St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne and Durham: a lecture at St Cuthbert's Edinburgh

I am very glad to be here in St Cuthbert’s Church, and bring you greetings from St Cuthbert’s people in Durham Cathedral. I may not make friends by saying so, but to me, having made this Cuthbert journey from Durham to Edinburgh, it does not feel as though I have crossed a national frontier. In his day, Saxon Northumbria extended right up to the Forth, here to Edwin’s Burgh which preserves the memory of its first Christian king. This part of Scotland is as much part of Cuthbert’s Land as north-east England. Cuthbert is believed to have halted on this site and preached here as he journeyed from Melrose to Lindisfarne, and at time a church was founded here. 

It is true that in later centuries, Durham Cathedral came to be perceived as ‘half church of God, half castle ‘gainst the Scot’ as Sir Walter Scott graphically put it. But when I went to Dunfermline Abbey ago to celebrate our common memory of Queen Margaret at the time this nation was honouring William Wallace, I said that I was glad as Dean of Durham to come to Scotland in the spirit of peace and friendship.  Cuthbert, Margaret and David are among the many figures in our Christian history who symbolise the deep sense of connection that we feel to this part of Scotland. The ‘new foundation of St Cuthbert’s church is due either to Margaret or perhaps more likely, her son David. If you visit Durham Cathedral, you will find them both honoured by the altar of St Margaret in a striking painting commissioned a few years ago by the Portugese artist Paula Rego.

I was installed at Durham on St Cuthbert’s Day 2003. That date is now better known as the day the disastrous Iraq war broke out. I shall never forget having to re-draft and re-draft my sermon throughout that day as the news unfolded. I was aware of asking myself all day, what would the peace-loving Cuthbert have said about Iraq?  But my most powerful memory of the liturgy itself was of kneeling with the Bishop and Chapter at the shrine of St Cuthbert while the elegiac music of the Northumbrian pipes wafted across the Cathedral.  I knew then that I was back in the north-east, in Cuthbertsland.  And I dared to hope and pray, knowing that with Cuthbert you can never take anything for granted, that the north-east’s great saint would be with me as inspiration and protector in the years that lay ahead.

I said I knew that I was back in the north-east.  In the mid-1980s, I worked as an incumbent in north Northumberland.  I am not a native northerner, but I grew to love that rough, rugged county and its people, and its spiritual heart, the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.  I often went there, alone or with others, on clear winter days when the sun shone out of a sky like opal and not a breeze ruffled the clear blue sea, and the snow was bright on distant Cheviot; and on stormy equinoctial days when the wind seemed to tear the clouds to shreds and shake the island to its core and the sea rushed in to enclose it with unbelievable force.  I have celebrated the eucharist with pilgrims on the beach opposite St Cuthbert’s Island and collected Cuddy beads and read aloud some of the stories Bede tells of Cuthbert. 

From Northumberland, I often visited Durham and the shrine of St Cuthbert. When I went back across the Tyne, they would tell me that while Durham had the body of Cuthbert, his soul was still on Lindisfarne.  Behind this teasing rivalry, there is a serious point about where we think the spiritual heart of the north-east lies.  Indisputably, Lindisfarne is the mother of Durham Cathedral and the mother of us all.  It was here that Aidan came from Ireland via Iona at the invitation of Oswald and established his community of monks.  It was from here that he, Chad, Cedd and many others went out to reconvert England to the Christian faith.  We in the north need no reminding that theirs was a mission that embraced most of what is now England.  Only south-east England was the domain of Augustine of Canterbury and those who came with him from Rome. Even there, the Christianisation of Sussex owes everything to St Wilfrid, Lindisfarne’s best travelled and most combative missioner.

