Saint Brendan the Navigator Orthodox Church belongs to the Diocese of San Francisco and the West of the Orthodox Church in America, which traces its roots to Saint Herman of Alaska and the Russian mission to America in the late 1700s. Our services attract parishioners and visitors from a large geographical area encompassing the northern Oregon Coast, the Long Beach Peninsula of Washington: both sides of the Columbia River estuary. 

Vision Statement

“To bring people to union with God through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Mission Statement

“St. Brendan the Navigator Orthodox Church follows the command of Christ according to the Holy Scriptures and Tradition of the Holy Orthodox Church by offering true worship and the holy mysteries (e.g. the Body and Blood of Christ); serving those in need; teaching the faithful and the lost; and knitting all into the body of Christ.”

Saint Brendan was born in 484 near the port of Tralee, in County Kerry, Ireland. As a young child he was raised by Saint Ita (Itha), the "foster mother" of Irish saints, and then later by Saint Erc, the local bishop, who had baptised him and who ordained him priest in 512.

In his youth, he learned the Old and New Testaments mostly by heart, and copied and codified the “Rules of the Monks of Ireland.” After his ordination, he became a monk and founded a hermitage at Ardfort, near Mt. Brandon (that was later named for him), on the West coast of Ireland.

In 530, he determined, through a heavenly vision, to wander and spread the Gospel in foreign lands. For the rest of his life, he traveled widely with a group of monks to Scotland, Wales, Great Britain, and Brittany. He made all these voyages in naomhogs, (Irish Gaelic: saint boats, also named for St Brendan), wooden framed boats covered in cattle hide and waterproofed with tallow.

His most famous voyage was the search for the "The Land Promised to the Saints of God" or  “The Island of Paradise” which lay to the West, beyond Ireland. On that voyage he visited the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, and finally what is most likely Newfoundland. An alternative interpretation of St Brendan's voyage is that his quest was not a geographical voyage but rather a metaphycical one to a higher ontological plane, and that he was thus able to pass from the lower to the upper waters of the firmament (Genesis 1:6-8) and arrive at Eden, the Paradise of God, and from there to make his return.

In 1962, some petroglyphs were found in several caves in West Virginia which, when deciphered, were found to contain Chi Rho symbols and references to the sun shining into these caves on the feast of Christ’s incarnation, and a mention of the Blessed Theotokos. These inscriptions were also found in Ireland, leading archeologists to the conclusion that these pictographs were most likely drawn by Irish monks. Saint Brendan and his companions were perhaps the first Europeans to discover North America!

Saint Brendan reposed in 577 at the age of 93 and is buried at Clonfert, the last monastery he founded on the River Shannon near the West coast of Ireland, the land he loved. He is considered one of the “Twelve Apostles of Ireland,” and is venerated today around the world. He is the patron of mariners and seafarers, bar pilots and navigators, travelers, adventurers, scuba divers and even whales, with which he had many encounters during his journeys. Thus he is an appropriate patron for our Orthodox parish in Astoria, Oregon, on the Columbia River estuary near the north Pacific Ocean.

Saint Brendan’s feast day is celebrated on May 16.

Venerable Father Brendan, pray to God for us!

Thine angelic life of fasting hath spread thy glory throughout the church of Christ,

O venerable father Brendan.

For thou didst sail the waters of the thundering sea

Like a merchant seeking a pearl of great price,

But didst obtain it in heaven from the hand of the Lord.

Wherefore, O God-bearing father,

Bestow this treasure upon those who now call upon thee with faith

And who cherish thine honored memory.

By ascetic strivings thou didst safely sail across the sea of life,

And rejoicing, didst obtain unto the realm of the blessed,

Which is on high, O venerable father Brendan,

Divinely wise and most holy.

Entreat Christ God, that our souls be saved.

We have two different akathists to St Brendan, quite different from one another. The first akathist centers more on St Brendan's voyage itself and summarizes the Navigatio, the ninth century Latin narrative of the voyage, written some 400 years after the saint's death. The second akathist summarizes biographical information that is known about St Brendan mostly from other sources.