St Oswald: the king who shared his bread

In today’s gospel the crowd does what crowds always do: follow the leader who promises bread.  Jesus has just fed them with the five barley loaves and two fish.  Now they follow him across the lake, still hungry and expectant.  The appetite of crowds is never satiated.  ‘Amen I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs but because you ate your fill of the loaves’.  In the unfolding of Jesus’ awareness of his vocation, this is a milestone.  Last week’s gospel reading told us how, after the distribution of the loaves, Jesus realised that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, so ‘he withdrew again to the mountain by himself’.  Later when Jesus has taught how he is the living bread from heaven, John says: ‘many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him’.  Crowds are fickle barometers of favour.  From popular acclaim to the loneliness of ridicule and contempt is a short journey. When the thousands have vanished and only the disciples are left Jesus faces them and himself with an awful truth.  ‘Did not I choose you the twelve? Yet one of you is a devil.’  The shadow of betrayal is felt.  This king has come to die.

The king who gives bread and dies for his people is celebrated in one of the saints of this place whose feast falls on Wednesday.  The king who feeds the poor is how Bede lovingly depicts St Oswald.  One Easter Day, he and Bishop Aidan sat down to feast.  ‘A silver dish was placed on the table before him, full of rich foods.  They had just raised their hands to ask a blessing on the bread when there came in an officer of the king, whose duty it was to relieve the needy, telling him that a very great multitude of poor people from every district were sitting in the precincts and asking alms of the king.  He at once ordered the dainties which had been set up in front of him to be carried to the poor, the dish to be broken up, and the pieces divided amongst them.  The bishop, who was sitting by… grasped him by the right hand and said: ‘May this hand never decay’.  In a thirteenth century missal there is a charming image of Oswald’s charity.  Under the table where he and Aidan are sitting are two poor men crouching like dogs, pathetically lifting up their hands to catch the crumbs falling from their masters’ table.  Oswald holds the precious vessel he is about to break up, a symbol, perhaps, of how he will give up his own life. On the table are bowls with loaves and fishes.  The meaning is plain: Oswald is like Jesus.  He gives bread to the hungry.  He gives himself to his own. 

I wonder if Oswald is the neglected saint of Durham.  His head had been interred with the relics of St Cuthbert and carried brought to Durham with the Lindisfarne Gospels by Cuthbert’s community, finally to be laid to rest in the shrine behind the high altar.  There in the feretory there is a thirteenth century statue of Cuthbert.  He has lost his own head in some violent act of the Reformation or civil war.  But he has kept Oswald’s head, which he holds in his left hand, which is how Cuthbert is often portrayed in medieval iconography.  Once there would have been a statue of Oswald, like Cuthbert, flanking Blessed Mary in the central, most prominent niches of the Neville Screen above the high altar.  You can see him in stained glass, in Thetis Blacker’s striking banner in the feretory and, maybe, in a wall-painting in the Galilee Chapel.  Of all our saints, Oswald is the one whose relics appear all over Europe as a true catholic martyr.  Given his vital role in the unification and Christianisation of Northumbria, and therefore the Christianisation of England, he deserves our recognition. 

What do we know about him?  He was not the first Christian king of Northumbria: that honour belongs to Edwin.  But it was he who decisively led his nation into embracing the gospel.  He had been exiled on Iona as a young man and had been baptised there.  After Edwin’s death, he inherited a weak and divided kingdom threatened by native British rulers.  Famously, Oswald set up a cross at the place we now call Heavenfield, above the Tyne near Hexham, and ordered his soldiers to pray for victory against the British king Cadwallon.  This established both Oswald’s kingship and his faith.  From Iona he summoned Irish missionaries to preach the gospel in his kingdom, from where Aidan came and founded his monastery on Lindisfarne as the base for the Northumbrian mission.  Oswald often travelled with Aidan on his journeys, translating the message into English, caring for the poor and building up the church.  He was both parent and midwife of a project that changed the face of England. He died in battle in 642 at the hand of the pagan king Penda of Mercia, ‘slain by the heathen fighting for his fatherland’ says Bede, not just for Northumbria but for a kingdom not of this world. 

Oswald is a potent model of the Christian statesman.  Bede portrays him as the ideal king, a new David who unites his kingdom against the threats it faces, establishes a secure capital, promotes religion, dispenses justice, cares for the least of his people as well as the greatest, and finally gives himself up for their sake.  The synergy between the two cities, sacred and the profane, church and state, is symbolised by the geography of the sites associated with the Northumbrian royal court.  Oswald’s capital at Bamburgh and Aidan’s monastery on Holy Island were within sight of each other.  It was a reminder to this world’s ruler of his divine call and accountability: ‘knowing whose minister he is and whose authority he hath’ as the Prayer Book puts it.  For Bede, the politics of God and of mortals serve the same end, that justice, truth and peace should be established in the nation.  He is saying something that we may not always welcome: that God works through institutions as well as individuals.  This is why we have organised religion embedded in the structures of society, part of the glue that holds it together. 