What is more, the Irish missionaries from Iona and Lindisfarne came with no less a European ecumenical perspective as did the Latin missionaries like Augustine.  Time does not allow me to go into how, for example, Columbanus, an Irish Christian par excellence, travelled across Europe, had close connections with the church in Gaul, and brought this dimension into Irish Christianity.  But we need to remember this when it is alleged, as it sometimes is, that the faith of Ireland and Iona was no more than an episode, an eccentric, offshore aberration from the European mainstream that the Synod of Whitby in 664 had to correct.  Aidan had died in 651.  Cuthbert, like Hild, lived through the painful adoption of Latin ways in the north.  And this paved the way for the golden age of Lindisfarne, the late 7^th and early 8^th century, which saw the production of the Lindisfarne Gospels.  The Gospel Book is coming to Durham for a 3 month exhibition next summer, an event organised by the Cathedral and University as the major presences on the World Heritage Site. That book shows in its supreme art and craftsmanship that there as a close connection between Northumbria and other parts of Europe where elaborate sacred texts were being created. And in so far as the relics of St Cuthbert and the Lindisfarne Gospels found their way from Holy Island to Durham, it is true to say that Lindisfarne is the mother of Durham Cathedral.

But if it is mother, it is also daughter.  And this needs to be said just as clearly.  In the year 875 the community of Lindisfarne left the island, taking with them the relics of St Cuthbert and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Over a century later in 995, they installed themselves at Durham.  Although they returned to the island at least once in that time, they did not settle there.  The usual reason given is the threat of Viking raids and the need to find a better defended site.  Whatever it is, by the end of the 10^th century, Durham was where Cuthbert and the Gospels had come to rest.  In 1083, after the Norman Conquest, the Saxon community of St Cuthbert was replaced by Benedictine monks from Wearmouth-Jarrow.  It was these who went out from Durham to found cells across the north of England, priories such as Finchale, Coldingham and the one on Holy Island.  Where there had been a Christian presence before, it had disappeared and needed to be re-established, certainly the case on Holy Island.  In all these places, the ruined priories show some striking similarities to the mother house, Durham Cathedral Priory.  The incised drum piers and the Romanesque ‘rainbow’ arch at Holy Island make it seem like a scaled-down version of Durham in red sandstone.  The point I am making is that the ruins there that we find so evocative are of the Benedictine daughter house of Durham, not the original mother house of the monks of St Cuthbert. 

This chicken-and-egg relationship between Durham and Lindisfarne is politically important today when it comes to the Lindisfarne Gospels and whether they should be permanently returned to the north-east.  I am not going to go into that debate now, but I do want to draw attention to the logic of the issue.  If we think they should ‘come home’, as popular rhetoric has it, then where should they go?  The claims of Holy Island and Durham are both strong.  Durham Cathedral is where they are presumed to have been kept and honoured for about 600 years, longer than they have been anywhere else.  And because the Gospels were created ‘in honour of God and St Cuthbert’, as the dedication says, and because the Community of St Cuthbert would have thought it inconceivable to separate the books from the saint’s relics, there has to be a case for saying that they belong to the place where Cuthbert’s relics lie.  However a similar argument leads to the conclusion that Lindisfarne, their place of origin, would be the natural and best place for them to be kept.  What is more, that argument would point to sending Cuthbert’s remains back there too, and not only that, but returning the relics of Bede to Jarrow from where they were stolen by an unscrupulous monk and brought to Durham in 1022.  These issues are perhaps more difficult than they at first seem.

All this is by way of illustrating how, now that I am at Durham, and in a sense the guardian of Cuthbert’s shrine, I am pondering the rather different perspective from which I now see and experience the saint. For Durham ‘inherited’ a Cuthbert who was already a distant memory coloured by a long history after his death that was at least as extraordinary as his career while he was still alive.  Most saints are left alone in their resting places when they die as no doubt Cuthbert was intended to.  But chance, circumstance, providence – call it what you will – decreed otherwise for him.  Cuthbert probably travelled further when dead than he ever did in his lifetime.  Only three centuries after his death did he reach his final resting place at Durham.  So by the time he arrived there, a vast quantity of collective memory, reverential myth, legend and folk tale had coalesced around the three primary sources for his life, the anonymous Life of about 700, and the two Lives by Bede, one in prose and one in poetry.  And once installed in Durham, in a context so different from the one from which he had come, his presence came to acquire yet more layers of meaning that are intriguing in themselves, and to some extent paradoxical for the way in which they represent a very different vision from the one he himself had embraced. 

