Saturday Morning: The Celtic and Saxon Mission to Northumbria I finished yesterday evening by quoting the Dean of Philadelphia: The whole Judeao-Christian story is a traveller s tale. Moreover it is a cautionary tale which warns that coming to a halt, settling down, and building bigger barns is usually a sign that decline and fall is imminent. Well, Durham Cathedral has been settling down for 1000 years and it is a very big barn. The present cathedral is Norman, part of the Norman conquest, it replaced a perfectly decent but somewhat smaller Saxon stone cathedral and was intended to be awe inspiring, not only to encourage the worship of God, or to provide a fitting shrine for St Cuthbert, but to ensure that the native Northumbrians were in awe of the Normans, who appointed a prince Bishop, who would rule the north temporally as well as spiritually, his coat of arms would carry a coronet as well as a mitre and a sword as well as a pastoral staff. Much later, Sir Walter Scott was to describe Durham Cathedral: Grey towers of Durham Yet well I love thy mixed and massive piles Half church of God, half castle gainst the Scot And long to roam these venerable aisles With records stored of deeds long since forgot And yet, within the solidity of the great Norman cathedral has been constant movement in at least two ways. Before the popularity and South of England convenience of Canterbury after the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, Durham was the most visited pilgrim shrine in England and remained among the foremost of shrines throughout the Middle Ages a constant stream of pilgrims would cross the River Wear and ascend the hill to the shrine of St Cuthbert, containing also the relics of St/King Oswald and the final resting place of the Venerable Bede. The Lindisfarne community, for which Cuthbert had been Bishop, weary of periodic Viking attacks, which had begun in 793AD, had travelled for over 100 years in search of a base for their community, carrying the body of their saint with them. They had settled for a while at Chester-le-Street and had journeyed as far south as Ripon before settling on Durham and building a shrine to St Cuthbert and a settlement for St Cuthbert s people. In 995AD a wooden church was built and in 999 the White Church or
Minster was built in stone, Now pilgrims would come to them as well as having a secure base for going out in mission and ministry. There is a second type of movement, which does not require you to move from place to place. And that is the interior movement of the Daily Office, a journeying together in community through the Calendar, starting with Advent and journeying through the seasons to Trinity. This is a spiritual journey, year on year, based on the daily recitation of Psalms, the continual reading of the whole Bible and the telling of the story of salvation, focussed on the life of Christ. There is nothing static or stationary in this, movement takes place as the story unfolds through the daily office. The office itself takes you on a journey as it tells the story. This form of journeying was not destroyed by either the Reformation or even the vicious destructive depravities of Cromwell s rule, who at one time imprisoned 3000 Scots soldiers in the cathedral at a cold time of year. (Interestingly to me, the last prior and first Dean of Durham at the Reformation was called Whitehead I understand that he was a sound, but adaptable sort of chap.) But you see, after the Reformation, the Dean and Chapter were still required to say or sing the Daily Office not the Sevenfold-office of the Benedictine monastic Rule,this time, but Cranmer s greatest liturgical achievement, that is, of Morning and Evening Prayer For me, this makes Cranmer an accessible heir to St Benedict. He was still deploying the principles of the Benedictine daily Office he was certainly not preparing something mean, reduced and truncated, but a wonderful, memorable and strongly scriptural journey of prayer, psalmody and scripture. Again, for me, I find Cranmer s daily office to be a much more satisfying and inclusive invitation to the Benedictine principle of ordered daily prayer, than his less satisfying and more controversial and theologically partisan version of the Eucharist. Cranmer has the great distinction of having elevated the daily office from a purely monastic discipline to a form of Common Prayer, open to all God s people able to read or listeen. Indeed, the Book of Common Prayer requires the parish priest to ring the bell at daily office times, so that anyone might be able to join in. This was and is linked to the continuing role of the Cathedral as a place of divine learning. It is no coincidence that a Bishop of Durham, Van Mildert, in the 19 th Century, gave Durham Castle for the foundation of Durham University. Or that a great Victorian scholar-bishop of Durham, Lightfoot, created one of the first theological colleges in his own home of
Auckland Castle for what became known as Lightfoot s lambs This Benedictine tradition of prayer and study, in itself, has been an enabler of the interior journey for many. Even Lord Nelson in the Napoleonic Wars gave a prayer book and Bible to all his sailors, so that common prayer might be experienced in his navy. He believed that morale, positive behaviour, and discipline were more evident on those ships where common prayer was held. I would now like to get behind this brief historical response to the Dean of Philadelphia s legitimate challenge to static over-settled barns and church life = by looking more closely at the Celtic/Saxon spirituality which caused the person and story of St Cuthbert to have such a huge impact upon succeeding generations and the building of a cathedral and community at Durham. We have already seen some of the virtues of the Benedictine style of Rule. It inherited three great concepts from the crumbling Roman Empire: gravitas, stabilitas and ordo: three virtues which strongly influenced the design