A Path by Land and Sea: the Way of St Hild

 This is a remarkable gathering in a remarkable place on a remarkable day. And all because of a remarkable woman. It’s St Hild we have to thank for inspiring this celebration that begins here at Hartlepool and ends at Whitby this afternoon. Two places that cherish the memory of this great Saxon woman, and now a pilgrim path along the North Sea coast to link them, the Way of St Hild.  

You might think it’s a little eccentric to look back across more than thirteen hundred years to find inspiration for this project. But the North is fiercely proud of its saints: Aidan, Oswald, Benedict Biscop, Wilfred, Chad, Cuthbert, and Bede whose writing lovingly tell their stories and help us imagine the world they lived in. Hild was one of these men and women of Northumbria’s Golden Age who shaped the culture and spirituality of the North East, to whom we owe so much of the North East’s identity and character and its marvellous ‘sense of place’. To Northerners, these legendary saints aren’t locked into some remote and distant past. They are our contemporaries, our fellow-travellers, our friends. 

St Hild would have known intimately the route that bears her name. As Abbess first of Hartlepool and then of Whitby, she must often have made the journey between them, whether walking or riding the marshlands and the high cliffs, or viewing them from afar as she plied the highway of the great grey ocean. What’s more, her family links to the Northumbrian royal house at Bamburgh and to the mother house on Lindisfarne would have taken her to the northern reaches of the kingdom too, past South Shields where there is another church dedicated to her and where she may have founded her first convent. 

‘All who knew Hild the handmaiden of Christ called her mother because of her outstanding devotion and grace’ says Bede. He writes about her as ‘a jewel in the land’, a shining light as a Christian leader, teacher, reconciler and healer. Her name means battle and she did indeed live through turbulent times. A Synod at Whitby in 664 at which King Oswiu presided called for leadership skills of the highest order when church and state were bitterly divided. She died full of years in 680. On her deathbed she urged her brothers and sisters ‘to preserve the gospel peace among themselves and towards others’, to live out the virtues of service to others as she herself had done throughout her life. 

Our new Way of St Hild sets out to tell her story and celebrate her legacy. It does this not only by referring back to the events of her life, but by setting her in the context of her times, of the natural landscapes her path traverses, and of the events that subsequently changed the world she knew, sometimes, we can safely say, beyond anything she could have imagined in her lifetime. The natural environment of salt marsh and estuary and cliff top, the profusion of birdlife and wildlife, the fossil memories from aeons past she would recognise today. The sound of the salt sea crashing against the old eternal rocks would always have been music to her ears, for it was this that she taught Caedmon the cowherd to sing about as he found his voice to praise the Creator. 

But what would she have made of the heavy industry of Teesmouth, the comings and goings of rigs and tankers, the steel, iron and alum works on the edge of the moors, feats of heavy 
engineering like the Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge, or facilities along the coast dedicated to tourism, sport and leisure? One of the fascinations of creating this route has been the extraordinary contrasts you encounter on the Way of St Hild. And inviting reflection on what it could all mean to men and women of our twenty-first century. So this pilgrim path is as much a celebration of human activity and achievement – with all its dilemmas and compromises - as it is of the beauties of the natural world and the life and times of one of our greatest saints. 

It’s a remarkable collaboration between Hartlepool Council and neighbouring local authorities, the churches, tourism agencies, the Royal Navy, and people and organisations that care for and interpret our natural and built heritage. Hild would have liked that spirit of common purpose. And given her adventurous spirit, she’d have liked, I think, the digital access to the pilgrimage that’s been created through augmented reality stations, so that people with limited or no mobility can still be pilgrims and walk the route on their smartphone. 

It’s appropriate to be doing this in 2020 as our contribution to this ‘Year of Pilgrimage’ that’s being observed by cathedrals and pilgrimage sites across the land. Durham Cathedral is the focal point of a cluster of new pilgrim routes being launched this year, one of which connects with the Way of St Hild here on the Headland at Hartlepool. The capacity of saints and holy places to inspire pilgrimage is evidence of the interest being awakened today in what’s being called ‘religious tourism’. Stories like Hild’s are Christian in origin. Yet like the pilgrim routes to Compostela, Jerusalem and Canterbury, interest in pilgrimage is alive in people of many faiths and of no faith in particular for whom the spiritual search is a fundamental aspect of being alive. I don’t hesitate to claim that Hild’s faith prized inclusion as a basic Christian value. That’s the spirit in which we have tried to create this pilgrimage.

Which brings me to my final point. The more I study Bede’s writings about St Hild and her legacy as a Christian leader, the more remarkable I find it that a woman should have been entrusted with the authority conferred on her as a medieval abbess by bishops and kings. Saxon monasteries were not primarily places of retreat but centres from which the land was Christianised and ruled, and affairs of state were managed. Politics and religion were inextricably intertwined in places like Hartlepool and Whitby. The woman whose memory is enshrined in our pilgrim path belonged to the front rank of leaders in the Saxon world. No wonder Bishop Aidan ‘loved her heartily for her innate wisdom and her devotion to the service of God’.

So you’ll not be surprised that there was a fond wish to launch The Way of St Hild on International Women’s Day 2020, Sunday 8 March. This year’s theme is Generation Equality, meaning the empowerment of women and girls not only for good citizenship but also for leadership in the worlds of today and tomorrow. Like Ruth in our first reading, Hild speaks to us across the centuries of all that represents the best and noblest in human character, giftedness and service. She is a woman for us all to be proud of, and whether as women or men, to emulate as we ask ourselves what it might mean to serve God and our neighbour in whatever capacity he calls us to at just such a time as this? 

St Hilda, Hartlepool
Sunday 8 March 2020

The Way of St Hild: a new pilgrim route

When we think about The Way of Saint Hild our first thoughts are naturally about Hild herself, the life and times of this great Saxon woman, and how the themes of her life might speak to us today. And I shall come on to her shortly. But before we do, I want to look briefly at the other important word in this project title, Way. 

The idea of pilgrimage trails is ancient. For centuries people have criss-crossed Europe to undertake pilgrimages to the great Christian shrines of Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago da Compostela where I was two months ago. Here in England among prominent pilgrim destinations have been, and still are, Canterbury, Walsingham and Glastonbury. And in the North East, Lindisfarne, Hexham, Jarrow, Wearmouth and Durham where I was privileged to spend thirteen years of my life as, you might say, a guardian of St Cuthbert’s shrine.

Among those honoured places here in the North East are, or ought to be, South Shields, Whitby and Hartlepool, the three sites most closely associated with St Hild, and through her, the Saxon saints of the seventh century. The Way of St Hild will link the two southern sites associated with her, a pilgrim path along the North Sea that connects St Hilda’s Church on Hartlepool’s Headland to the Abbey on the cliffs above Whitby. 

What is a pilgrimage for? Why would anyone want to walk the path we are creating? Why do people already walk the St Cuthbert’s Way from Melrose to Holy Island, and the St Oswald’s Way from Holy Island to Heavenfield? This seems to me to be a fundamental question to ask if we are going to make sense of this project. 

A pilgrimage is a journey with a purpose. Traditionally, that meant a religious purpose, making an often long and arduous journey to visit a place associated with some key event in the story of faith, or with the lives of holy men and women who are revered in that story. The tradition speaks about holy places, sites that have been touched and lit up in some way because of those associations. “Hild was here.” And insofar as the whole journey is inspired by this sense of holy purpose, we can say that it comes to define a sacred geography, a landscape imbued with historical, cultural and spiritual meanings. 

So pilgrimage declares: this is not just any landscape, however historic, however beautiful. The pilgrim way contributes to what we can call place-making. Its very existence enhances our understanding of our native geography, its genius loci or “spirit of the place” that makes it what it is, or as we tend to say nowadays, its sense of place. The journey may already be familiar or be travelled for the first time. The important thing is that pilgrimage lends it added significance. It suggests new ways of looking at it because of the stories it commemorates. There are new interpretations, new meanings, new textures. 

Historically, pilgrimage has been defined in terms of journeys with a religious purpose, but I need to broaden that understanding. A journey can have many kinds of purpose that are not always overtly religious. Veterans travel to honour war graves where their comrades lie buried. Holidaymakers visit distant places they haven’t been to before to learn about their culture and art, meet their peoples and admire their landscapes. People go back to their birthplace or where their ancestors have lived. These are all pilgrimages in their different ways. A holiday is literally a holy day. That makes the point. 