 

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Cuthbert died on 20 March 687.  He had wanted a simple burial on the Inner Farne, but the monks of Lindisfarne had other ideas.  He was taken back to Lindisfarne where he was given a burial fit for a king.  His body was wrapped in precious cloths and placed in an elaborate sarcophagus together with his presumed pectoral cross and a copy of his beloved Fourth Gospel, the ‘Cuthbert Gospel Book’ that has recently been purchased for the nation by the British Library.  Eleven years later, the sarcophagus was opened, then the accepted route to canonisation. Miraculously it was found to be intact with no evidence of decay.  This was taken to be a sign of sainthood, and from then on his relics were venerated in a shrine above ground.  When the community abandoned Holy Island, they set off around the north of England, looking for a permanent home.  The issue here was not simply the need to live as a community in safety.  It was first and foremost to identify a final resting place for their beloved saint, probably a conscious imitation of the patriarchs of the Old Testament gathering up the bones of their ancestors and taking them for burial in the place of God’s choosing, the promised land.  The wanderings of this faithful band of pilgrims carrying the relics of their beloved saint and their precious gospels is to me one of the most moving stories to come from our part of Britain.

The places where the saint’s body rested on its long journey became indelibly associated with his memory.  Already, the community had acquired estates across the north of England through the donations of kings and noblemen.  The churches built on these sites were obvious safe stopping points on the pilgrimage, and the recollection that Cuthbert had lain in these places often provided the impetus to found small monastic cells there and enlarge their churches.  Norham on the Tweed, Bedlington in Northumberland, and Crayke in North Yorkshire are among many places that were part of what came to be known as the Patrimony of St Cuthbert, Cuthbertsland.  Wherever you find a pre-Conquest church dedicated to St Cuthbert, you can always presume a link to the Patrimony and often to this period of wandering.  Even today, the memory of this defining époque is perpetuated in the fact that many of these parish churches dedicated to Cuthbert remain within the patronage of Durham Cathedral, the lineal successor to Lindisfarne.  And this extends to the estates that this increasingly prosperous community acquired thanks for benefactions of those who came to treasure the memory of Cuthbert.  Yesterday, we were in Whitekirk near North Berwick, a beautiful church I had not visited before.  Inside there was a photograph of a medieval document which recorded the donation of the lands of that parish to the monks of Durham in virtue of its ancient connection with St. Cuthbert, either because he had preached there or because his body had rested there. 

The memory of how Cuthbert’s body had travelled around and rested at certain stopping-places created a strong sense of what we might call ‘sacred geography’ in the north of England and in the Scottish borders.  It reinforced the notion of ‘Northumbria’ as not simply a political entity but a ‘kingdom of the mind’ with an emotional and spiritual dimension.  This built on the connections already established in his lifetime between Cuthbert and the northern part of Northumbria, the kingdom of Bernicia.  In this he was building on the partnership Bede describes in his History between Aidan and King Oswald.  By the time of the Norman Conquest, the inhabitants of the far north were known as haliwerfolk, the people of the saint.  This ability of a saint’s memory to bond a people and define a sense of place is comparable to the role of St Martin or Joan of Arc in France. In north-east England, Cuthbert provided precisely the kind of ‘glue’ that 1300 years later is perhaps still able to affirm something like a common history and set of values in the north-east.    