of Church life under the Roman western tradition. You see it in the establishment of very territorial dioceses and the parochial system, systematically covering the whole country with interlocking administrative units. This was begun in England after 668AD, when Theodore of Tarsus was sent by the Pope to be Archbishop of Canterbury. This heir to the Roman Empire sought to establish structural and spiritual order to the Church in England, especially now that the King of Northumbria, one Ecgfrith (One if the egg Kings of 1066 And All that), had ruled at the Synod of Whitby in 664AD that his kingdom must accept the authority of St Peter and Rome, whereas previously it had followed the Celtic Irish way, which they traced back to St John. This left the monasteries and ministers of the Celtic tradition to conform or withdraw. Many, including the great St Hilda of Whitby conformed, while Colman, the last Irish or Scots bishop of Lindisfarne in the Celtic tradition, with some of his monks returned to the land of the Scots and Iona. To Theodore and the Saxon Bishop Wilfrid, the basic complaint was the need to accept the Roman date of Easter and the Roman tonsure. But it was more than these technical issues, they were the presenting problems, but there was also the question of style and ethos. To Rome with its ordered structure and Benedictine monasteries, and the desire to express faith through great permanent buildings, the Celtic tradition seemed undisciplined and too free flowing. Too many Celtic missionary monks
seemed to act on their own initiative, without appearing to seek Episcopal or abbatial letters of permission. They got into their coracles and went wherever the wind or tide seemed to take them. They assumed the hospitality and open door from any monasteries they visited on their wanderings, including wanderings all over Europe. They were given the name peregrini, wanderers. These were the communities of saints, as they saw themselves, who were driven by the Spirit, who would feel compelled by the Spirit to sacrifice the security and familiarity of their home monastery, however much they loved it and had an inner yearning for it, for the sake of the Gospel. I think a sentence from Hebrews 13 is relevant. For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come. This echoes themes in 1 Corinthians where Paul urges the Corinthians to see themselves as God s Temple with God s Spirit dwelling in them. They did not need big barns for this. The Celtic monastic rules varied from monastery to monastery and were written in poetry. They set a high standard in artistic achievement, for example, the Book of Kells, and the amazing Irish High Crosses, with their celebration of the saints and with the encircled world overlayed and redeemed by the cross of Christ, and their unending interlocking cable patterns, reflecting God s eternity, seen in so much of their art and sculpture. This Celtic style powerfully influenced the church in the Saxon kingdoms of England. For example such stone monasteries as Hexham developed their own take on this sculptural style. The fashion changed after the Norman conquest. These Saxon/Celts did not however build elaborate churches in the earlier days. There was a closeness to God s creation, to nature and a glorifying thankful response to God for it. They sensed the Spirit in the wild goose and worshipped the creator through his creation, in the waves of the sea and in the mountains, hills, fields and woodland all around them. They created a spirituality in which very ordinary lay folk would remember the heart of Christ s story, their devotion to Mary, and their trust in the Trinity through the composition of homely and memorable prayers: getting up prayers, prayers for journeys and prayers while you milk your cow or see the gentle rain falling on your fields. The Carmina Gadelica is a collection by Alexander Carmichael of such remembered prayers from the Islands and Highlands of Scotland. The Celtic or Irish monastery would be in a form of circular village with a simple church at the heart of it, a circle of daub and wattle huts for the
monks, then a circle for the lay workers, the married with their families, and then the animals and the birds. It was more like an extended family, than an ascetic settlement completely separated from secular life. However, the role of the ascetic, the hermit was greatly valued and some of their monks would spend time in the hermit s cell. Cuthbert, after a lifetime of mission, travelling and community life, settled to the hermit s life in the Farne Islands, separated by a stretch of sea from Lindisfarne, before being called to be Bishop, which he strenuously resisted, and resumed the travelling mission for the last two years of his life. And notice, the Bishop was not primarily a manager or ruler of a diocese, or even the manager of the monastery. He was not bound to a desk or committee meetings, or too many synods. He was the leader of mission based on an authentic life of prayer. He was one who was known to bravely make the interior journey, who had wrestled with interior demons and conquered, who had searched for God and who had been found by God, who recited the daily Psalms, known by heart, who knew much of the Bible, especially the New Testament by heart in Latin. He was a missioner, a teacher, a preacher, a Holy Man of God who motivated and inspire the saints and brought great spiritual blessing. This is what the monastery and the wider community desired of their bishop. All of this presented great problems for Bede, the great historian, polymath, scholar, and one who was a Benedictine monk through and through. (By the way, he had already calculated from his observations that the world was round). He was a lover of order and method, ahead of his time in scholarly methodology. He was born in 682AD, eighteen years, after the Synod of Whitby and so was in touch with some of those who had known Cuthbert who died in 687AD and was hardly a couple of generations away from those who knew Aidan, the founder of the Celtic mission to Northumbria who died in 651AD. The difficulty for Bede is that he could not help but admire the Celtic saints who had converted Northumbria, even though he felt they had got Easter wrong, wore the wrong tonsure and were detached from the discipline, authority shape and stability of the true church. Bede s portrayal of Wilfrid, who was an advocate of the Roman tradition at the Synod of Whitby, was much less flattering and attractive than that distinctive gentle gracious strength exemplified by such as Aidan, Chad, Cedd, and Hilda of the Celtic tradition. In fact, Wilfrid had been a Saxon boy student at the Celtic monastery on Lindisfarne and in Hilda s monastery at Whitby. But then he had