If Aidan is a model of mission, Cuthbert of sanctity and Bede of wisdom, Oswald is an inspiring image of leadership.  No doubt public life today is infinitely more complex than the 7^th century, but that does not mean it is more exacting or difficult.  Yesterday I led a pilgrimage of Cathedral Friends to the wondrous Saxon cross at Bewcastle deep in the Cumbrian fells.  The church is dedicated to Cuthbert, so perhaps Cuthbert’s body and Oswald’s head rested there on their long journey.  The cross dates from Cuthbert’s time, the generation after Oswald.  You can see a replica of it in the Cathedral dormitory.  As I gazed at the intricate knot-work chequers and vine scrolls on the shaft, I thought about complexity and order. It’s as if the artist is saying: this world is puzzling and chaotic.  How do we chart our voyage across it?  And how, in particular, does any leader negotiate the hazards of public life in the face of difficulty and threat?  The answer is: by going to the source of pattern and order, God the Creator and Saviour of the world, and by emulating this ordered life in how we live out our humanity.  And given that this is a churchyard cross, it is also saying to us: the clue if self-giving, service, sacrifice.  

I have been reading a remarkable new book called Good Value: reflections on money, morality and an uncertain world.  Its author, Stephen Green, is Chairman of HSBC.  He is writing about globalisation and the question the economic crisis is putting to us.  We can assume that in his role, to negotiate the economic, political and societal challenges of today is a daunting assignment.  But he is not only an economist but an ordained Anglican priest.  He is not afraid to speak about what is demanded of us in these difficult times, how we need to live according to wise, ethical and humane values that are not simply based on than the impersonal market forces of price and profit.  He is keen on altruism and on doing something for posterity instead of falling for the Faustian bargain of selling our soul for the pursuit of gain.  He calls for a style of leadership ‘whose essence is not psychological dominance, but which seeks to share itself, to set an example, to instil the instinct of leadership in others, and thus to serve the common endeavour…. Seen as domination, leadership impoverishes both the leader and the led; seen as service… it enriches both, and is more enduringly effective.’   He might have been writing of Oswald sharing bread, giving himself for the people.  Bede would certainly have approved. Our leaders should be paying attention.  So should we.    

Durham Cathedral, 2 August 2009 (John 6.24-35)

Landscapes of Faith: the Christian Heritage of North East England

I have been preparing this lecture at my desk in the window of my study. We live in the Tynedale village of Haydon Bridge a few miles upstream from Hexham. Appropriately enough for a superannuated clergyman, our road is called Church Street. If I look to the right I can see across the road the Georgian parish church where we worship every week. If I look to the left, beyond the railway line, the valley side sweeps majestically down from the ridge where there is a clump of trees marking an enclosure. They are still rich with foliage, but in winter, I can glimpse what lies behind them: the little “old” church of St Cuthbert, now all but abandoned when the medieval village of Haydon migrated down the hill to the more sheltered location where we live, the ancient river crossing where, as the border reivers knew, there has been a bridge across the fast and turbulent South Tyne since time immemorial. Here the Greenwich Commissioners built a new church in 1791 in unadorned village Georgian with a pretty pagoda on the west tower. It too was dedicated to St Cuthbert. The Victorians found it too plain so they gothicised the windows and put coloured glass in, some of it by Kempe and very good. It has some pretty arts and crafts furnishings. 

But although it is a push up a steep hill to get there, and there is no electricity so no heat or light, the old church remains the spiritual and emotional heart of the community. It lost its nave in the eighteenth century when its stones were used to construct the new church. But the chancel remains, an exquisite early gothic jewel in a lovely walled churchyard screened by trees, a haven for wildlife. Inside is a Roman altar that now serves as the font, a reminder that we live in the borderlands of a once vast world empire whose wall stretches across Britain not five miles to the north, and just a mile or so south of the Roman road called Stanegate. It was a moving experience to baptise the Vicar's daughter in that font this year. Once a month the candles are lit and we gather in the Old Church for evensong in muddy boots wrapped up in cagoules, and enjoy hot tea or wine and canapés afterwards before tramping back down the hill and homewards across the fields. 

Much of the North East’s Christian heritage is encapsulated in that view from my window. For Haydon Old Church marks one of those sites where, it is believed, the Saxon monks of Cuthbert’s community stopped on their long journey around the north with his body and the gospel book written in his honour, the great volume we now call the Lindisfarne Gospels. Some villagers will tell you that in his lifetime, Cuthbert himself travelled along Tynedale and stopped to preach here on his journeys between Hexham or Lindisfarne and Cumbria where Bede tells us he regularly went. There is a chain of Cuthbert churches scattered across Tynedale and Redesdale. I think we can safely say that wherever you find a medieval church dedicated to him, you can presume a direct link either to the saint himself, or to his community and the estates they possessed.  