The Way of St Hild is offered as a journey that carries multiple significance. We can see this clearly from the twelve proposed stations for the “augmented reality” interpretations. It begins and ends with churches associated with St Hild herself, a traditional way of setting out and completing a pilgrimage at a sacred site. Some set our saint in the context of the Saxon era and explore how her story was told and her pilgrimage developed into the later middle ages and beyond. Another identifies her as one of a North East cluster of holy men and women who were honoured by pilgrimages. But some stations are more historical. They make us aware of the Anglo-Saxon culture in which Hild lived and that the pilgrimage landscape has a prehistory going back to Roman times. One of them opens up an aspect of the natural world, the wildlife of the Tees Estuary and helps us understand the landscapes that Hild knew and that formed her as a northern saint. Not all of these are directly focused on Hild herself, but all of them contribute to the rich texture of this pilgrim journey and place her story in a larger context than simply her own life and times.

One of the important aspects of any pilgrimage is that while it often commemorates people or events in the past, at its best it is never backward-looking. That is to say, good pilgrimage makes a distinction between the past in itself, the past as it’s featured in the stories told about it by subsequent generations, and the past as we ourselves encounter and experience it as people of today. Theologians talk about anamnesis, bringing the past into the present so that it has the potential to shed light upon our contemporary concerns and even contribute to shaping the future. This is what is happening when Christians celebrate the eucharist and take bread and wine “in remembrance of me”, not to relive the past memory but to actualise it in the present, make it a real agency of transformation. 

This seems to me to be crucial in the way we set about the project of imagining this particular Hild-inspired journey and creating it as an offer to enrich people’s lives. How do we avoid setting up an exercise that is no more than an exercise in recreating the past? By taking an intentionally holistic view of what we are engaged in, not least in its connections with our contemporary world. This means broadening the scope as far as we can while preserving the integrity of the controlling theme of St Hild. I shall come back to this later on.

I began by defining pilgrimage as journey with a purpose. Ultimately, I guess that purpose means our own self-understanding as contemporary men and women. A way is more than a physical path. It suggests our way of life, a spirituality of being human, the journey we cannot help making if we are serious about human life and being good citizens of our age. We want in our best moments to know our place in the world and how we can leave a legacy that will have added value and enhanced not only our own lives but those of our successors.

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So much for the meanings of pilgrimage. I want now to turn to Hild herself and how we should commemorate her in this pilgrim journey. Let me say something about her life and times, and then suggest themes to consider as we create this pilgrimage that bears her name. 

Our source for the life of St Hild (in Latin, Hilda) is the Venerable Bede, that great chronicler of the late seventh and early eighth century to whom we owe the very idea of “England”. As a Northumbrian living in the double monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow, his focus was inevitably northern which makes him the best (and often only) authority on Christian Northumbria in what we’ve come to call its golden age. It is agreed by all that Bede was a scrupulous historian when judged by the criteria of his times, and a wealth of information about the Saxon kingdom and its people has been preserved to us which would otherwise have been lost.

He tells us that Hild was a Saxon princess who was brought up in the court of King Edwin of Northumbria. When he converted to Christianity in 627, the first Northumbrian king to do so, he and his entire court were baptised by Paulinus at York, including the thirteen-year old Hild. Sent away to the safety of the south when Edwin was killed by the Mercians in 633, she returned to Northumbria at the summons of Aidan of Lindisfarne who asked her to found a religious community somewhere north of the River Wear. Tradition identifies this with the ancient Christian site on which St Hilda’s Church in South Shields was later built. In 649 Aidan appointed her as Abbess of the double monastery at Hartlepool, a community of men and women who took vows and lived separately but worshipped together in their abbey church. In keeping with Northumbrian Christian tradition instituted by Bishop Aidan, himself an Irishman, their rule of life would have drawn on Irish rather than Roman Benedictine monasticism.

Again, we don’t know precisely where the community was situated but we can assume it to have been on the Headland by St Hilda’s Church where the remains of the medieval sea wall and the convent cemetery can still be seen. Perhaps we should see the Headland as a second Lindisfarne, an almost-island that was conducive to spiritual reflection and the life of prayer. The Saxon church loved these semi-detached places by the sea, isolated in themselves yet always connected to the mainland. Even today, the Headland retains these qualities despite – or perhaps because – of its urban character. It’s one of the most magical places I know. In my book Landscapes of Faith I said of it that “it is quintessentially north eastern in its marriage of a centuries-old Christian history and more modern urbanisation”. Like Bede’s churches at Wearmouth and Jarrow, the Saxon churches at Billingham and Escomb, and Durham Cathedral itself. 

Hild founded Whitby Abbey in 657. This too was a double monastery, and there is no reason to doubt that it was situated on the cliffs near the Benedictine abbey that was built there in the thirteenth century. (Indeed, it could even be possible that it was “double” in the sense Wearmouth-Jarrow was: a single convent on two geographical sites, Hartlepool and Whitby.) Bede commends Whitby as a model of its kind, a house of discipline, prayer, learning, good works, peaceability and charity. Its greatest moment took place in the year 664. Oswiu, Oswald’s brother and successor as King of Northumbria, convened a synod there to resolve matters of dispute in the church of which he was the leading lay person. 

The principal point of contention concerned the date of Easter. This may seem arcane to us today, but to Christians in the early centuries of the church’s history it was a matter of extreme importance to celebrate the festival of the resurrection on the correct day and together. Bede himself wrote about the mathematics and astronomy that underlay the complex calculations. Irish tradition, inherited by the influential community on Lindisfarne, calculated the date one way, Catholics, taking their lead from the continental European church and St Augustine’s mission in the southern kingdoms, in another. This was a sharply personal issue for Oswiu because while he like his brother followed the Irish calendar, his queen Eanfleda who had been brought up in Kent followed Roman practice. This meant that one of them could be feasting in Eastertide while the other was still fasting rigorously in Lent. What was at stake was the unity of the Northumbrian church. But more than that, the kingdom’s political relationships with the rest of England and with the continent had everything to gain by reaching agreement.

Oswiu listened carefully, then decided in favour of the Catholic way and imposed it on his kingdom. This was how decisions were made in those days. Cuius regio, eius religio – you followed the religion of whoever reigned over you. Those on Lindisfarne who could not accept it returned to Iona where they had come from, and then to the north of Ireland (where, in due course, the church fell into line with the Catholic south, thus ending a schism that had divided the western church). For Bede, the Synod of Whitby was a turning point in the history of the northern church. And we can see Hild’s role in the synod as presiding over bitterly contested ground, acknowledging the outcome of the dispute, and promoting its acceptance among the company of those gathered in her monastery and in the wider Northumbrian church – all the more impressive for the fact that she personally inclined to the Irish tradition in which she had been formed, rather than the Roman.

Hild died on 17 November 680. It was not long before her memory began to be venerated. We know this from a church calendar from early in the eighth century, not long after the Lindisfarne Gospels were written. I think we should remember her for her holiness, her piety, her administrative skills, her wisdom, her learning, her charity and, not least, her extraordinary energy even in old age. Two stories endeared her to the ordinary people of her day. Bede tells the story of how she enabled the simple cow-herd Caedmon to sing and compose poems in praise of God. He is the earliest English poet whose name we know, so Hild came to be celebrated as a midwife of poetry and song. A legend was told of her turning snakes to stone during an infestation of the town, which supposedly explained fossils found in the cliffs; hence the ammonite symbol long associated with her which you will see on many churches and institutions dedicated to her.

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Why does her story matter to us today, and how should we set about commemorating it in our Pilgrim Way of St Hild? Let me make three suggestions.

First, we should respect and honour our Christian heritage. What do I mean by invoking that slippery word? I mean, among other things, the “landscapes of faith” that we are fortunate enough to live in here in North East England. In England, it’s perhaps only in Cornwall and the North East that we have such a rich legacy of saints from early Christian times. The difference is that whereas in Cornwall, so many of them have survived only in village names and church dedications, here in the North East we know a great deal about who they were, how they lived and what they achieved that left such a mark on the collective memory that they were canonised as saints. 