In about 883 the community settled at Chester-le-Street where they rested for more than a century and a church was built in honour of Our Lady and St Cuthbert.  In 995, they decided to move to a more secure site up river.  We all know the legend of how they recognised the place where Cuthbert wished to lie.  As they drew near to the peninsula, the coffin unaccountably stuck fast in the ground.  It was impossible to lift it.  Clearly the saint wished the community to pay attention.  Then they overheard two women talking about a lost cow, and pointing to a place on top of the hill, Dun Holm, where she would be found. The community took this to indicate the saint’s wishes.  Now they found they could move the coffin again.  They brought it on to the peninsula where they built a church to house the relics.  It is only a story, of course, what the experts call an aetiology that explains the carving of a cow on the exterior north wall of the Cathedral.  But it is exactly the kind of miracle story frequently resorted to in the middle ages to legitimise a religious shrine.  It demonstrated both that Cuthbert had lost none of his potency in death, and that although Durham had enjoyed no direct connection with him, nevertheless this was the place where he wished to be honoured.

The Norman Conquest brought far-reaching change across England.  The new order was proud, confident and ruthlessly efficient.  In Durham, there was an early consequence for religious life at a time of conflict and rebellion in the north-east.  In 1083, the Norman bishop William of St Carileph brought 400 years of Saxon religious history to an end by suppressing the Community of St Cuthbert because the monks had been allowed to marry and, it was alleged, their discipline had become lax. He re-founded it as a Benedictine Cathedral Priory whose monks were required to live strictly according to the Rule of St Benedict.  Monastic ‘cathedral priories’ like Durham, Canterbury and Norwich provided for their bishops to be titular abbots who, no longer monks, delegated the running of the Cathedral to their priors.  These curious institutions were unique to England, and in this respect, the Normans simply carried over a well-tried Saxon model.  However, they transformed it on the basis of the Benedictine pattern familiar to them from hundreds of existing foundations in France.  Here, the model was Cluny, whose Abbot Hugh of Cluny was at this time completing the construction of the great third Abbey Church, then the largest church in Christendom. 

This watershed in the life of the monastery was given outward expression a decade later.  In 1093 the first Cathedral, the White Church, the last visible survival of the Saxon community of St Cuthbert, was pulled down and a new Cathedral begun under Bishop William of Saint-Calais and Prior Turgot.  As historians and lovers of architecture know, it is not only the pinnacle of Romanesque church building in Europe, but also pioneered new structural techniques.  It was the first building in Europe to be stone vaulted throughout with rib vaults that would provide one of the foundations on which the gothic style could emerge.  Along with the vault there were two other pioneering innovations at Durham: the flying buttress and the pointed arch.  Work proceeded quickly and by 1104, the sanctuary, quire and transepts had been completed.  In that year, Bishop Ranulf Flambard consecrated the feretory behind the high altar as the new shrine to St Cuthbert, and his remains, together with the head of St Oswald, were interred there. 

The significance of that event would be hard to exaggerate.  It launched a golden age for the Priory when pilgrims flocked to the shrine in their millions, bringing with them endowments and estates that made Durham the wealthiest cathedral in the land. For most of the 12^th century it was the unrivalled pilgrimage centre of England.  Only with the martyrdom of Thomas Becket in 1170 and the growth of his cult at Canterbury did Cuthbert lose his pre-eminence in England.  Durham’s response was to promote itself as a pilgrimage church even more energetically.  The late 12^th century saw the creation of a beautifully illustrated life of Cuthbert, and the construction of Bishop Puiset’s exquisite Galilee Chapel.  In the next century followed the building of the Chapel of the Nine Altars at the east end of the Cathedral, a clear enlargement of the church around the shrine to allow pilgrims to gather and circulate more freely.  Despite Thomas a Becket, Cuthbert’s shrine at Durham continued to be a focal point for the devotion and loyalty of the people of the north of England and southern Scotland throughout the middle ages.   

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Several things were taking place at this time, and it is the meaning of these events that I want to explore in the remainder of this lecture. 

