Join me today to meet the burned man who called Europe to repent.
Name: Fursey, Fursa, Furseus
Life: c. 600 - 652 AD
Status: Saint
Feast: January 16
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When Saint Fursey died, he nearly started a war.
The problem was that he had been travelling, as he so often did. Since he died on the road in the lands of the Franks, several local lords argued that they should have the honour of keeping the saint’s body. They were conveniently forgetting Fursey’s own wish that his body should be brought to Péronne, in the North of modern France, where he had founded a monastery. The lords involved in the debate had brought armed men with them, but before the dispute could escalate into a fight, someone had an idea. They commandeered an ox-drawn cart, laid the saint’s body on it, and sent the oxen out to go wherever they liked. The oxen wandered into the lands of Lord Echinwald, headed for Péronne. Once again, things played out just as the burned man had wanted.
It was a fittingly strange ending to a strange life, one that had taken Fursey far from his home in Ireland. It is difficult to know where in Ireland Fursey came from. Later, many regions would claim the burned man as their own. Some traditions said that Fursey’s father was a king, others that Fursey came from among the common people. Some even said that Fursey was the nephew of the navigator, Saint Brendan, the man who, so it was said, sailed out to find the island of the blessed.
Whatever his origins, Fursey was a talented and charismatic young man. He entered the Church as a boy, becoming a monk, then a priest, all before turning twenty. Fursey soon began to display the traits that would make men follow him for the rest of his life, and founded a monastery of his own, probably in the West of Ireland, a little North of Galway. And so, by the time he turned twenty, Fursey was already an accomplished abbot and leader of men. People expected great things of him. And that was why it was so shocking when Fursey grew very, very sick.
When it seemed as though Fursey was going to die, his family and friends gathered around him. And it was then, when he was under maximum observation from those around, that something strange happened. Fursey slipped into something that looked like a coma, so that he was completely unresponsive. But as Fursey would later explain, his mind had been active throughout. He had had an out of body experience, leaving his body to find three angels waiting for him, with vast white wings and faces shining too brightly for Fursey to see their features. The angels had told him that they would come again, and to be ready. Fursey wasn’t sure what this meant, so over the next few days he made a thorough examination of his conscience, confessed, and received the Eucharist. And then, three days later, he again fell into a coma-like state, and received the vision for which he would be remembered across Europe.
Once again, Fursey saw the angels. They were armed for battle, and they formed up around Fursey in the old arrowhead cavalry formation. The commander was out in front, carrying a sword and shield, and the angel to Fursey’s right quietly reassured him that he was under their protection. Then they unfurled their great wings and set out. The angels spoke to Fursey in the ordinary way, but when they spoke to each other, as he remembered it, they sang, and Fursey often found himself getting lost in the music, and missing the sound when it stopped.
Symbolism and story would blend together in Fursey’s strange vision. He encountered several of the saints of Ireland, who came out from Heaven’s gates to meet him. But where did that leave Fursey? The place into which the angels had brought him wasn’t Heaven, or Hell either.
High above the earth, Fursey looked down and saw fire. He could make out four major fires, which as his guides told him, represented four great temptations and sins of the times in which Fursey lived: the temptation to abandon God, the temptation to greedily amass things, the temptation for those who are weak to stir up conflict, and the temptation for those who are strong to exploit the poor. But when Fursey looked again, the fires were one, huge fire, and now his guides were headed into the centre of the blaze. One of the angels explained that the fire burned those sins of which a man was guilty.
When they were in the conflagration, as the flames bent around the angels to avoid touching them, Fursey realized that there were others there. There were demons here. Unlike the shining angels, the demons were dark, with misshapen bodies, and the shadows pooled in their faces so that they were as cloaked in darkness as the angels’ faces where hidden in light. The demons surrounded Fursey’s escorts, sliding over the ground like darting shadows.