Most people have heard of Aidan, Cuthbert and Bede. Fewer could name Oswald, Wilfred, Benedict Biscop, St John of Beverley, Chad and Cedd. Hild belongs in that second group of saints who had a real and lasting impact on the history of the English, but remains comparatively little known. I think it is the duty of places associated with any great men and women to promote their memory and celebrate their contribution to our history. It helps if natural and built heritage create obvious ways in which to do this, which they indeed do in this part of England. 

But intangible heritage is as important as what is visible and concrete. Intangible heritage has to do with stories and their meanings, the values and aspirations, that human beings assign to their surroundings to explain why they matter and should be cherished. It is the story itself that must be told in order to interpret the “sense of place” I spoke about at the beginning, and bear witness to the importance of events that shaped our past. So our project is an act of piety, that is, an explicit acknowledgment of what makes our places what they are, and what we owe to them as people who are, consciously or unconsciously, formed by them. In her case, we should not be afraid of speaking about promoting spiritual values, those dimensions of human life that are intanglible but influential and formative, whatever content we choose to give to that kind of language.

Secondly, we should draw on the narratives of the past so as to inform our present and future. I am thinking of two aspects of Hild’s story as a leader in public life that I think speak directly to our society today. She was a woman, perhaps the most accomplished of the women Bede makes a point of celebrating in his History. An abbot or abbess was always a person of significance in Saxon England. But her oversight as a woman of one of the great institutions of Saxon England, and her capacity to open up educational possibilities for young women and girls in the convent tells us much about her stature. Her presiding role in a monastery important enough to host a royal synod is all the evidence we need of her standing in the kingdom. This speaks volumes to the times we are living in as we struggle to achieve equality in our gender roles in public and personal life. By extension, we could see her role as symbolic of our quest for a genuine inclusion of all who are marginalised in our supposedly equal society. We can see Caedmon, the singer whom Hild brought in from outside as an instance of the literally voiceless person on the edge of her privileged circle being recognised, heard, taken seriously and given back their power. As a practitioner of social justice, she speaks eloquently into our own divided society. 

And this is what Hild’s conduct at the Synod of Whitby particularly witnesses to. As far as we can tell, she demonstrated the capacity to reach across a society fractured by ideological debates in order to achieve unity and common purpose. We can see her, I think, as a broker of reconciliation towards those hurt by the king’s decision, for while loyal to the agreed outcome, as a woman herself shaped by Ireland and Iona, she did not lose her sympathy for those on the losing side. In our increasingly fraught politics, there are all kinds of lessons those in public life can usefully draw from the career of a leader whom tradition honours for her celebrated wisdom in turbulent times.

But thirdly, we need to respect the pastness of the past and while learning from it, we should not attempt to recapitulate it in our present experience. I said earlier that we must not allow a project of this kind to become locked into the past, still less to try to reconstruct it and relive it in the utterly different world in which we live. We only do justice to Hild if we can distance ourselves from her and recognise that she was a woman of her time. There is so much we can learn from her, but it doesn’t follow that we should inhabit the cultural assumptions and thought-world of seventh century Northumbria. We must beware of nostalgia for our Saxon past. Nostalgia is literally aching for home. But the past is not our home. The present is.

This hardly needs to be said, but there is a strain of heritage activity (which has influenced some sections of the church in its take on Northumbrian Christianity) that risks romanticising the past, subtly – or not so subtly – suggesting that it was better, kinder, more noble, more courageous than the present. I think this is a point worth dwelling on at a time when nationalism is on the rise, often driven, it seems, by a nostalgic harking back to the days of empire or the wartime spirit. More than thirteen centuries after the event there are still people who will tell you that the decision at the Synod of Whitby was a terrible mistake, fatally compromising the purity of a supposedly primitive Celtic Christianity as against the corruptions of Rome. When heritage colludes with nostalgia to convey the message that the past was always better than the present, we should beware. 

The fact is that the Anglo-Saxon world was cruel and harsh to an extent that we don’t always realise when we look at our Christian sources. Christian monarchs thought nothing of slaughtering their foes as a matter of daily reality. The saints of that era practised extreme asceticism of a kind we might be tempted to regard as eccentric or even abusive, especially when the young were trained up in these practices. I am thinking of Cuthbert walking into the North Sea and reciting Psalms all night long while the waters rose up to his neck. We are impressed and moved by that story but I doubt that we should emulate it, especially knowing the North Sea as we do. So it’s important that we do not regard historical figures as our contemporaries, however much we may admire them. We need to learn from them intelligently, exercise discernment as their critical friends.

This is how we must respect Hild as a great woman who belongs to our common past. We honour her by respecting the distance that lies between our times and hers, the gap of the centuries across which we reach back to her story and try to tell it as people of today. This entails understanding how her memory come down to us endlessly worked on and reshaped by those who received it, cherished it and bequeathed it to those who followed. Tradition is traditio, literally “that which is handed on”. It is never free of the influences of those who receive it and pass it on. This is part of its richness, that layered, textured quality the deep structures of our best stories acquire precisely because they have been handled with such reverence and love. 

So the interpretative task is: how do the horizons of the Saxon and our modern worlds encounter each other in ways that respect the distinctiveness of each and enrich our own? The Way of St Hild ought to help us pilgrims who walk it understand our own times all the better for the insights that our past sheds on it. Here is where the choice of augmented reality stations and the interpretative experiences we offer is fundamental. If the enterprise is to realise its cultural and spiritual aims, it must demonstrate a holistic understanding of pilgrimage that sets it in our own times and addresses contemporary concerns. 

For example, I could see further interpretation points) focusing on themes such as: 

-the natural maritime heritage of this stretch of the North Sea coast (recalling how the Saxon saints lived close to nature), together with threats to the environment, species diversity and natural habitats;
-industry on the coast including mining, shipping and fishing;
-Hartlepool’s role as a gateway to safety for those given sanctuary at Durham Cathedral and embarking on exile
-sea and land communications along the coast (in the middle ages, the sea was the highway of choice that connected nations and societies);
-poverty, need and social justice in the North East (of which the Saxon saints were champions);
-war and conflict from the Viking invasions, military fortifications along the coast, and the air raids of the Great War;
-education and learning (promoted in Hild’s convents as a key aim of monasticism);
-the arts in the North East from Caedmon, Hild’s poet, to the present;
-sport, leisure and recreation as they respond to the opportunity of “sabbatical time” whether chosen or enforced by unemployment, age, sickness or disability. 

This can sound contrived, I know. And pilgrims would see straight through any bogus attempt to make connections. But I could make a plausible case for a Hild pilgrimage broadening its reach in all these ways. And that includes connecting it with other pilgrim “ways” that already exist or are being developed in the North East. They could link us to Holy Island, St Oswald and St Aidan, Durham and St Cuthbert, Hexham and St Wilfrid, and Wearmouth-Jarrow and St Benedict Biscop and Bede. Once the controlling idea was worked out, so much else could flow from it. Natural heritage, our Christian past, the lived experience of the people whose “places” the route passes through, the larger dilemmas of contemporary North East England, all have a part to play in contributing to the wholeness of pilgrimage in these parts, its capacity to raise questions and make connections across the entire breadth of human life as it is experienced in this region of England. 

The “pastness of the past” is part of its gift to us. By resisting nostalgia, but instead receiving and understanding it for what it is and what it has become helps us become genuinely contemporary citizens of the present who are able to contribute to today’s world with renewed insight, imagination and vitality. The Way of St Hild has an enormous amount to contribute to our common life here in the North East. “Augmented reality” could be another word for pilgrimage, in whatever ways we experience it. It’s very good to have a small part to play in realising this imaginative project.

At a seminar to discuss the development of a pilgrim trail "The Way of St Hild"
Hartlepool, 2 July 2019

Stirring us up to Sing: Sermon at the Consecration of Nicholas Chamberlain as Bishop of Grantham

Honour comes into things today. We are here to celebrate the consecration of a new bishop. We are glad for him, for the diocese of Lincoln and for the whole church. And it is not wrong to say that we honour him as we give thanks for Nick, this man of God, this friend, this priest whom we surround today with our love, our affection and our prayers.