Looking out at these two Cuthbert churches, I am inevitably made to think of journeys. In comparatively recent history as things go, church and village migrated downhill, a journey that was no doubt associated with early industrialisation in the Tyne Valley, for lead was mined all over the North Pennine dales, and in places coal too: we live in a house that was once the home of the pit manager at Bardon Mill. It was named after a Tyneside colliery ship that went down with the loss of all hands in the 1880s. The North East was among the first places in England to embrace the industrial revolution. It did this with real enthusiasm, as the nineteenth century confidently committed itself to vast enterprises in railways, ship building, steel making and coal mining. In 1789, the painter John Martin was born in Haydon Bridge. His huge canvasses are well known: you can see some of them in the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle and at Tate Britain in London. Much of his work echoes the steep-sided hill country of his native Tynedale. But in his most famous apocalyptic paintings such as The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and The Last Judgment, you seem to see in those vivid oranges and reds the fires of the North East’s blast furnaces, the colossal engines of locomotion and mining, a landscape whose appearance has been transformed by the revolution the artist was living through. That he turned to the medium of industrial landscape to depict scenes from biblical narratives is itself a metaphor of how faith was needing to be re-forged in the fires of an entirely new social environment. This is a central part of the North East’s religious history because it sets the scene for how faith has been and is still experienced and expressed in our own bewildering, and sometimes apocalyptic, times.  

John Martin was baptised in Haydon Old Church. What did he know about Cuthbert and his wandering community, I wonder? For that tiny church takes us back to a memory a thousand years old when Cuthbert’s community travelled this way in the ninth and tenth centuries. So inside it you feel the pull of the Holy Island of Lindisfarne where Cuthbert had been prior and then bishop and where, after his death in 687, his shrine was set up and honoured. It was from there that his community set off in 875 in search of a permanent home. But Haydon also points us forward in time to Chester-le-Street where the community settled for more than a century on the site where the lovely church of St Mary and St Cuthbert with its octagonal spire now stands. And you inevitably feel the pull of Durham up there too, for from Chester-le-Street, they migrated to the peninsula called Dun Holme where they arrived in 995. There a Saxon cathedral was constructed, to be succeeded by the great Romanesque church we know and love today. But the important thing about Durham is that in essence, it’s no different from Holy Island, or Old Haydon, or Chester-le-Street. In these places and many others, a church was built to house a shrine, built around Cuthbert and the memory his community preserved. Durham is not a church with a saint’s shrine inside, but a shrine around which a cathedral has been built. 

********

I have served as a priest in North East England for a significant proportion of the 40 years since I was ordained. In the 1980s I was vicar of Alnwick for five years, the first time I had lived outside London and the south where I was born and brought up. It was eye-opening to discover the wealth of the North East’s Christian heritage. I had read about the northern saints of course: I bought my first copy of Bede’s great History as a teenager new to Christian faith and how glad I am that somebody told me that it’s a book every Englishman (and woman) should read often. But reading even the incomparable prose of a great writer like Bede is not the same as walking the landscapes he writes about, inhabiting them for yourself, reflecting and praying in these ancient holy sites. It profoundly shaped my spirituality and ministry at a highly formative time in my life. Sixteen years later we came back to the North East when I was appointed Dean of Durham. There I found myself in the role of guardian not only of a building that the whole world loves and the north is immensely proud of, but also of the shrines of no fewer than three of the founding saints of the Saxon church: Oswald, Cuthbert and Bede. To spend twelve years in Durham was the greatest privilege of my life.

I learned a lot about heritage and how we promote it during those years. When we think of the legacy of Christian faith in this region, we tend to call to mind the headline sites associated with it like Holy Island, the Inner Farne, Hexham, Jarrow, Wearmouth, Hartlepool, Auckland Castle and Whitby. And of course Durham Cathedral. The late and much-missed development agency One North East ran an imaginative campaign to promote the region in the UK and overseas. You’ll recall the strap line Passionate Places, Passionate People that accompanied beautiful images of these places and enticed southerners to try the North East out for themselves. They were on to something that caught the spirit of the North East. I’m not sure I ever understood what a “passionate place” really was, yet the epithet felt right. Tourism-speak uses words like iconic to describe them – a little too freely perhaps, though who is going to argue that anyone who is serious about getting to know the area needs to put them on their “must-see” list? 

But if you want to touch the soul of the North East, you have to venture off the main tourist routes and explore the by-ways. The little church at Escomb, for instance, in its circular churchyard in the middle of a housing estate in a County Durham pit village. It’s an intact Saxon church, one of the very best in England. It was there in the time of Bede and it is still there fulfilling its original purpose as an ordinary working church where people worship and pray. Or Lady’s Well, a secret little place at Holystone in Upper Coquetdale where there is a pool overhung by trees and a stone cross that marks the memory of many hundreds of convert baptisms there. Or the little medieval church of Edlingham next to its ruined castle and railway viaduct set among the lonely heathery sandstone hills of Northumberland with mighty Cheviot rearing up behind: I was vicar there too and sometimes in midwinter (if I even succeeded in getting out there across the snowy expanse of Alnwick Moor), I had to break the ice in the cruets for water at the Sunday eucharist. Or the Norman chapel secreted deep within the keep of the fortress at Newcastle where the Victorians drove the East Coast railway line right across one of England’s mightiest military monuments. Or the church at Newbiggin-on-Sea perched in splendid isolation on the edge of the North Sea where the east winds howl around its precarious gothic fabric. Or Arts and Crafts done to perfection in the early twentieth century church of St Andrew’s Roker, a building of national importance that far too few know about. I could go on. 