Something like a fight began, and Fursey knew it was about him. If the language of Heaven was song, Fursey found that the language of Hell was argument. As they tried to claw their way through the angels, the demons were constantly talking, trying to find something that Fursey had done and had not confessed, illustrating every accusation with Biblical quotations. Fursey had spoken idle words and had not repented of every single one, was that not a sin? Fursey had tried to forgive his enemies, but sometimes he had struggled with it - more sin, clearly. The angels deflected the arguments along with the attacks, often saying that God would judge, with what hidden mercies they did not know. The demons slipped easily between accusation and feigned outrage when their arguments were rejected, complaining that if God were truly just then He would obviously agree with them.
And then, after some time, the demons found a way in. Some time ago, a wealthy but corrupt man had come to Fursey’s monastery to die. Fursey had stayed with the man, and before the end, the man told Fursey that he should take the well-made clothes the man was wearing after he died as a personal gift. Fursey had thought of it as an act of charity on the dying man’s part, and had agreed. But now, the demons argued, there was a problem. The man had not been fully repentant. Since he had gotten his rich clothes through evil means, and Fursey had taken those clothes, Fursey was basically the man’s partner in crime. And here was the man, the demons said, hauling a naked figure out of the fire. Fursey recognized the rich man. Then one of the demons shoved the rich man forward, so that he fell onto Fursey, his chest in Fursey’s face and one arm over Fursey’s back to steady himself, before tumbling back into the fire. And where the man had touched him, Fursey began to burn. The pain was intense - but temporary. After a while, the fire went out. The angel said that Fursey had indeed acted in an unseemly way in taking the clothes for himself, for a man only burned for those sins he had committed.
After this strange experience, Fursey awoke in his bed. He was surrounded by friends and family. He still had the memory of the vision. And then, as they watched, a strange thing happened. Fursey’s skin bubbled up in a disfiguring burn, on his face and between his shoulders, where he had burned in the vision.
Fursey recovered from his illness. But he was no longer content to be an abbot. He left the monastery he had founded, and travelled around Ireland, telling the story of what he had seen and calling the men of his time to renewed faith.
But what exactly had Fursey seen? Certainly what he had seen was scary, a sobering reminder of judgment. There was something terrifying about the idea of one’s life being picked through by malformed, shadow-bound accusers. The historian and saint, Bede, who lived a few decades after Fursey’s death, managed to track down an eye witness account from someone who had heard Fursey tell his story. The witness said that even though it had been a cold night, by the time Fursey had finished the tale, he was dripping with sweat.
But there was more to the story. Thoughtful Christians had always recognized the implication of the teaching that God does not abide sin. How then do those who die in a state of grace but having committed small sins, or with tendencies to sin, become the sorts of beings who are fit to stand in the presence of God? If God simply transformed our character, a kind of metaphysical lobotomy, how could the new character be truly ours? The answer was that God had a way to purge sin, a place in which sins were removed and our character reoriented in a process that, while unpleasant, was not lethal to our very identity. This was Purgatory.
Fursey’s vision was a vision of Purgatory, long before the poet Dante imagined Purgatory as a mountain. The most important detail was not that Fursey had been burned, but that the burning had ended when Fursey’s small sin had been purged. And that implied that even the rich, corrupt man whose clothes Fursey had received was also burning for a time, but not forever.
And this was the message that Fursey spread as he walked around the island of Ireland. As he had before, he gathered followers. One later tradition has it that in his wanderings, Fursey came across a grave beside which a little cottage had been built. Every day, the man in the cottage prayed by the grave, and Fursey asked a local leader whether some saint was buried there. Quite the opposite, the leader explained, the grave and the cottage contained terrible people. It was the grave of a woman who had been a nun. But she and a monk had become lovers, and she had become pregnant. She had died in childbirth, and the monk had been thrown out of his order. Now the former monk had built this little cottage so that he could pray for the soul of the woman with whom he had sinned.
Fursey watched the grave for a time, and told the surprised leader that he was wrong. The prayers of the former monk and the repentance of the former nun had been successful. Angels ascended and descended from this place. And so the woman was reburied in consecrated ground, and Fursey offered the man who had been a monk the chance to become a monk again, and follow him.