Why do I use that word ‘honour’? Because it’s found in the gospel reading for this holy day, the feast of St Hild. (Two things to say here in parentheses. First, you’ll forgive me for preferring to speak of her by her Saxon name Hild rather than the Latin Hilda despite Nick’s honourable role as incumbent of St Hilda’s Church Jesmond. The second is that she died not on the 19th but the 17th of November 680. But as Lincoln people know, that day is also the anniversary of Hugh of Lincoln who died in 1200. To my mind Hugh, who was not only five hundred years Hild’s junior but also a gentleman, would not have hesitated to concede the 17th to the senior lady and taken the 19th himself. But the Church calendar has a wisdom of its own.)

But back to this word honour. In the gospel, Jesus has a lesson about good behaviour at a party. Be careful. Don’t grab the place of honour for yourself. Wait to be invited. It’s a pertinent reading at an episcopal service, for diocesan bishops as we know have seats. Cathedrals are named after these seats of honour, these cathedra; pretty grand some of them are too, if Durham’s is anything to go by. But, Jesus says, be properly reluctant about occupying a place of primacy and taking honour. Once, bishops-designate had to be dragged to their consecrations, so fearful were they to take up this awesome office. Nolo episcopari! they would cry, ‘I don’t want to be a bishop.’ Quite right. That should be an essential quality in the person spec of every episcopal appointment.

It’s so characteristic of Jesus’ teaching. Doxa, honour, is only to be had by those who begin by sitting in the lowest place and are invited to take a privileged seat. Why? Because his rule is a kingdom of nobodies where the greatest are least and the last first. Jesus himself is the example of this way of being: he who was rich became poor so that we might become rich, who took the form of a slave and was obedient unto death. All of Christianity is about this. But public ministry in particular, and episcopal ministry most of all. To be ‘grand’ is to subvert the very thing a priest or bishop embodies as-Christ. To be a ‘dignitary’, as we call it, is to embody true Christian ‘worth’, dignitas; and this means above all else, evangelical poverty of spirit, the virtue of humility we heard about in Ephesians, the grace to be as nobody and become one of God’s poor.

Hild was born into the royal house of Northumbria. But her vocation did not lie in being a princess but an abbess pledged to religious poverty. She had the oversight of a double monastery of women and men like her given as God’s poor in imitation of the humble Son of Man and in response to his call to follow. Like others inspired by gentle Aidan, she is depicted by Bede as a woman who embodied the spirit of the gospel herself by noticing and honouring those of little account. One of those to whom she said, in effect, ‘friend, come up higher’ was Caedmon. He was a nobody in that community. While the brothers and sisters were at prayer in quire or dining in hall, he would be outside in the stables caring for the animals and sleeping among them. Once in a dream, someone came to him and asked him to sing about the origin of created things. ‘How can I sing?’ he replied helplessly, 'how shall I sing that Majesty?' Yet in his dream, he composed a poem and sang the praise of the Creator. Next day he remembered the song. Hild heard about it and summoned him. Testing and recognising his gift, she called him to take vows and enter the monastery as its poet and singer in residence, one of the earliest poets to write in English. 

I love that story because of what it says to me about Christian vocation and ministry. For one thing, it underlines the Bible’s insistence that God’s humble poor are his special treasure. This is always a privilege of public ministry as deacon, priest or bishop, to notice and care about those in the stable no less than those in quire. But to go on, this ‘noticing’ is about paying attention to what God is doing in the lives of others, even when they are the most unlikely of others. We should learn from this story not to think we can ever predict or know where God is going to be at work. All ministry is to do the work of God, indeed, but part of this is the difficult and exacting task of discernment: understanding that God is at work in the world before we ever get to see it or know about it. Only then are we in a position to bring about reconciliation and healing, one of the gifts Hild was especially remembered for in the Saxon church. This is where we look to bishops to lead. I don’t simply mean that the recognition and calling out of gifts and ministries belongs to episcope as your act of loving oversight of the church. I mean something altogether larger than this: teaching the church to pay attention to creation, to all of life in its flourishing and in its brokenness, to listen and discern so that we do not miss the often hidden stirrings of the Spirit of God. Hild, we can safely say, always acted in an episcopal way as Abbess, and the story of how Caedmon was brought to her and her eyes and ears were opened gives us a clue about the leadership style of this remarkable woman.

And then there is the nature of the gift itself. To compose poetry and to sing songs in praise of God: this was the charism Hild discerned in Caedmon and brought out to flourish. Isn’t it the vocation of a bishop to help the whole church find our voice as poets and singers? When it comes to worshipping God and speaking about him, poetry and song are far closer to the truth of things than prose can ever be. In Bruce Chatwin’s book Songlines, he traces the footsteps of native peoples who sing as they walk and bring worlds into being, echoing the primordial song by which the universe was made. ‘The trade route is the Songline because songs, not things, are the principal medium of exchange.’ Oscar Wilde says that Christ was a poet who makes poets out of all of us. I have a hunch that if bishops and all of us who are Christian leaders could worry about the prose a little less, and trade in song a little more, our church might breathe a great sigh of relief. For with the lightness of spirit and quickness of step that poetry and song bring, who knows how our worship could begin to dance, and our mission glow with gratitude, and our service of God and humanity, and our pursuit of all that is just and right be transformed from Pelagian duty into gospel joy?

This story of Hild and Caedmon fits so well with our gospel reading. Here is the man who knew his place but was called to a new role because his gift was discovered and recognised. I doubt if Hild ever forgot the day she first heard Caedmon sing. To him, like so many in the Saxon church of Northumbria, ‘she was known as mother because of her outstanding devotion and grace’ says Bede. To be a father or a mother in God, like every act of parenting, is to recognise the giftedness of those who are as children to us, and raise them to the place of honour where their God-given potential is realised, and where the base metal of prosody is transmuted into the shining gold of song.

'We need each other's voice to sing the songs our hearts would raise.' Nick, you are among us as God’s bishop to stir us up to sing even in dark and evil times, especially in dark and evil times*. So find your own voice, and help us to find ours so that we may be a church of joy and hope as together we learn how to 'sing that Majesty which angels do admire.'

*A reference to the bombings in Beirut and Paris by Daesh a few days before, and heightened security in the UK.

Southwark Cathedral, St Hild’s Day 2015.
At the consecration of The Right Reverend Dr Nicholas Chamberlain as Bishop of Grantham. (Ephesians 4.1-6, Luke 14.7-14)

 

Finding a Voice: a sermon on St Hild's Day

What’s your recurring nightmare? Falling off a cliff? Taking that exam? Having a tooth out?  One of mine is a dream quite common among clergy, apparently, being strangled by my own priestly vestments as I try to get out of them after a service.  Today’s gospel reading reminds me of another of my nightmares. When I hear Jesus’ parables about great feasts, I imagine myself at a party finding that I’m expected to do a ‘turn’.  There are two kinds of people: those who seize the main chance glimpsing celebrity just minutes away; and those who shrink from the awful certainty of public failure, embarrassment and shame. They know how to take the lowest place. We all know which class we belong to.  And even if there is some chance of faking it, you still feel in your heart of hearts that everyone is seeing through you. 

The Venerable Bede wrote about just such a shrinking violet in his History of the English Church and People.  It was late in the 7th century.  He says that when the guests at a feast were asked to entertain the gathering, a lay brother saw the harp coming his way, and got out as fast as he could, fleeing outside to a stable to sleep.  And his worst dream came back to haunt him: someone standing beside him telling him to sing something.  ‘I can’t sing’ he replied, ‘that’s why I left the party and came out here’.  ‘But you shall sing’ persisted his visitant.  ‘What about?’ asked Caedmon. ‘Sing about the creation of all things’.  And this untutored man who had never written or sung a verse in his life broke into the purest song of praise.  Next morning, he was brought to the abbess of the double monastery where there were both women and men.  She saw at once that divine inspiration had taken hold of him.  She had him admitted as a monk, and taught him the scriptures which he turned into verse and, says Bede, through his gift, inspired his hearers ‘to love and do good’ and prepare for the joys of heaven.  We sang about this in Canon Brown’s hymn.