In my book Landscapes of Faith I talk about the religious “sense of place” the North East has. What is unique about it is not how well marked the region is with the traces of Christian faith across the centuries. Cornwall, Ireland and Brittany can claim as much, as can the sites on the great pilgrim routes of Europe such as the roads to Santiago da Compostela across France and Spain. It is, I think, that the lives and stories of its Christian communities are so well documented from Saxon times right up to the present. This is a peopled heritage. It carries human memory and lived experience. And this is the next point I want to make about how we respond to the wealth of religious shrines and sites that we are fortunate enough to inherit in the North East. 

One of the things I’ve enjoyed doing in most of the places where I’ve ministered has been to write a guide book. There is no better way for a new priest to get to know his or her building, the place where it’s set, the story of the community for whom it has been a cherished symbol of hope and aspiration usually for many centuries. When I came to Durham Cathedral, the guide book was up for review. I’ll have a go, I offered, a trifle rashly I now think. In the introduction I wrote about what I thought were the three great emblems of the North East: Hadrian’s Wall, the Angel of the North, and Durham Cathedral. If you live in the region, you set your eyes on any one of these and think to yourself, this is home; this is where I belong. 

Not long after the new guide was published, a visiting Czech professor of architecture asked if he could see me. He wanted to discuss my claim about these three regional icons. He said: you’re not comparing like with like. You haven’t considered the human dimension of these sites apart from their emotional impact on people. Durham Cathedral has a dense human texture. People have worshipped here, worked, studied and prayed in and around this building for a thousand years. They still do. By contrast, Hadrian’s Wall lost the human texture it once had as a working fortification when the legions left Britannia in the fifth century and it became merely a memory. And as for the Angel of the North (I sensed a slight sniff at this point), it has no human texture at all, no community for whom it has any existential significance. It is just a piece of public art – fine enough in its brutal way, but nothing more than a huge weight of rusting iron stuck in a hole in the ground.

I have thought about that conversation a good deal. He overstated his case, of course. People who live in Gateshead near the Angel of the North like my friend the Bishop of Jarrow tell me that this remarkable sculpture has spawned a great deal of surprising human activity. Couples come there to pledge their commitment or renew their marriage vows. Children’s naming ceremonies take place there. Mining communities honour the memory of the pit that once stood there and to which the Angel is a conscious homage by Anthony Gormley. Churches hold faith events round it. Similarly, Hadrian’s Wall has become the backdrop of an astonishing variety of activity along its length, some of it scholarly and archaeological, much of it tourism-related, promoting its wonderful landscapes for the enjoyment of walkers, heritage enthusiasts and nature-lovers. 

But there’s still a truth in what my Czech friend had to say. It’s that neither the Angel nor the Wall is home to a permanent community in the way in which the Cathedral is. Like the vast majority of our built religious heritage, the Cathedral is still what it was constructed to be, a living, working, praying community of men, women and children. I call this the human texture of heritage and it is immensely precious. I think I am right in saying that what fascinates people when they visit palaces and country houses is not only their architecture, art and landscape setting. It’s the human texture of these buildings. They were once the homes of real people. The best of them still are. Compare two of the castles of the Dukes of Northumberland, Alnwick and Warkworth. Both are splendid. But while one is an empty shell, the other is the family home. Compare the noble ruins of Lindisfarne Priory or Rievaulx Abbey with the parish church on Lindisfarne, or with Durham Cathedral. Ruined heritage is hauntingly beautiful, as the Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries discovered, so much so that they created faux-ruins to adorn their landscape parks and gardens. But heritage that is “inhabited”, that has a living human texture, has an altogether different quality. It has “soul”. 

And this is vital for the way in which we interpret and promote it. I think it is only in our generation that we have begun to recognise the importance of this. The evidence is striking. In the 1950s and 60s, when my parents took me round our great national monuments, cathedrals, abbeys, castles and stately homes, I used to collect Pitkin guides as souvenirs. They were immaculately produced and illustrated but the photography studiously avoided including human beings engaged in ordinary human activities. There would be images of people prominent in the history of the place, usually the great and the good. You might have pictures of royalty ceremonially visiting, or a cathedral chapter posing in their chapter house. But quotidian activity of people doing ordinary things, or guests enjoying their visits was something you glimpsed only very rarely. The effect was to construe these places as museums and inculcate correct behaviour proper to such places. You could look across ropes or through glass, but it was at a distance. You were deferential, told not to make a noise, not to touch, not to intrude on the hushed sanctity.

Now all that has changed, and vastly for the better. You only have to look at today’s guide books to see how lively and populated they are. Gone is the formal distance that was once evoked between observer and observed. People are enjoying themselves! Interactive engagement is the name of the game. Children are not just tolerated but invited and welcomed. Heritage and history have been humanised. And this is all part of the welcome emphasis placed nowadays on what public funding bodies call “access to heritage”. Accessibility is not simply about making physical access feasible for as many as possible, though that is immensely important. It’s about humanising the past so that it can be experienced as a present reality. Human texture has the effect of making it tangible to people so that they are drawn into something that they belong to and are part of. It affirms what is central to understanding and caring for our heritage, that it is for everybody. It is not for the privileged few but for all. It’s about inclusion. 