First, we need to understand the nature of the Cathedral as a building.  It was not a case of constructing a church and then placing a shrine within it.  It was the opposite: building a great church in order to house a shrine, indeed we could say, building it around the shrine.   This had been true of the White Church.  It was pre-eminently true of the Norman Cathedral.  It only exists because of the need to build a new and magnificent home for St Cuthbert. This was a shrewd move politically.  Through the wanderings of his coffin and now through the shrine, Cuthbert was already a focal point for people across the north of England. To affirm his cult by the construction of a church on a scale hitherto unknown in this country was a way of pulling that wayward, indeed backward, part of England into consenting with, even welcoming, its new Norman overlords.  To make friends with Cuthbert was a way of making friends with the people of Cuthbertsland.  This is one reading, a more benign one, of the events in Durham after the Norman Conquest.

But there is another reading which puts Cuthbert in a more paradoxical context.  The suppression of the Saxon community and the installation of Benedictine monks was not simply a religious act.  It was an expression of Norman hegemony, an act of power and control.  In the Wars of Religion of later centuries, a principle was established that largely created the map of modern Europe.  It was expressed in the tag cuius regio, eius religio: whoever your ruler, you follow his religion.  In the 16^th century, whether you were catholic or protestant depended for most people not on personal choice but on whether your prince was catholic or protestant.  It was the same in Norman England.  The importing of the Benedictine rule was a way of imposing Norman religious attitudes and assumptions on to the life of the church in the north-east.

And these Norman ways were very different from the customs of the Saxon church which Cuthbert and his community knew.  St Benedict, who had been educated in Rome, drew up his rule for monks in about 540, a century before Cuthbert’s lifetime.  His rule emphasised order, stability and pattern, a vision of a Christian society that drew on the remembered order, stability and pattern of the dying Roman Empire.  Its spirituality was grounded on the practical realities of life in community based on the three priorities of prayer, study and work.  This was the coenobitic way that proved so outstandingly successful in medieval Europe, especially in France, and that demonstrated time and again its capacity for self-renewal and reform, particularly in its Cistercian form.  So to the Benedictines, St Cuthbert must have struck a rather odd figure.  Not for them the extremes of ascetic devotion he was given to, like praying in the sea all night until the tide swirled up to his neck, or living in solitude on Inner Farne in an enclosure with walls so high that all he could see was the sky.  In fact, Cuthbert has much more in common with the Irish saints, and before them, with the ascetic hermit traditions of St Anthony and the desert fathers than with the coenobitic way of the Benedictine rule.  For this reason, the Benedictine Cathedral Priory at Durham would have struck Cuthbert as an unlikely, even an alien, place to lie.

And this is mirrored in how the building was intended to be read.  Durham Cathedral is historically more than a great pilgrimage church.  The power of the building is not only its consummate mastery of form, scale and proportion, or of the engineering principles of rib vault, flying buttress and pointed arch. It is also a symbol of the power of the Norman Conquest and of the William’s bloodthirsty adventures in the north of England.  The Cathedral, sitting on its acropolis along with the Castle, was in the strict sense of the word an offensive structure before it was defensive.  It identified who England’s new masters were and on whose side God and St Cuthbert now belonged.  It stood for the political as well as the religious role of the church and particularly of the Norman bishops.  It was a massive statement of Norman rule.   It was an unambiguous symbol of power. 

In this conflicted, power-obsessed world of the 11^th century, the saint of Lindisfarne cuts a strange figure.  It is hard to imagine a greater contrast between these two worlds: Durham Cathedral, in one sense a worldly symbol of sword and crown, frequented by kings and knights and armies, and the lonely cell on Inner Farne battered by wind and sea, and home only to birds and otters and one solitary hermit.  We know that Cuthbert found even Lindisfarne too busy and crowded for him to realise his God-given vocation.  This required remoteness and solitude: not for ‘retreat’ in the sense we understand it, a way of withdrawing from the world to find refreshment and renewal, but on the contrary, to enable him to focus in a concentrated way without distraction on the spiritual work of prayer and combating evil, not least his own demons.  This was the reason he chose to live and die on the Farne. 