Caedmon was the earliest English Christian poet.  I am telling you about him because of that abbess who recognised his gift: Hild, as the Saxons called her; Hilda in Bede’s Latin.  She was one of the great leaders of the Saxon church in the 7^th century, born 1400 years ago next year, a princess called back to Northumbria by St Aidan, admitted to the religious life and associated since then with three places in the North East commemorated on the kneelers executed by our broderers at the Hild altar in this Cathedral. The first is South Shields where the parish church in the town centre plausibly stands on an ancient Saxon place of worship. Next comes Hartlepool where one of the North East’s great churches, the grand gothic pile of St Hilda, stands on the numinous windy headland near the medieval sea wall where a plaque tells you that you are not far from the monastery where she was abbess.

Finally comes Whitby which is properly Yorkshire but for today an honorary part of North East England and definitely Northumbria.  The marvellous abbey ruins on the cliffs above the town stand on the original Saxon site. Here too, Hild was abbess and hosted the Synod of 664 AD at which the Northumbrian church made the difficult choice to follow continental Roman customs for calculating the date of Easter rather than the Irish traditions of Lindisfarne in which she herself had been schooled.  I see her trying to find reconciliation between those two ways of being Christian, for unlike others, she did not abandon England when the decision went against Lindisfarne. 

I love the story of Hild taking in the unknown Caedmon as the midwife of his gift so as to bring it out into the open.  There is always a risk in this, discerning and nurturing what perplexes other people, recognising the work of God in the life of another human being.  In the gospel reading, Jesus speaks of the importance of invitation: it is the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind who should be welcomed to the banquet.  And this is what Hild did for Caedmon, recognising his gift of poetry and song, a gift not only of versification but of interpretation: understanding the ways and works of the Creator and speaking about them. It’s a lovely picture of how human beings grow and flourish when they are, so to speak, brought inside and their gifts and talents are celebrated.

Some of you have recently seen the film Little Voice. Jane Horrocks plays an ultra-timid daughter who is so dominated by her overbearing mother that she can’t speak above a stage-whisper.  She spends her days in her bedroom listening to LPs of songs from the shows: Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Shirley Bassey.  And she sings along with them, sings as them, for she can sing – not just hum or whistle but really sing.  One evening Little Voice is overheard by a seedy, dead-end talent scout, Michael Caine, who recognises her gift and realises this is his last big chance for a big prize. So he puts her on the stage.  It’s not a straightforward rags to riches story.  But it is a picture of finding one’s voice, and through it, finding herself. Through Hild, Caedmon, a 7^th century Little Voice, found his gift, found his voice, found his God, and found himself.

I see in this a metaphor of Christian ministry.  I don’t mean what the clergy do, but what we all do for one another as the people of God, our companions in the church. Isn’t the task of ministry to try to recognise what God is doing in the world and in those around us, and help make it conscious, articulate, so that they find their God, their voice and their gifts?  That is much harder than baldly stating the truths of Christianity or pressing home moral certainties. As I read the gospels, I find Jesus gong about his work in a way that brings out the possibilities inherent in ordinary men and women, enticing them into responding more fully to the love and grace of God: piping so that people not only listen but dance. It’s suggestive rather than insistent.  It offers people the freedom to say yes, or no, or maybe, or it’s hard, or I wish I could; but this is how to draw out of them the song they alone can sing.  Oscar Wilde said that what makes Jesus a poet is that he makes poets of us all.  Precisely this gift of opening the lips of others to proclaim the words and works of God is how I read Hild’s act in bringing another person to life. 

There are few things more important than to do this for one another.  We can never know how much a little word of encouragement can mean to someone else: ‘thank you’, ‘that touched me’, ‘God spoke to me through what you did for me’.  Words and gestures like these are so often how God gives us the gifts and the strength to carry on serving him as followers of Jesus.  It means being open to other people, responsive to them in their tentativeness and lack of confidence, glimpsing what God is doing and could do through them, as Hild discerned with Caedmon. There are those who have done this for us.  We must do it for others. 

 

This is how the church is built up as we respond together the to ‘one hope of our calling’.  Who knows whether there is a Caedmon somewhere waiting for us to prompt them, nudge them, encourage them to find their voice, open their mouths and sing?

Durham Cathedral, St Hild’s Day, 17 November 2013

Luke 14.7-14

Saxon Saints and Saxon Places: Spiritualities of North-East England

1  What is Iconic?
Some years ago I wrote a new guide book for Durham Cathedral.  I began, as deans do, by offering a word of welcome to it, saying that there were three sites in north-east England that were commonly regarded as ‘iconic’ of the region: Hadrian’s Wall, the Angel of the North, and Durham Cathedral.  Later, I was drawn into a long conversation with a visitor from eastern Europe who had taken exception to what I had written.  He said that I was using the word ‘iconic’ in an ambiguous way that obscured how different these three places were, and how only Durham did justice to the true meaning of ‘icon’.  What made the Cathedral ‘iconic’, he said, was not simply its unforgettable visible image, but the indissoluble association between the place and its people over more than a thousand years.  He believed that the Cathedral’s rich ‘texture’ was not only its architecture and history, what we might call the ‘heritage’, but specifically the memory and lived experience of a common life focused on a particular place over centuries, and continuing today.  Hadrian’s Wall only had this connection to a human community in an attenuated way, and for a far shorter period of time; while he doubted whether the Angel of the North was ‘iconic’ at all other than as an easily recognised profile on the skyline; it was an ‘icon’ only in the modern and as he thought, debased, sense that is familiar to us as an overused lazy epithet from the travel-writer’s lexicon. (I have ow banned the use of the word in our Durham literature.) 

He was I think making two points in this thought-provoking exchange.  The first was that what makes something ‘iconic’ in this deeper sense is not simply that it symbolises something, nor even that enough people assign value to it to get it included in some canon of defining images.  An iconic place has to do ‘work’, not in the crudely functional sense that it necessarily serves a functional purpose, but that it is profoundly connected to a community, ‘does’ something for it and invites, indeed requires, that community to do things for it.  The second was that an icon, in the Christian spiritual tradition, opens doors, discloses meanings beyond itself, draws us into another dimension of experience.  An icon is always ‘charged’ with significance which is why it is inseparable from the emotional, spiritual and aspirational investment in it on the part of human beings.  This is how art and heritage take on ‘texture’. 

I am still not sure whether I agree with my conversation partner, or whether in fact his argument proves more than he intended, for it is indisputable that for the people of this region, these three places represent something more than mere branding, and more than a simply aesthetic appeal to the senses.  There are many people in the north-east who do not like Anthony Gormley’s sculpture, and who regard it as a piece of rather brutal temporary art shorn of any truly symbolic meaning, and beset by all the uncertainties and lack of conviction that characterises our age with its ambivalence about strong religious or cultural statements.  But even they recognise the way it has captured the imagination of the north-east and to travellers on the A1 or the East Coast Main Line gathers up its sense of place.  I suspect that Hadrian’s extraordinary wall is more admirable and fascinating rather than ‘beautiful’ in itself; yet there is something evocative about its relationship to the lowering skies and wide lonely landscapes of Northumberland that makes it an eloquent and moving image for this part of England.  There are even a few who do not greatly care for Durham Cathedral, who find the building dark, intimidating and oppressive; yet precisely because of this admit that it captures the tough astringency of north-east England. 

Where my critic was undoubtedly right about ‘texture’ was in something that was implied rather than stated in his comments about how an icon exists only in relation to a community.  What was implied was to do with the particular people who are remembered at certain places.  Part of the value a community finds in such places is its association with memory, not only specific events that constitute a story but the people who are its central protagonists.  In narrative terms, this is how particular sites have meaning conferred on them, because of the connection between place, people and event.  In this place, something significant has happened to certain people.  When that story intersects and resonates with the self-understanding of a community or an individual, its ‘place’ becomes charged with significance, if you like ‘iconic’ in a more focused sense than the loose way I used it as part of the Durham Cathedral promotional-speak.  Sometimes it is a public significance for a society or nation, like the Cenotaph.  Sometimes it holds private significance for families and a few individuals, like a roadside shrine where flowers are tied to a post in memory of a loved one killed in a road accident.  Sometimes it carries religious significance, sometimes not.  But a site that capable in any way of inhabiting the landscape of the mind, and evoking some kind of spiritual response, will I think have a texture that is layered by a sense of place, the memory of particular people, and an event or events in the distant or more recent past that live on in the present.    

