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       Photo: "Skellig Michael" Copyright Irish Tourist Board.      Skellig Michael    Image: The Prayer Foundation logo (with white Celtic cross on a green shield).

Plan of Salvation                The Monastery "Halfway to Heaven"                      Next    Photo: of Skellig Michael surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. The ancient stone bee-hive huts are barely seen two-thirds of the way up the rock face.  Photo © Irish Tourist Board

(Skellig Michael is) "an incredible, impossible, mad place. I tell you the thing does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in; it is part of our dream world."  -George Bernard Shaw

The Rock off the western Irish Coast known as "Skellig Michael" was inhabited by Irish Monks for over 600 years; from 588-1222 A.D.  "Skellig" (or skeilic) is a Gaelic word used to describe a rock island out in the ocean.  In the Middle Ages many high places were named "Michael" after the Archangel Michael.  It is home to some ancient stone bee-hive huts.  The monastery was founded by Fionán, believed to be one of the original monks who was a member of the community of St. Brendan the Navigator.   

"It was in places like Skellig Michael that Western Civilization was preserved."  -Sir Kenneth Clark

"As I climbed the path winding up to the ancient constructions near the top of the cliff, I sensed that I was on the threshold of something utterly unique, though I was by no means a stranger to monasteries, which I had visited throughout Europe, and even farther afield at one time and another.  But nothing in my experience had prepared me for this huddle of domes, crouching halfway to heaven in this all but inaccessible place, with an intimidating immensity of space all around, where it was easy to feel that you had reached a limit of this world.  A holy place, to be sure, which would still have been so, even if it had never known the consecrated life of prayer."  -Geoffrey Moorhouse 

(-from the Author's Note in his book, "Sun Dancing".  Copyright © 1997 Geoffrey Moorhouse.  All Rights Reserved.)

Photo: of our actual Celtic Cross Shield (TM). The Prayer Foundation Logo and Trademark. Phot Copyright 2007 S.G.P. All Rights Reserved.™  

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Copyright © 2001 S.G.P. All rights reserved.

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