There are many traditions about Cuthbert that testify to his feeling for the natural world.  Bede tells the story of a visit to Coldingham Priory, a mixed community of men and women where Aebba, a friend of Cuthbert’s, was abbess.  One night one of the monks saw Cuthbert leave the convent when he thought everyone was asleep, and go down to the beach.  He entered the water and prayed there through the night.  As he came out of the water at dawn, two otters were seen breathing on the saint’s legs to warm him.  Episodes like these have earned Cuthbert the epithet of England’s St Francis.  But I believe that Cuthbert’s choice of Inner Farne was motivated by more than a love of nature.  When you visit the Farne Islands, you are struck by the fact that dominating the Northumberland shore to the west lies Bamburgh Castle, the historic seat of the kings of Northumbria.  That tells us that Cuthbert deliberately chose a site for his hermitage in full view of the political authorities of his day, as if to remind them daily that in ordering the affairs of human kingdoms, there is a heavenly kingdom to consider, a God to reckon with who claims the allegiance of all human subjects. 

This, to me, underlines the paradox of Cuthbert’s tomb at the heart of our Norman Cathedral.  In one way, his entire career was profoundly counter-cultural to all that the Norman Conquest stood for.  He would have been much troubled at the thought that his body would be imprisoned beneath the heavy stone vaults of a place so compromised by the principalities and powers of this world.  His holiness and simplicity were fundamentally at odds with the sophisticated complexities of Anglo-Norman life, with the Priory’s accumulation of wealth and status, and with the violent history with which it was associated. The powerful sense of permanence that the Cathedral evokes, its confidence that it will last for ever, exude a spirit very different from the lowly wooden churches and monasteries that Cuthbert and his peers inhabited. 

Yet there is another perspective on this.  Cuthbert was not unused to dealing with those in his day who wielded sword and sceptre in the royal courts.  His was a spirituality of engagement with this world’s agenda, not withdrawal from it.  And to my mind, it is precisely the presence of Cuthbert in the midst of this marvellous yet ambiguous building that perhaps redeems it from being what it might have become: a temple to the hubris its builders, forever driven by the need to build bigger, higher, stronger and better than their rivals.  No doubt there is something of William Golding’s Dean Jocelyn in those who set out to build the great cathedrals of medieval Europe (I am thinking of his brilliant novel The Spire, an imaginative re-telling of the completion of Salisbury Cathedral, in which he explores how the motive of spiritual aspiration becomes fatally corrupted by vanity and self-aggrandisement in the building of England’s highest medieval spire). 

Cuthbert’s shrine, then, puts a theological question to the Durham project.  It gives it a conscience, a soul.  Some would say that there is a contradiction between what he stood for and what the building consciously represented when it was built, that the shrine by its very existence subverts the meaning of a great church.  I do not think that it does, but by criticising human self-assertion against the claims of God it does put the building of the Norman church into a larger context.  It is as if the shrine is a kind of Inner Farne within the Cathedral, a constant and necessary reminder of where our true and ultimate accountability lies.  In the real world, we all have to deal with priors and deans, with bishops and princes and warriors, but there is only one ultimate loyalty that we owe: to the living God himself.  If we do not perceive and serve him in and through our negotiations with the ebbs and flows of human institutions, if we are blinded by those who wield power and hold our destinies in their hands, if we give our absolute allegiance to sword and crown, then we betray his trust.

I am aware of the risk, in saying this, that we romanticise the saints of the Saxon era and their Irish forebears.  Those who lament the Synod of Whitby in 664, and its ruling in favour of the Roman tradition over the Irish, see the Norman Conquest as the last nail in the coffin whereby a holier, simpler, more beautiful form of Christianity was suppressed by an insitutional church that was worldly, corrupted and domineering.  The label of ‘Celtic’ Christianity is often attached to that nostalgic vision of the spirituality of these islands when the church was young.  As we all know, there is these days a considerable industry around ‘Celtic’ spirituality that is attractively and fragrantly packaged and marketed.  Without criticising what many have found helpful, we do nevertheless need to recognise it for what it is: a re-invention for a postmodern generation of a way of faith that in its day was unbelievably, indeed for our day, an impossibly severe, astringent and demanding. 

