Today (June 3) is St. Kevin’s Day. My name saint. St. Kevin of Glendalough. Not a figure from obscure Irish hagiography, but a presence who has, over time, shaped how I imagine attention, how I hold questions, how I understand stillness.
There’s no grand sermon in Kevin’s story. No fiery conversions. Just a man in a stone cell, one arm outstretched through the threshold, and a blackbird that comes to nest in his palm. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t shake her off. He stays—long enough for the eggs to hatch and the young to fly.
What kind of listening does that require? What kind of patience?
Seamus Heaney turns this moment into something more than legend. In his poem St Kevin and the Blackbird, he wonders whether Kevin is “self-forgetful or in agony all the time.” Whether he still feels his knees. Whether he’s praying—or simply becoming the prayer itself.
“To labour and not to seek reward,” Heaney writes,
“he prays, a prayer his body makes entirely…”
That line gets me. Not because I think it’s something to achieve, but because it names something so few of us are taught: that attentiveness—costly, embodied, quiet attentiveness—might be the most necessary thing. To let something land. To let it stay. To not flee discomfort or mystery. To become hospitable, even to the wild.
The miracle, if there is one, is not in the bird. It’s in the stillness. In a form of presence that does not insist or interpret, but holds. Not grasping. Not passive. Just utterly available.
I think that’s why I walk(ed) as a pilgrim to Glendalough. To Kevin. Not as a seeker of escape or sanctity, but to be in the presence of a witness—one who stood for a way of being: the long patience of love, the unshaken hand, the refusal to close.
Today, I say his name with quiet reverence. Kevin of the valley. Kevin of the birds. Not a figure to admire, but a silence to be met. A name to carry. A story to return to.
Perhaps I shall walk the valley of the two lakes again—with a bird in hand. Again. And again.
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