Faith communities have always understood this.  In the history of religions, the ‘idea of the holy’ is not usually of some disembodied presence, rather it is an experience of the divine, mysterium tremens et fascinans, that is concretely located in particular places, people and events.  Pilgrimage in the world’s religions is the universal human way of acknowledging the importance of places where certain significant things happened to certain significant people.  In the Old Testament, we could cite many examples, such as the shrine at Bethel that was associated with the patriarch Jacob because of his dream of the ladder to heaven and the altar he built there; or Solomon’s temple at Jerusalem whose altar of burnt offering was situated at the very place where David had bought a threshing floor in order to build an altar to thank God for the cessation of a plague.    

Medieval pilgrim churches always have this layering of place, people and event.  You only have to think of the three great pilgrim destinations of medieval Europe, Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago da Compostela to realise this.  But I want to focus on north-east England where we see this in abundance; for this region is the richest in England for its concentration of pilgrimage sites related to the origins of Christianity in Saxon times. 

 

2  The Significance of Durham for North-East England
Let me start with Durham.  The Cathedral, and therefore the city, only exists because of the memory of one man and the community who revered him.  Cuthbert’s body, together with the Lindisfarne Gospels written in his honour, was brought to Durham by the community that bore his name in 995 after more than a century of wandering around the north of England. In an important sense that journey defined a ‘sacred geography’ that roughly approximates to north-east England.  Holy sense of ‘place’ was built into the journey of Cuthbert’s relics from the first.  At every place where the coffin rested, a church was erected and the memory of Cuthbert enshrined into the self-understanding of a locality: places such as Norham on the Tweed, and Chester-le-Street, the mother church of the Durham Palatinate.  Such churches were always dedicated to St Cuthbert, or to Our Lady and St Cuthbert, as indeed was our Cathedral (which, after a lapse of over 450 years following the Reformation, now has St Cuthbert restored to its legal title alongside Christ and Blessed Mary the Virgin). 

So the ‘texture’ of Durham, its iconic significance, its sanctity if you like is inseparable from the saint whose shrine it was from the very beginning.  The shrine legitimises sacred place.   And inevitably, the sacred attracts the sacred.  St Oswald’s head had already been interred with the Cuthbert relics as the royal patron of the Northumbrian mission (and perhaps because the presence of a martyr’s relics added potency to those of Cuthbert).  Add to this, as part of the same symbol-system, the Lindisfarne Gospels, written ‘in honour of God and St Cuthbert’ early in the 8^th century perhaps a decade and a half after his death, and always intended to be inseparable from his relics.  Next summer we look forward to welcoming the Gospel Book to Durham for a three month visit.  The significance of this is not simply to open up this national treasure to the people of the north-east who have such a deep feeling of connection with it.  It is that you can only understand the Gospel Book in its Cuthbert context, that is to say, in and around the Cathedral.  This is what gives that sense of ‘texture’, community belonging and spiritual meaning to what is otherwise just a beautiful ancient manuscript.

But the monks of Durham were greedy for more relics, I don’t say that they did not covet sanctity; but more relics meant more pilgrims and more pilgrims meant more gifts and endowments including valuable estates.  In the middle ages, one way of strengthening the relationship with sacred history was the practice of furta sacra, the sacred theft of relics from other shrines. ‘Professional traffickers in holiness’ travelled around snatching and selling relics of the saints. Bishop Hugh of Lincoln was an ardent practitioner. He was once allowed to handle the arm of Mary Magdalene at a rival shrine, whereupon he surreptitiously bit off a finger and took it back to Lincoln.  The monks of Durham were not above this practice, and this is part of your history here in Wearmouth.  They insinuated one of their number at Jarrow; and when that monk had gained sufficient trust, he stole the relics of Bede and brought them back to Durham to form a second shrine alongside Cuthbert.  That was in 1022.  Bede’s remains have been there ever since, an additional focus of spiritual presence in a church already well endowed with saints and the source of a millennium of irritation on the part of Jarrow people towards Durham. But we ought also to acknowledge our further debt to Wearmouth and Jarrow because it was from here that Benedictine monks were translated to Durham by William of St Calais in 1083 to found the Benedictine community there and to build its new Romanesque cathedral. 

The intriguing history of Bede’s bones is an important story to tell here in Wearmouth, because it shows how strongly the association of holy place and holy people was felt in the middle ages, and is still felt today.  But it opens up another aspect of the relationship of sacred people to sacred place.  St Peter’s Monkwearmouth, like St Paul’s Jarrow, are both moving testaments to the faith of the Saxon era, so vibrant and colourful, so intensely focused on the goal of human sanctity and on the reconciliation of earth to heaven.  (If you want to see an entire surviving church from the era of Bede, you must to to Escomb in the south of the county, a pure Saxon building of consummate beauty that hints at what these two churches of the double monastery might once have looked like.) 

After 1022, Jarrow became a pilgrim’s paradox: a saint’s shrine without the saint’s relics.  It became an empty place, shorn of the very thing that gave it meaning.  And yet the meaning lived on, perhaps tenuously for many centuries, but then strongly revived in the 18^th and 19^th centuries with the rise of romanticism and its passion for antiquity.  Where Bede had lived and worked and died, there the memory was once again revered.  That there were no physical remains left to honour made no difference.  You can still see what Bede saw, the inscription marking the dedication of St Paul’s Jarrow above the chancel arch; you can still walk where Bede walked, through the Saxon porch of St Peter’s Monkwearmouth.  Mention ‘Bede’ in the north-east, and the reply you will get will probably be ‘Jarrow’, not Durham Cathedral.  You will hear about Bede’s World, a successful and enjoyable rehabilitation of his memory in the place he knew and loved. The numinous character of these two great churches is not that they are conventionally beautiful but because of the spiritual, cultural and intellectual ‘heritage’ the legacy of Bede represents.

The extent of interest in Bede here at Wearmouth-Jarrow is almost saying of Durham, ‘they may have the body of Bede, but we have his spirit’.  Something similar is said on Lindisfarne about Cuthbert.  I am not going to say that they are altogether right, but neither are they wholly wrong.  My point is that the association of holy place and holy people can and does transcend physical remains.  A place can become a shrine and attract pilgrims for its holy (or heroic) memories and resonances.  And this is, in fact, how most of our ‘shrines’ in the north-east are.  I am not only thinking of Lindisfarne, or the Inner Farne of Aidan and Cuthbert, or the Wearmouth and Jarrow of Benedict Biscop and Bede.  We need to remember Bamburgh where Aidan died, Hartlepool where Hild ruled a double monastery, Coldingham where Aebba presided over a similar community, Hexham and Ripon with their crypts associated with Wilfrid, Finchale where Godric lived as a hermit, and many other sites across County Durham and Northumberland where memory has sanctified place. In all these places, memory does not need the support of physical remains. The nexus of place, people and event is powerful enough on its own. 

The implications of this for Durham are perhaps not comfortable.  For uniquely among the places I have mentioned, Durham has no intrinsic relation with any of the saints whose relics it houses.  Cuthbert presumably did not visit the obscure peninsula hilltop site of Dunholm far away from any major centre of population and from his own native Farne.  Bede, who was given to this double monastery as a child, probably never left it apart from two occasions when he travelled to Lindisfarne.  So Durham is the paradox of a holy place whose sanctity has nothing to do with what is indigenous to the place itself.  It’s a cuckoo in the nest, originating out of the historical accident that this was where the community of St Cuthbert chose to inter their saint and erect his shrine.  This is why the 12^th century chronicler Symeon of Durham, who probably came to England with the founder of the new Cathedral William of St Calais and who therefore had an interest in promoting the project of the Normans, goes to such great lengths in his Libellus or ‘little book’ on the origins of the Cathedral to legitimate the shrine, telling stories of how providence had guided the community to that spot, how the coffin refused to be carried any further became the saint had decided that his resting place should be at Durham. 