********

Inclusion means two things in particular: hospitality and interpretation. How we welcome people to heritage sites, and how we help them to be drawn into their stories and all that they mean, are vital for all who open up heritage to the public. But it is especially important when it comes to religious heritage. This is because the “religious” is already replete with meanings and associations, memories and aspirations, longings and fears and hopes. So the quality of the welcome at the porch of a cathedral or church matters as a theological and spiritual statement of what a sacred building stands for – its purpose, its values, its way of treating people. 

As a theologian, I see Christian hospitality as an expression of how God is towards his creatures. You can picture the act of creation as God opening the door and standing back behind it, as it were, so as to create “space” for the universe to spring into being and have its own existence. This is how we open our own front doors to our guests: we invite them to occupy our space and make it their own. In the training we gave to the hundreds of volunteers in Durham Cathedral whose privilege it was to welcome visitors and help them find their way around, we would say: you are the human face of the Cathedral to those who come through the door asking to share its space. How you welcome visitors makes all the difference, for good or ill. And because Durham had been a Benedictine priory in the middle ages, we would quote from the Rule of St Benedict which offers the other face of that theological insight about “making space” by saying: “receive guests as if they were Christ himself”.  The point about a sacred place is that it is God’s before it is ours. Therefore if it is going to receive guests with genuineness and authenticity, it needs to embody the values that matter to God himself.

Putting it that way makes it sound portentous and grand. But it has very practical consequences. Take one example that you will all have thought about. It’s the vexed question of admission charges to cathedrals. Everyone who works with heritage knows how very expensive it is to maintain. On top of the crippling expenses attached to keeping the fabric in good repair, you have the costs of making the visitor offer as excellent as it can possibly be so that people experience it in ways that are unforgettable and life-changing. So we have to factor in signage and interpretation, staff salaries, electronic and print guides and materials, the hard infrastructure of toilets, restaurants and shops and the wages of those who run them, advertising and promotion, and finally the burdens of compliance, especially safeguarding, and health and safety. You learn a lot about all these things when you are a dean. And you lie awake at night worrying about how you can possibly balance the books in the light of them. It’s not surprising that admission charges are now the norm in the big medieval cathedrals. No cathedral chapter has wanted to impose them, but the annual accounts are facts on the ground that can’t be evaded. Besides, people value what they pay for. What is more, in places like St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey and Canterbury where there is a huge footfall, over a million people a year, the admission charge helps to “calm the nave” and preserve the fabric from erosion by consciously limiting the numbers. 

In Durham, the Chapter steadfastly refused to go down that road. Our footfall was around 700,000 annually. We didn’t ask whether people had come as worshippers, pilgrims or sightseers, to enjoy the music and the arts, to shelter from the rain, to meet their friends in the restaurant or to take the short cut to and from the city centre. A guest is a guest is a guest. And, we argued, because the Cathedral is God’s space, and because God’s welcome is unconditional, generous and free, we should not impose a charge. Now, admission charges are not in fact something new. In the nineteenth century, if you wanted to visit Durham Cathedral, you knocked on the north door, and if you were lucky, a verger heard you and would let you in for the price of sixpence. But charging does raise questions about the contract that is set up between visitors, worshippers and pilgrims on the one hand, and the space on the other. When you pay, you have different expectations of the place and its resources and facilities, possibly even of God too. It’s a tricky marriage of idealism and pragmatism that charging cathedrals have to manage if they take their sacred space seriously and guard it from the corrosive effects of monetisation. Putting a price on everything, a habit that is endemic in our culture, can blind us to what is of true and lasting value. Church heritage could model something different, point to another set of values and invite people to think about them. Hospitality can challenge us to new ways of seeing things.

I said that “inclusion” means both hospitality and interpretation. Let me say something about the part interpretation plays in how we help guests make sense of what they are experiencing. Speaking again as a theologian, I believe that the entire task of Christian ministry, scholarship and outreach comes down to interpretation. Pilgrim’s Progress features “the House of the Interpreter” where the journey is made sense of and the destination understood. As a preacher, my responsibility is to handle the ancient text of the Bible and Christian tradition by asking not only what it meant but what it means today, and not only in generic terms, but specifically, to this community in this place at this time in our history. Heritage is just such a text that comes to us out of the past, whether it’s the recent past or antiquity. The ancientness of a sacred building like Durham Cathedral is part of what is both enticing and alienating about it. We love it because it has endured for so long, yet its very age can puzzle us. Why is it here at all? What did it mean to those who built it? What did it represent to the generations of pilgrims and worshippers who came to pray within its walls and reverence its shrines? And what does all this say to today’s guests, many of whom come from other faith traditions than Christianity, or have had no experience of organised religion in any shape or form?

