lasting work in a sense he never planned. In this reversal — the hermit who founded a monastery against his inclinations — something characteristic of the Irish monastic tradition appears, where solitude and community seem perpetually to generate each other.