journeyed to Rome, both physically and spiritually and been seduced or converted by its magnificence and the established churches and ecclesiastical order. Wilfrid was a big barn sort of churchman. He was gifted and ambitious, with more than a hint of ruthlessness. It was important to him to be made Bishop of York and to exercise wide-ranging authority, and he did not hesitate to have the gentle Chad deposed as Bishop. Chad for his part just accepted it, got on with the mission, and ended up as Bishop of Litchfield. However, it is instructive to read what Bede wrote to describe the Lindisfarne Community, when Colman and some of the monastery left after the Synod of Whitby, and remember Bede would have been convinced of the rectitude of that decision: So frugal and austere were Colman and his predecessors that when they left the seat of their authority there were very few buildings except the church; indeed, no more than met the bare requirements of a seemly way of life. They had no property except cattle, and whenever they received money from rich folk, they immediately gave it to the poor; for they had no need to amass money or private lodging for important people since such visited the church only in order to pray or hear the word of God. Whenever opportunity offered, the king himself used to come with only five or six attendants; and when he had completed his prayer in the church, he used to leave. But if they happened to remain for a meal, they were content with the plain daily food of the brothers and asked nothing more. For in those days the sole concern of these teachers was to serve God, not the world; to satisfy the soul, not the belly. Accordingly, the religious habit at that time was held in high esteem. Whenever any priest or monk paid a visit, he was joyfully welcomed by all as the servant of God. And if people met him on the road, they ran to him and bowed, eager to be signed by his hand or receive a blessing from his lips. Whenever he spoke a word of encouragement, he was given an attentive hearing. On Sundays the people flocked to the churches and monasteries, not to obtain food, but to hear the word of God. When a priest visited a village the people were quick to gather to receive the word of life; for priests and clerics always came to a village solely to preach, baptize, visit the sick and in short to care for the souls of its people. (p 194) I ve given this extensive quotation to show that despite his mental and ecclesiological reservations about the Celtic way, Bede s heart was drawn
and warmed by the holiness and Christ-likeness of that way and the gentle unself-regarding attitude of its leaders, who seemed ambitious for Christ, but not for themselves. It was something he returned to in various places in his history of the English Church and People. For it has long been clear to me that Bede s real hero was not Augustine of Canterbury, Paulinus of York or Wilfrid of Ripon, Heham and York, all in the Roman tradition, but Aidan of Iona and Lindisfarne. The text of Bede s writing comes alive when he tells Aidan s story. He is inspired by him. Indeed, I must confess that, when I first read the story of Aidan, my own spirits rose. He is the sort of Christian who leads me on and who gives hope to the church. Now by the standards of his generation, Bede is a remarkably true historian. He tests his sources and doesn t rush to hagiography and exaggeration. I think he gives us the true Aidan. Aidan never set out to be a bishop or be in charge of monasteries or walk the corridors of power, or be elevated by the concept of preferment. His journey was a journey of prayer, of self-giving and service, of being a faithful missionary monk, helping others to discover and serve Jesus and our fellow humanity. I sometimes weep inwardly when I witness, sometimes too close for sanity or comfort, the power struggles in the world-wide church and our own Anglican community. This searching for preferment and honours and status and influence and power over others, over church politics in synods and church councils, is so often and so far from the life of Christ and true discipleship, that I find it hard to find Christ in it or even near it. A recent Church Times tells of a new organisation, the Anglican Mission in England, who recently arranged for the Archbishop of Kenya to consecrate five bishops to serve in England and ordain priests for new church plants - without informing the Archbishop of Canterbury or the bishops of those dioceses where these bishops and priests are to operate. And there is the continuing activities of Gafcon and the Southern Cone on one wing and the Ordinariate on the other. I see too many of the worldly characteristics of the sort of self-seeking sleazy politics and dubious power struggles, which have corrupted politics, business, the banks and the media, creeping into the soul of the Church and disfiguring it. After the rant, back to Bede! Bede discovered something irresistible and compelling in his historical research, that really true, Christ-centred discipleship and mission seemed to be most reflected in the person of Aidan and in some of the monks he taught and nuns he had encouraged.