This story was important and influential in two ways.  First, it bolstered the fortunes of the Cathedral Priory at a time when the murder of Thomas Becket was placing the rival shrine at Canterbury ahead of Durham in the pilgrimage stakes.  But second, and importantly, it supported the temporal power of the prince bishops whose legitimacy as rulers of a palatinate kingdom within a kingdom depended on the patronage and good will of the local saint.  We can see something similar in the legend of how the relics of St James the Great came to be discovered in ‘the field of the star’, Compostela, thus legitimating the great shrine and pilgrim destination that place was becoming, and at the same time acting as the patron saint of the long Reconquista of Spain, the reclamation for Christendom of the Iberian peninsula from Islamic domination.  If you know the Pilgrim Road, you will be familiar with many images of St James as the Matamoros, the slayer of the Moors, hardly a comfortable depiction of a Christian saint for our own age, but an eloquent reminder of how both sacred people and sacred places become appropriated to the social and political causes of the day. 

3  Seven Saxon Saints and their Places
Having said something about the relationship of sacred people to sacred place and sacred event, let me devote the rest of this lecture to looking more specifically at seven of the north-east’s most important saints from the Saxon period and the places with which they are associated. Simply to list these names is to remind ourselves what an extraordinary era the 7^th and early 8^th century was, from the baptism of Edwin in 627 to the death of Bede in 735.  (Let me say, while I am about it, that I avoid the use of the word ‘Celtic’ to describe the saints of that century.  It is a slippery word that in popular spirituality tends to mean uncial script, intertwined decoration and fancy knotwork, images of golden sunsets and all pleasantly scented like a National Trust shop.  I joke but as a matter of accuracy, only one of the northern saints was of Celtic or Irish origin.  The others were all Saxon Northumbrians, strongly influenced by the Irish traditions of Lindisfarne but in no way Celts themselves, least of all after the Synod of Whitby in 664 when the Saxon church adopted Roman ways two decades before Cuthbert became bishop and before Bede was even born.)  And while it is inevitably simplistic, I am going to associate with these saints and ‘their’ places a quality that for me identifies each of them as a distinctive, figure who occupies a unique place in the landscape of the mind and spirit. 

Oswald, king and saint, is in many ways the founder and midwife of the Christian mission in Northumbria, and through it much of England.  He is the only one of the seven to have become a martyr.  He became a Christian on Iona, returning to Northumbria to do battle with the pagan British king Cadwalla.  The story is told of how he set up a wooden cross at Heavenfield in the Tyne Valley and gathered his army to pray for victory.  The defeat of Cadwalla was a turning point in the Christianisation of the kingdom, and led to his sending to Iona for a bishop who would preach the gospel to Northumbria.  This is what brought Aidan to England.  However in 642 he lost his life in battle against the Mercian king Penda, a death that was quickly construed as a life offered for the cause of Christ against paganism.  Penda dismembered his body, and this accounts for the fact that his relics are honoured in many different places.  His head was buried with Cuthbert’s remains on Lindisfarne and found its way to Durham: as is common in the Cuthbert iconography, there is a medieval statue of Cuthbert in the shrine there, holding Oswald’s head.  We can associate the lonely site at Heavenfield with him; but perhaps more eloquently, the castle at Bamburgh, where Oswald established his royal court, not as Northumbria’s first Christian king (that honour belongs to Edwin), but as the monarch who decisively established Christianity in the kingdom and thus gave it its character.  In this, he is an image of the Christian leader in public life, for whom politics and faith, for all their ambiguous alchemy, belonged inextricably to a single baptismal vocation.

I see Aidan as the missioner.  He is inevitably associated with the place where he founded a monasterium, the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.  It is one of the most numinous, or as they say up there, ‘thinnest’ places in England.  Of Aidan’s monastery nothing remains, only the memory; but what a memory it is!  I have called Aidan a symbol of mission, for as I have said he was brought from Iona by Oswald not as his personal chaplain, but specifically to convert the Northumbrians to Christianity.  The choice of Lindisfarne as the base of the Northumbrian mission is very significant.  Aidan seems to have looked for a site where his monks could live in community according to their rule following his native Irish traditions, from where he and others could travel across the kingdom preaching the gospel. The ‘semi-detached’ nature of the Island was ideal: it is connected yet not-connected to the mainland, a place with porous boundaries where holiness could be nurtured as the prerequisite for mission.  But there is another aspect to the island’s physical location.  This is that it is within direct sight of Oswald’s royal palace at Bamburgh, as if to say, not only was the king patron of the mission, but the politics of the court were accountable to the High King, God himself, whom the island community existed to proclaim.  This pattern of holy place juxtaposed to secular power is common in medieval sites: Durham is a good example of this.  The message is: mission is to the institutions of a society as well as to its individual members.  All of human life is subject to the kingship of God, and mission is to proclaim that fact. 

My next saint is Wilfrid and his place Hexham.  I see him as the organiser and shaper of Christian institutions in Saxon England. Among the bishops, Wilfrid was one of the most able intellectually and the most forceful as a personality.  He built the first church at Hexham in the 7^th century on such a grand scale, says his biographer Eddius, that no other church north of the Alps could compare with it. He was a native Northumbrian who was sent to be educated by Aidan on Holy Island.  From there his studies took him to Canterbury, Gaul and Rome, travels that gave him an understanding of the wider church few others of his generation had, and which gives us the clue to his life.  A colourful career as ecclesiastical statesman and politician par excellence, led him to stride out across Europe like some new Joshua to conquer lands for God.  From the beginning, as abbot of Ripon and bishop of York, and as apologist for the Roman way at the Synod of Whitby, he courted controversy.  Combative and pugnacious, he fell out with practically every Saxon king and prelate in the land. Wilfrid is usually presented as an unattractive image of worldly ambition and self-interest, corrupted by the power he craved.  But his achievements were considerable.  Not only did he found churches, monasteries and schools on a grand scale, he also introduced the Rule of St Benedict to England, a development that would prove highly significant in the Christian history of our country.  In the debate about the date of Easter, he understood where the future lay: not because it was ‘Roman’ rather than Irish, but because he was committed to the unity of the church and believed that the bishop was its focus. Wilfrid understood how the tides of history were flowing.  But we do him a disservice if we somehow imagine that he was interested only in the institution of the church and its power relations with the state.  To touch his spirituality, you need only visit his two crypts at Hexham and at Ripon. They are a truly Saxon testimony to the power of holiness, the spiritual quest to re-connect with what truly belongs to the foundation of a life lived before God. 

I propose Hild as the reconciler.  She was related to the Northumbrian royal family and was one of the first to become a Christian alongside the first Christian king of Northumbria, Edwin.  Aidan established her in a community somewhere between the Wear and the Tyne (traditionally South Shields), but she soon afterwards became abbess of the convent at Hartlepool.  In 657 she founded the double monastery at Whitby where the famous Synod was held in 664.  That she hosted it is important, together with her loyalty to its outcome in favour of Roman customs in the calculation of the date of Easter and the design of the monastic tonsure.  As an heir of Aidan, this will not have been easy; yet it is clear that she worked tirelessly for the unity of the church in Northumbria, gaining much influence and authority among both the nation’s leaders and the common people who often resorted to her for advice.  A feminist reading of her life would emphasise the respect in which able women could be held in Saxon times: she was unusual, but as we can see from the life of Aebbe, prioress of Coldingham, by no means unique.  Perhaps it is not fortuitous that it was a woman who, in both physical and metaphorical ways, ‘created space’ for a contentious, difficult debate to take place and for an outcome to be reached that did not fracture the church.  This reconciling instinct may perhaps be a particular gift of women in leadership. Her place in north-east England is of course the headland of Hartlepool, another of the region’s numinous places, where the great Early English church of St Hilda was built near to the site of her monastery. 