Fursey continued to wander, but his time in Ireland was coming to an end. He had been walking the land for a decade. Now, in his thirties, he felt called to take his story even further afield. And so Fursey travelled to the coast, taking ship for a small island, then South, around the Irish coast to Wales, the lands where the Britons still held off the Anglo-Saxon invaders. Fursey told his story, as he moved from place to place, entering the lands held by the Angles and the Saxons. In East Anglia, he was received gratefully by King Sigibert, who offered him land to build a monastery, possibly on the site of modern Burgh Castle, a little East of Norwich near the English coast.
Fursey would spend the next eleven years living among the Angles and Saxons. In time, though, the demands made by King Sigibert grew. Sigibert was glad to have the monks there, but the way Sigibert saw it, his gift of land had bought him an advisor. Fursey found himself being drawn into affairs of state, and so he withdrew, spending some time living as a hermit, and trying to discern where God was calling him next. He was being called East.
Fursey sailed toward modern France. He landed in Brittany, and soon founded a monastery. But this time, he kept travelling. Wherever Fursey went, his magnetic personality seemed to draw people to the religious life.
One of my favourite stories about Fursey comes from this period. As he was walking into modern France, into the lands of the Franks, Fursey was robbed. Fursey did not have much to steal, but the robber took his coat. Fursey kept walking, unhurriedly arriving at the house where the robber lived and knocking on the door. The shocked robber opened the door. Fursey blessed the robber’s sick daughter, healing her, and asked to stay with the family. Soon, the man who had once been a robber and his family were among Fursey’s most enthusiastic local supporters.
Fursey set up monasteries in the lands of the Franks: two in the North of modern France, one just East of Paris. Soon he had established himself as an important man. Lord Echinwald asked Fursey to baptize his son. By way of payment, Fursey asked the lord to free six men he was holding prisoner. But that was a little much, and Echinwald put off the request, hoping that Fursey would just forget about it. Fursey didn’t press the point, praying quietly. Soon, Echinwald was shocked to see his prisoners arrive at the banquet. They had come to thank Fursey, explaining that shortly after the priest had passed by, the door of their prison had swung open and they assumed they had him to thank for it. Lord Echinwald swallowed, and decided the prudent thing was to let them go.
Fursey would spend the last decade of his life among the Franks, moving from monastery to monastery. When he entered his 50s, the burned man of Ireland had become well-known in Northern Europe. And it was then that Fursey set off on another journey, headed back to England. This was a journey he was not destined to complete. Fursey died on the way, and after a showdown in which conflict between the Frankish lords was narrowly averted, Lord Echinwald had the pleasure of seeing Saint Fursey placed in a shrine in his land, in Péronne.
Miracles were reported at the tomb that held Saint Fursey’s incorrupt body. His fame spread. The first account of his life appeared only a few years after his death, and traditions continued to be gathered for centuries. But time rolled on. The Church continued to articulate the theology of Purgatory. The poet Dante told vividly of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory in his Divine Comedy, and in time Dante’s imaginings replaced the vision of Fursey in the popular imagination. Eventually, the monasteries Saint Fursey had founded moved or closed and their original locations were forgotten, or swept away in the French Revolution.
One of the remainders of Saint Fursey’s work survives in an old manuscript in the British library. It is a lorica, often translated as breastplate: a prayer asking God for protection, this one usually followed by the Apostles Creed and one Our Father. Here are the words:
The arms of God be around my shoulders,
the touch of the Holy Spirit upon my head,
the sign of Christ’s cross upon my forehead,
the sound of the Holy Spirit in my ears,
the fragrance of the Holy Spirit in my nostrils,
the vision of heaven’s company in my eyes,
the conversation of heaven’s company on my lips,
the work of God’s church in my hands,
the service of God and the neighbour in my feet,
a home for God in my heart,
and to God, the Father of all, my entire being. (Ó Ríordáin translation)
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His vision of purgatory is a gut check for sure. Are you ready?? I think I’ll be going to confession more often...