In the early 630s AD, King Oswald regained the Kingdom of Northumbria, after a period in exile. His prolonged exile included sanctuary as a boy on the Island of Iona with the Irish Christian community founded by St Columba. So, becoming King, he wanted to establish Christianity as the religion of his Kingdom and sent to Iona for a team of missionary monks to do the work. The leader of the first party, whom Bede describes as a man of a more austere disposition, failed miserably and had to return to Iona. The community were badly disappointed and held a conference at which the leading missionary reported that he hadn t been able to achieve anything because they had sent him to an ungovernable people of an obstinate and barbarous temperament. At this point Aidan spoke up and suggested that he should have given them the milk of simpler teaching and then gradually nourished them with the Word of God. His gracious way of speaking and thinking led the community to consecrate him bishop and sent him to lead the mission. Aidan s approach to mission involved the following ingredients: 1. He had compassion and respect for the lives of the ordinary people he was called to convert 2. He chose the right base for his community the Island of Lindisfarne was cleverly chosen. It was an island like Iona, set apart for prayer and community, being cut off from the mainland twice a day by the tides; it had opportunities for the hermit; and yet was only a short distance from the King s principle palace at Bamburgh and on the main routes for safe communication, along the coast. Coastal waters were the equivalent to modern motorways 3. He worked with the King, who at first sometimes acted as his translator from the Irish (or Scots) into the English language. Yet he was prepared to be outspoken to and unafraid of the nobility and wealthy. 4. He lived simply and travelled light: he chose to walk and gave the king s gift of a horse to a poor beggar; it was unheard of that a leading person, especially their bishop invited by the king, should walk. 5. He built up his base community and presence by recruiting the English to it, so that you did not have to rely on the sending community from Iona longer than you needed to. The Irish mission quickly became indigenous and Northumbrian English. He supported this by using any gifts of money or treasure, either to
give to the poor or to ransom any who had been unjustly sold as slaves. Indeed, some of these ex-slaves were to join the community and help provide the next generation of church leadership and monastic membership. 6. He developed patterns of good Christian education. One of the first things he did was establish a school, which was to provide him with the next generation of monks and educated Christians. Education was mainly learning Latin, all the Psalms, then the New Testament, and then the Old. They took their Bibles and the daily office with them in their heads and in their hearts when they too set out on their missionary journeys. They could travel light, with God s word within them. They took their Library and their worship books in their heads. 7. He practiced what he preached: Bede records that Aidan gave his clergy an inspiring example of self-discipline and continence and the highest recommendation of his teaching to all was that he and his followers lived as they taught. Aidan had a humble and attractive holiness combined with moral strength and great self-discipline: an attractive combination of integrity, compassion and generosity, remarkably combined with an ability to organise a simple but effective structural framework for the church s future. This is why Cuthbert, in the next generation after Aidan. became so important to Bede. For in so many ways he was like Aidan, with a similar spiritual motivation, the desire to pray and be close to God on a rocky island retreat, and yet also a powerful missionary, taking the Gospel through the wilds of Northumbria, with the gentle strength and personal holiness of Aidan. Yet, Cuthbert was consecrated bishop in the Roman order. He kept Rome s date of Easter: he was the Roman monk, as it were, with the Celtic heart and lifestyle. I believe he was a more extravert man than Aidan. He had been a young nobleman, a boy athlete, and possibly soldier before he arrived on his horse at the monastery of Melrose, to ask to be a soldier of Christ. He was charismatic with a powerful healing ministry. And, what was appealing to the later medieval mind, miracles were accredited to him. This is how Bede speaks of Cuthbert s missionary method: Cuthbert was so skilful a speaker, and had such a light in his angelic face, and such a love for proclaiming his message, that
