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 8th 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 18th and 19th 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 12th 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 7th and
early 8th 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 7th
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 7th
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
19th 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