Cuthbert is the ascetic in this septet.  He stands out not because the others did not also practise askesis or ‘spiritual training’: rather, it is the lengths to which he took it.  He is the one saint of this period who can truly be called eremitical, for the vocation to live as a hermit never faltered, even in the midst of a life fully taken up with the evangelistic, pastoral and organisational duties of a bishop.  To me he is always Cuthbert of Farne, for it was here in the harsh, lonely environment of a rocky island set in a grey hostile sea that he truly found his home.  We misconstrue Cuthbert if we see this as the introvert’s love of solitude, the quest for a peaceful retreat away from the demands of a busy life.  The Farne belongs to the same world as his well-documented habit of spending hours standing in the sea overnight as the tide retreated and advanced again saying prayers and reciting psalms.  It was a determined battle against the forces of evil in the world and in himself.  His extreme spiritual discipline is familiar to us from Irish monks such as Columba and Columbanus, and they seem to owe it to the example of Anthony of Egypt and the desert fathers for whom refuge in the fierce wild places on the margins of human existence was to find God and do battle with demons.  The paradox of this man of holy simplicity is that he should end up buried beneath Europe’s greatest Romanesque building, built as his shrine, yet at the same time so palpably a monument to human power and achievement.  To me the simplicity of his shrine at Durham plays an important role in acting as the Cathedral’s conscience, a reminder that the ascetic journey towards holiness, rather than the seductions of grandeur, is the vocation of all the baptised. And we should remember the Cuthbert is associated not only with Lindisfarne and Durham, but also with the many places he visited in lifetime, and even more those where his body rested after his death.  They include Norham on the Tweed, and pre-eminently Chester-le-Street, Durham’s first cathedral where the saint and his Gospel book rested for more than a century before they found their way on to the peninsula at Dunholme.

The least well-known member of this canon of Saxon saints is Benedict Biscop, the first abbot of Wearmouth and then of Jarrow.  He was the most travelled of the northern saints, making no less than six visits to Rome.  He brought many treasures back to England, for his famous library here and at Jarrow; bringing too a new Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore.  He was an energetic church builder, bringing continental stonemasons with him to England whose achievement, in the pre-Norman Romanesque style, we see in the wonderful Saxon remains at Jarrow and here at St Peter’s Monkwearmouth.  Among the craftsmen he introduced were the first stained-glass makers, an art for which Sunderland can claim to have pioneered in England, a skill which is perpetuated today in the National Glass Centre on Wearside.  But it is for his cosmopolitanism that I want to celebrate Benedict Biscop.  His long, arduous journeys are a timely reminder that far from being isolated from European civilisation and culture off the north-west corner of the mainland, his Christianity was intricately connected to the continental church. So he reminds us that the local church is always a part of a greater whole: this is the meaning of Catholicism.  As to the place with which I identify him, it must be Sunderland and specifically Monkwearmouth.  A few years ago I was preaching at a civic service at Sunderland Minster.  The civic leadership, celebrating their new and much coveted city status, had wanted to make Bede the patron saint of Sunderland.  I replied that this would be contested by both Jarrow and Durham whose claims seemed stronger.  I asked them to think about Benedict Biscop instead, for some of the reasons I have outlined.  I am glad to say that they have officially adopted him. 

My final saint is of course Bede, and his place here at Wearmouth and at Jarrow.  This is not to undermine the significance of his shrine at Durham, simply to acknowledge that it was in the lands between the Wear and the Tyne that Bede was given as a child to Biscop’s double monastery, and where he spent the rest of his life.  Bede is my undoubted symbol of Christian scholarship, learning and wisdom, or as I like to call it, religious intelligence.  He owed this not only to his education under Benedict Biscop but also to the library with which Biscop had endowed the monastery.  He was said to be the most learned man in Europe: a poet, astronomer, mathematician, biographer, theologian, translator and most famously, historian.  His great delight, he says, was to ‘learn, to teach and to write’.  ‘Bede’s World’ gives us a feel for the range of his achievements, though there is no substitute for reading him, especially his History of the English Church and People, which ought to be one of the best-loved books of English Christians.  But if you had asked Bede which writings he regarded as the most important, he would have said (modestly, for he was a deeply humble man), his biblical commentaries.  He was working on a translation of St John’s Gospel when he died.  So Wearmouth-Jarrow is one of those places where the memory enshrined here recalls us to the Christian imperative to love God not only with the heart and soul and will but also with the mind. 

4  Conclusion
I have tried to say something about how Saxon sacred places are connected to Saxon sacred people and the events for which they are remembered, and how this imparts both historical and spiritual texture to those sites.  I have mentioned places that fulfil this role in north-east England: from north to south, Norham, Lindisfarne, the Farne Islands, Bamburgh, Hexham, Jarrow, Wearmouth, Chester-le-Street and Hartlepool.  I could have chosen others, of course, for the Christian history of north-east England is uniquely rich in this respect: Yeavering by the Cheviots where Paulinus baptised; or the Yorkshire sites that belong to the world of Northumbrian Christianity like Lastingham and Ripon; or the scores of small, often isolated, ancient churches whose very obscurity makes them moving testimonies to lived faith and prayer across so many centuries, places where the holiness of unknown men and women is still palpable.  When I was a parish priest in Northumberland 30 years ago, I got to know and love these churches; indeed, one of them, a small hamlet called Edlingham, was part of the united benefice I served, and I used to travel out across the moors to take services for a handful of people in a tiny moorland church that was almost beyond dating for it seemed to have merged completely with its wild remote surroundings, with the stump of a Norman castle next to it and a small cluster of houses huddling together as if for protection against the blasts of wind that swept down off Cheviot.  Who knows what heroic souls weathered physical and spiritual storms in this forgotten corner of England, the kind of men and women who seemed to step straight out of an R. S. Thomas poem? 

That was, as it happened, a Durham Dean and Chapter living, so almost certainly part of the patrimony of St Cuthbert, maybe even (though this is conjecture) one of the many places where the body rested for a while on its long pilgrimage around the north.  And this brings me back where I began, to Durham Cathedral.  Where does Durham belong in the sacred geography of the north whose ‘core’ sacred places I have mentioned?   

I’ve suggested that Durham is different from the other sites I’ve mentioned because it has no first-hand connection with any of the saints whose shrines it houses, only a memory that has embedded itself in that place for historical reasons.  Yet that memory has proved powerful beyond words, as we all recognise when we look at the immensity of the Cathedral perched on its peninsula, and consider that it was the story of the simplest and humblest of saints that led to its being built.  So a ‘borrowed’ sanctity has, if you like, become indigenised at Durham, taken root there, for the Cathedral, St Cuthbert and the Lindisfarne Gospels are, or ought to be, inseparable in what I have called the landscape of the mind.  A few years ago, I took an elderly imam from Saudi Arabia round the Cathedral.  He was completely blind, but did not wish me to speak very much about the building before he had experienced it for himself.  I ended the visit, as I usually do, at the shrine of St Cuthbert.  Before I could say anything about him, he said at once: ‘ah; I recognise here the presence of a holy man.  Someone important is buried here, isn’t he?  I sense it, because in Islam we too have our holy places where holy men are buried.’  I have pondered the word ‘presence’, for it says so much about how the power of religious memory makes the past live in the present, so that the saints become our contemporaries, fellow-travellers, friends, guardians and intercessors.  There is a mystical theology of person-and-place here that only prayer and contemplation will open up for us.

So Durham is not, after all, the cuckoo in the nest.  It is, I think, the shrine in the north-east that gathers up and embraces all the others, because its sanctity of person and place is inseparable from theirs.  I prefer not to use the epithet ‘mother church’ to describe this relationship, for historically, Durham is more daughter than mother, whether in relation to Lindisfarne, Wearmouth-Jarrow or Chester-le-Street.  But the lineal descent of Durham from the sources of 7^th century Christianity in Northumbria, those extraordinary places and people who were the fountainhead of an entire nation’s faith, does make it in my view truly symbolic of the Christian north.

In the list of diocesan bishops you find in Crockfords, the Durham entry does not begin with Aldhun, the first bishop to be resident when the community of St Cuthbert arrived on the peninsula in 995.  It begins with Aidan, the first bishop of Lindisfarne who came to Northumbria in 635.  The Diocese of Durham (with its own 19^th century daughter Newcastle Diocese) therefore stands in direct continuity with the Saxon church and its saints and martyrs: we are still the diocese of Aidan and Cuthbert whose first seat was Lindisfarne and whose present focus is Durham.  What Durham expresses in its textured relationship between place and people is the same reality that we have seen lived out in the other shrines of the north with their memories of sacred people and sacred events.  Together, they have shaped the Christian character of the North-East and given it its distinctive spiritual identity.  These Saxon saints in their Saxon places continue to speak to and inspire us today in ways they could not have dreamed of.  For that, we continue to thank God.  

 

The Wearmouth Lecture, St Peter's Monkwearmouth, September 2012