As soon as we try to respond to these questions, we recognise that they are far from simple. At one level, it’s obvious (and true) that the Cathedral was built to bear witness to the reality of God. The worship of God has always been its primary role. But then, as I’ve said, its origins lie with St Cuthbert and the quest of his community for a permanent shrine. And then again, think about its position and landscape setting. It is so clearly a fortified, defended space, perched on its acropolis next to William the Conqueror’s castle, appearing for all the world to be one great defensive structure to keep the enemy at bay, those wayward Northumbrian Saxons and marauding Scots. I often used to say to visitors that Durham was as much a statement of brutal Norman military might as it was a shrine to a humble saint and a temple to the Almighty. Despite its celebrated beauty, Durham speaks volumes about political hegemony and the uses and abuses of power. Sacred space has its shadow side and we must tell the truth about that too.

But we owe our visitors more than simply an historical perspective. The “text” of a sacred building is not only its past but its present. I spoke earlier about the human texture of heritage that is alive. I have found that usually, people are genuinely interested to know what goes on in a cathedral, just as they are when they visit a stately home that is still lived in. When we stand in the Cathedral quire and tell them that each day, morning and evening prayer are celebrated in this space, precisely where the Benedictine monks gathered for daily prayer in the middle ages, they are fascinated and even moved. And even when casual visitors who have not checked the website turn up to find that they can’t walk round the church because a service is going on, they are often content to stand at the west end, or if they are brave enough, sit in the nave and witness it for themselves. 

But as I have said, it needs explaining and interpreting in a secular age. You can’t assume that visitors will know what the font is, or the altar or pulpit, or a saint, a bishop, a monk or a dean. When I was a minor canon of Salisbury Cathedral in the late 1970s, the then dean wrote what he called a “reflective guide” that didn’t simply describe the building but pointed to some of its meanings, and the significance of each particular part within it. It invited the visitor to become a participant, even for a few minutes, that is to say, not just to observe, but join in, feel the spiritual grain of the building, align his or her story to its own and perhaps understand themselves in a new way. Nowadays, all cathedrals talk readily about “turning visitors into pilgrims”, a phrase I find a trifle manipulative if I am honest. Good hospitality doesn’t require guests to conform against their will or be required to take a particular view. But I like the notion of “seeing in fresh ways”. I like the invitation, “This is how we see things. Maybe you can too?” This is surely part of the transformative effect that all heritage can have, and sacred heritage in particular. 

And this is where, in Durham, we made an important link between interpretation and hospitality. If admission to the church was going to be free, how would we balance the books? Our answer was to create the facility called Open Treasure about which I’m sure you have all heard. Better still, I’d love to think you have visited it in this first summer it’s been open to the public. I want to end by saying something about it because this project seems to me to embrace so much of what I believe about religious heritage and what we do with it. And as I do this, I want to recognise how much activity is going on across the North East to do creative things with sacred heritage. I’m thinking of the new exhibitions at Hexham Abbey, for example, and the eye-watering developments at Auckland Castle with Kynren having proved such a success in its first season. 

Durham Cathedral is a world class building in a world class setting. This was recognised by the grant of World Heritage status to this unique site more than thirty years ago. I don’t approve of rating cathedrals by stars, but I am glad that in his book England's Cathedrals which has just been published, Simon Jenkins gives Durham the five it deserves. But the building, its arts, furnishings and its landscape setting, marvellous though they are, are not everything. Its collections are world class too. And it was becoming clear during my time as dean that we needed to do more justice to our infinitely precious artefacts from Cuthbert’s era, our books and manuscripts, our Saxon fabrics, our Roman, Saxon and Norman stones, our treasures that span two thousand years of northern history. What is more, we needed to do justice to the equally cherished spaces around the cloister that constitute the best surviving set of monastic buildings still in use for their original purpose anywhere in Britain. Open Treasure is the result. I am immensely proud to have been part of its story. 

That name "Open Treasure" says precisely what we believed about our sacred heritage: that we needed to open up these marvellous artefacts and marvellous spaces to as wide a public as possible. We wanted to extend an invitation to come in, discover, learn and enjoy. But we also wanted to say that there was more to “treasure” than simply spaces and artefacts. These represented an intellectual and cultural history, and above all, the spiritual history of a community of faith, so the people of the place were a vital part of its “treasure” too. We wanted to help people grasp this, not simply as a past reality but a present one too. So the timeline through the monks’ dormitory and the great kitchen takes guests through a display that presents the community of the Cathedral and Diocese as they are today and invited them to think about how they too fit into this long story that continues into the future. 

But more than that, the phrase “Open Treasure” evokes two sayings of Jesus in the gospels. One is about how the wise steward brings out of his treasure “things old and new”; the other reminds us that “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”. And that takes us back to the task of interpretation which is what Open Treasure is all about. For we cannot interpret the past without also recognising the present tense of our lives and the future tense that lies ahead. We can only look back from where we are today and hope to be tomorrow. So to tell the story of a faith community is inevitably to pose questions about its identity and purpose now. The hope is that by opening the treasure, there will be discoveries not only about history and heritage but also about human life as we live and experience it today. We would have failed in our interpretative task if we had evaded that requirement.