none presumed to hide his inmost secrets, but all openly confessed their wrong-doing. He used mainly to visit and preach in the villages that lay far distant among high and inaccessible mountains, which others feared to visit and whose barbarity and squalor daunted other teachers. Cuthbert, however, gladly undertook this pious task, and taught with such patience and skill that when he left the monastery it would sometimes be a week, sometimes two or three, and occasionally an entire month, before he returned home, after staying in the mountains to guide the peasants heavenward by his teachings and virtuous example. Clearly, Bede sees in Cuthbert the synthesis of the two founding traditions of English Christianity: on the one hand, the order and stability of Rome with the correct day of Easter, the emerging Benedictine form of monasticism, the geographically designed dioceses and Episcopal authority; while on the other, the Christ-like sacrificial free-flowing more spontaneous gentle courage of the Celtic mission. However, Cuthbert is not the only example of synthesis available to Bede. And I conclude with the best example of one who proved to be a significant and gracious agent of unity in the English church. A characteristic of Bede s writing is seen in his description of the unique contribution to the dynamics of the English church made by women. He wrote a poem in honour of Etheldreda, abbess of Eli. And he wrote most eloquently of Hilda of Hartlepool and Whitby. Notice, she was the one who presided at the great Synod of Whitby which brought the church of Northumbria and Lindisfarne into the discipline of Rome and the Western Church. She was abbess of a dual monastery of monks and nuns, based on land given her through Aidan, a beloved friend. In the Celtic/Saxon tradition all dual monasteries were presided over by abbesses and not abbots. Bridgit of Kildare ruled over such a monastery in Ireland. Princes and the King sought Hilda s advice and guidance and five Bishops were trained in her monastery and sat at her feet. They all called her Mother. Bede tells a wonderful story of how Hilda s mother Breguswith had a dream in which she was searching through her robes, only to discover under her garments, a precious jewel, which emitted such a brilliant light, that all Britain was lit by its splendour. Bede confidently claims that it was Hilda who fulfilled this dream. No woman in the post conquest church would be treated with such reverence and respect, as such a source
of real authority and spiritual presence in the Church. I think we are only beginning to catch up now, and then not without difficulty. In this lecture I have talked much of the Celtic and Saxon saints and Celtic and Benedictine monks. But one of the legacies of this early period has been a handed down, virtually anonymous tradition of lay prayer, with unwritten knowledge retained in the heart and the head, and with chants, homely prayer and blessings closely related to daily life and treasured by crofters and very ordinary people living in scattered communities in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and rediscovered in the late 19 th Century by Alexander Carmichael and recorded in the Carmina Gadelica. It is testimony to an enduring lay spirituality closely related to the needs of daily life with its blessings demands and hardships, something lost in our noisier cosmopolitan mainland society. I think a very present challenge to Readers today is to rediscover a fitting lay spirituality capable of doing service to contemporary Christians and the demands of life in our type of society; to find a language that emerges from a knowledge of the world and its language and the story of salvation and grace flowing from the life of Christ. I do not think that a church which depends on and puts much of its energy into recruiting ever more adaptations of the ordained life will ever do much more than look inwards to the maintenance of the Church as an establishment. John Bell of the Iona community put it this way in 1999: I think that at the end of the twentieth century when we look back or look on that which we are taking with us into the future, so much of it is dictated by the whims of the ecclesiastical establishment and so little is geared toward the life of the people, the relationship to the land, the business of everyday work, the incarnation of Christ in the homes and the area of activities of people, as equally, if not more important, than keeping some Church establishment ticking over. (From Christ is the Morning Star: When Celtic Spirituality Meets Benedictine Rule Veritas Publications 1999, Edited by Linda Burton and Alex Whitehead) Let me conclude with a favourite prayer from Mary Gillies, a very old crofter in the year 1900. I love its humble origins and its quiet depth and eloquence:
Thanks be to Thee, Jesu Christ, For the many gifts Thou hast bestowed on me, Each day and night, each sea and land, Each weather fair, each calm, each wild. I am giving Thee worship with my whole life, I am giving Thee assent with my whole power, I am giving Thee praise with my whole tongue, I am giving Thee honour with my whole utterance. I am giving Thee reverence with my whole understanding, I am giving Thee offering with my whole thought, I am giving Thee praise with my whole fervour, I am giving Thee humility in the blood of the Lamb. I am giving thee love with my whole devotion, I am giving Thee kneeling with my whole desire, I am giving Thee love with my whole heart, I am giving Thee affection with my whole sense; I am giving Thee my existence, with my whole mind, I am giving Thee my soul, O God of all gods. Alex Whitehead St John s College Durham July 2011