He meets Judas, one night during his voyaging. It’s a subject you see a lot on stained-glass windows, actually, paintings, things like that. He travels for months on end, encountering demons, sea monsters, every kind of creature you can imagine, and then one night he comes upon a man chained to a pillar of rock, in the middle of the sea – just there, just there in the ocean like this great, tall fang rising from the waves, this thing that shouldn’t be there, a man at the mercy of the elements. So St Brendan calls out to him and he learns that the man is Judas – Judas who gave Jesus up for dead, Judas the failed apostle – and St Brendan learns that Judas is there because the way in which the Lord chooses to show him mercy is to free him from his torments, to free him from hell on Sundays and Holy Days, and cast him adrift on the ocean, where he can at least feel the wind on his face. I always like that part of the story. St Brendan stays all night, until Judas’ respite from his torments is over, and then he has to go on.

Tell your secret to the wind, but don’t blame it for telling the trees.

Individualism is the first to disappear.

a girl’s arranged marriage to shame

Could you become used to the shock of water?

Our fathers also have a saying about the danger of living apart. They say it is the curse of the snake. If all snakes lived together in one place, who would approach them? But they live every one unto himself and so fall easy prey to man.