How does all this speak into the financial challenges our stewardship of heritage inevitably poses? Well, the origins of Open Treasure were not simply the need to rise to the challenge our collections posed and present them in the best possible way. There was a hard business case that said: if we are going to maintain free admission to the church, we need to earn income in some other way. Paid admission to the exhibitions was our answer: to make our heritage work for us by using it to help fund the costs of the sacred space itself. (Under the same rubric of letting heritage pay for heritage, we were glad to send one of our copies of Magna Carta on tour to Canada during the 1215 celebrations, a project that proved exceedingly exacting but which did earn a welcome six-figure sum for the Cathedral at a time when we were under particular financial pressure.) 

It is too early to tell what benefit Open Treasure will bring to the Cathedral’s bottom line. The Cuthbert treasures will not be installed until next year when the environmental monitoring of the Great Kitchen will be complete. His pectoral cross, coffin, portable altar and comb are always going to be the big draw - they are of cultural and spiritual value beyond compare. The hope is that in the future, when the Lindisfarne Gospels return to Durham as has been promised every seven years by an agreement with the British Library worked out before the 2013 residency, they will be exhibited in their historic home, the Cathedral precinct where they belonged to the monastic library throughout the medieval period. To bring Cuthbert and his gospel book back together again for three months in the very place indelibly associated with both of them would be marvellous. It would of course bring thousands of people through Open Treasure as genuine pilgrims for whom it would offer a profound spiritual experience. We shall have to wait and see. But we know that the secret of successful visitor facilities is to maintain ever-changing exhibitions alongside the permanent displays so as to bring visitors back again and again. That is the ambition. If it works as we hope it will, it should make a real difference to the Cathedral’s financial sustainability. 

But above all, it will have demonstrated the Cathedral’s belief in the importance of hospitality and interpretation. As the National Trust knows better than anyone, you can never invest too much in these. For each is a part of the other, and without them, heritage will never find a voice with which to speak into human life today. This always matters for our self-understanding, knowing who we are and where we come from. But as a person of faith, I want to suggest that it matters most of all when heritage has an explicitly sacred dimension. “They being dead yet speaketh” says the miners’ banner that hangs in the south transept of Durham Cathedral alluding to the Letter to the Hebrews in endearingly confused grammar. It’s our responsibility to make sure the capacity of the past to speak is as articulate and persuasive as it can be.

********

I began with the view from my study window 40 miles away in Haydon Bridge, and the journeys of Cuthbert and his community. Open Treasure has brought us back to Cuthbert and to the long and wonderful story of Christian faith in North East England. I have only been able to touch on a little of it. But I’ve wanted to try to say something about the importance of religious heritage in telling a story not only about where we have come from in this region, but who we are now, today. 

We know that “church heritage tourism” is on the increase. Why this should be in an increasingly secularising society is worth speculating about. I am no sociologist of religion, but I wonder whether the dwindling of commitment to organised religion isn’t being misread in some circles as a decline of interest in the realm of what we can call the spiritual and the sacred. My lifetime in public ministry suggests to me that these elusive, mysterious aspects of life continue to fascinate and engage people very widely indeed even if they are increasingly disinclined to resort to organised religion to pursue them. “Believing, not belonging” has become the catch-phrase of those who recognise this phenomenon. No doubt nostalgia for a lost era of religious belief comes into it too; as Matthew Arnold’s great poem pictures it, we stand on Dover Beach watching the sea of faith recede. Some welcome the tide going out, but I suspect that for many, it’s a matter of wistful regret even if they remain observers rather than participants. Perhaps church tourism offers them the chance to touch the sacred without the entanglements of “belonging”, signing up to organised religion. If so, then it is all the more important to make sure that those of us who have the oversight of our magnificent religious sites help our guests articulate and respond to whatever it is they are experiencing: not to require that their experience takes this shape or that, but simply to make sure that they remain open to the possibilities of living with a deeper awareness as a result of having crossed our thresholds and – who knows – find themselves experiencing a transformation scene. 


Lecture to the County Durham division of the National Trust, 6 October 2016

Durham Cathedral: Foundation Sermon

On 11 August 1093, a momentous event took place here on this peninsula. On that day the foundation stone of this Cathedral was laid amid much pomp and ceremony and in the presence of royalty. We are celebrating it at services today, the Sunday nearest.

It was a watershed spiritually, historically, politically and architecturally. As we know, we have the Norman bishop William of Saint-Calais to thank for it. It was he who embarked on the enormous project of replacing the Saxon ‘white’ church with a great new cathedral in the Romanesque style that by the late 11th century had become familiar across France and after the Norman Conquest, England too. No doubt he was motivated by many aspirations. We can take it that he wished to build to the glory of God. But he also wanted to honour St Cuthbert, whom the Normans adopted as the North’s patron saint not least to win the Saxons’ allegiance. Then he intended to express visibly the ideal of the great monastic church of a religious community following the introduction of Benedictine monks to Durham a decade earlier. Finally, and perhaps not least, because human motivation always comes into things, he wanted to build big and grand to demonstrate that the Normans now held power in the land, and to signal to Saxons and Scots alike that this peninsula was the seat not only of spiritual but of secular authority.

William of Saint-Calais did not live to see his cathedral finished, nor even the placing (or ‘translation’) of Cuthbert’s body into its final resting place behind the high altar when the shrine had been completed in 1104. But I always tread lightly near his grave in the Chapter House: the monks had wanted to bury him near Cuthbert but he insisted that he was not worthy of it. (When my wife and I went to Saint-Calais, a little town in the Loire region of France, we found an elderly woman cleaning the church and asked about the great Norman bishop of Durham who was baptised there. She had never heard of him, and realising that we were Anglais, told us that we had evidently confused Saint-Calais with the better known ferry-port just across the Channel.)

You do not need me to tell you what we owe to him. This Cathedral is consistently regarded Britain’s best-loved building and praised as a masterpiece the world over. That is a tribute to his vision and his eye for architecture. If you wanted to imagine a church that would be an embodiment of the Benedictine virtues of stability, balance and the beauty of good order, you would not do better than Durham. Here is a building to lift the spirits, point you to the skies, drive you to your knees, enlarge the imagination, guide you to contemplate the vision of God and dream about a world in which his will is done on earth as in heaven. But it is also a building that affirms our humanity, holds us in a safe place, protects us from threat, a church that doesn’t crush us with its awesomeness but upholds our human dignity, makes us feel honoured and valued. The laying of the foundation stone in 1093 inaugurated an era that despite the changes and chances of centuries, still goes on in our day, drawing admirers, guests and pilgrims in their millions. We who worship here, live here, volunteer here, work here are privileged to be a part of this history of a place of awesome majesty and beauty.

But the word ‘foundation’ is perhaps misleading. For what took place in 1093 was not of course the founding of the Cathedral itself. That had existed on this site since the Saxon community of St Cuthbert with their bishop, the relics of their saints and the Lindisfarne Gospel Book arrived here at the end of their long journey round the north a century earlier and recognised that this was where the body of their saint would lie. Their cathedral had been lovingly built around Cuthbert’s shrine. No doubt those who had known it shed tears when they saw it being torn down, just as some of the Jews returning from exile wept at the dedication of the new temple because they had not forgotten the old. So when we speak the language of ‘foundation’, we should not forget an earlier history so deeply embedded in the founding story of this place: how (says a later legend) the community were first guided on to this peninsula by a lost dun-cow and the milkmaids looking for her. This ‘foundation’ of 995 is important too, for it marked the transition from being a wandering community of Lindisfarne exiles to establishing themselves as settled in one place, like the Hebrews entering into the promised land. It was another threshold that needed to be crossed with awareness of untested demands of a new, unknown environment.

But even this is not all we need to say today. If you look at the list of Bishops of Durham in Crockford’s Clerical Directory, you will see that it begins, not with the Saxon bishops who arrived here in the 10th century, nor the Normans who succeeded them. It begins with the See of Lindisfarne founded by St Aidan himself at the instigation of King Oswald in 635. St Oswald’s head is interred in the shrine along with Cuthbert, and we celebrated his feast last Tuesday with a procession to the feretory in which we remembered how he was the founder of the mission to Christianise Northumbria. So the true foundation of the See of Durham and its Cathedral lies not here at all but 80 miles to the north, on the Holy Island where Aidan first gathered around him as bishop a community of prayer, study, evangelisation and the service of the poor. This is where the story of our Cathedral begins. This is where the word ‘foundation’ ultimately points.

It matters that we are accurate about our history: the monks of Durham were always clear that as the shrine of St Cuthbert, this Cathedral looked back across an honoured era of Christian life and witness that preceded the Durham years by centuries. It also matters that we recognise that this cathedral has been through many different incarnations and they are all part of the story of our ‘foundation’. You could say that the Lindisfarne era was our apostolic age when saints like Aidan and Cuthbert, Hild and Bede, Wilfred, Chad and Cedd walked the landscapes of Northumbria and bore witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ with such power. You could also say that what followed it was just as significant: the century of exile after the Vikings had driven us from our Holy Island and forced us to travel around the north ending up at Chester-le-Street where the Cathedral was resident for more than a century. We learned through that experience to be a roving cathedral, a community that was discovering how to travel light, adjust to ever-changing circumstances, realise that there is something deeply ingrained in Christian faith about being readily responsive to God’s call. There is something attractive to me about being a Cathedral on the move. In a metaphorical and spiritual sense, this is how we must always be as we are led by God into futures that glow with possibility and promise. ‘To live is to change; to live long is to have changed much’ said John Henry Newman.

So ‘foundation’ is not finally about great stones and magnificent buildings. The fabric of a sacred space is there to demonstrate the deeper truth of our New Testament lesson. St Peter refers to ‘living stones’, people like us from St Oswald and St Aidan to the present day whose life in this community is founded upon Christ the Living Stone. And he says, while we are aliens and exiles like our Hebrew forebears, nevertheless we carry the mark of Jesus’ cross and resurrection and are always ready to give a reason for the hope that is within us. That is why Durham Cathedral is here. And that is why it is good to celebrate its foundation today.

Durham Cathedral, 10 August 2014 (1 Peter 2.1-12)

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