I doubt if we would easily find ourselves at home in the world inhabited by Patrick, Columba, Aidan, Oswald and Cuthbert.  That world, from our vantage point, would seem bizarre, not to say extreme or even mad.  So much the worse for us, we may say.  But we can recognise that this process of ‘reinventing’ the saints was precisely what the Normans were doing with Cuthbert by placing his shrine at the heart of Durham Cathedral.  What is more, we can see that this is not only inevitable but necessary.  For as I have already said, Cuthbert had already become a distant memory by the time the Cathedral was built.  Placing him within the frame of a Benedictine Cathedral Priory was a way of ‘claiming’ his universal significance for times very different from his own.  It was, as I have said, a paradoxical thing to do.  But it rescued him from the fate of being locked up in the remote past.  It made him a contemporary of pilgrims of all ages.  It enacted a constant theme of religious faith which is that what we receive, we hand on but not without contributing to it our own insight, devotion and meaning.   This is the true meaning of traditio: a living body of faith that is given new significance through the act of cherishing it, and proclaiming it, and discerning new meanings in it in the light of altered circumstances and times.   

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In 1537, Henry VIII’s Commissioners for the north of England came to Durham as part of the programme of dissolving the monasteries.  Always with an eye to the acquiring wealth for the crown, they stripped Cuthbert’s shrine of its jewels and precious metals and levelled it to the ground with their axes and crow-bars. Then one of their stooges set about opening up the coffin in order to smash the relics and destroy all trace of the saint.  A remarkable record of the Cathedral Priory, The Rites of Durham, tells us that he found, instead of dust and ashes, that the body was ‘lying whole uncorrupt with his face bare and his beard as it had been a fortnight’s growth’.  An altercation followed, the Commissioners standing below the feretory wondering why the man had not completed the work of a few minutes and thrown down a pile of Saxon bones and detritus.  The intact skeleton caused them to stop their work, leave the remains where they were and seek advice from London.  We can be grateful that the advice ever came. 

The relics remained where they were and subsequent openings in 1827 and 1899 confirmed that they had not been tampered with.  In 1827 the superb Saxon artifacts now housed in our Treasury were removed: the pectoral cross of St Cuthbert, a stole, maniple and girdle, the silk wrappings, an ivory comb, a portable altar and pieces of the coffin itself.  The great black slab, huge, primitive and unadorned identifies his resting place in crude unembellished letters: CUTHBERTVS.  Its sheer starkness and simplicity are profoundly moving: the best tribute we can offer as we honour a man whose extraordinary career in both life and death have endeared him to so many.  Millions still come to Durham to bring to his place their hopes, their longings, their joys, their fears, their pain.  He is, I think, as close as England has ever come to begetting a national saint.  What he is to us is no doubt very different from what he has been to past generations, and I have tried to show how Durham Cathedral played a large part in the process of reinterpreting his significance to subsequent generations. 

Cuthbert is the emblem of so much that our churches today need to cultivate. Here are some reasons why.  First, for his askesis or spiritual discipline.  It is not that others did not also practise ‘spiritual training’: rather, it is the lengths to which he took it, his complete devotion to the way of a disciple. It never faltered, even in the midst of a life fully taken up with the evangelistic, pastoral and organisational duties of a bishop. From this self-offering, going right back to the night on the hills around Melrose where he had his vision of Aidan’s soul being carried up to heaven and resolved at once to enter monastic life. Then we honour the memory of a man who lived close to the natural world, who not only respected it and treated it with courtesy but befriended it, England’s St Francis 600 years earlier. If we were looking for a patron saint of environmental responsibility, we could not do better. We celebrate him as an evangelist for his perseverance in preaching the gospel and the lengths to which he went in order to bring the love of Jesus Christ to communities in remote places. As a bishop he is an inspiration to all called to public office in the church, not simply in the complete commitment he brought to it, but in managing the boundaries of his public role and personal spiritual disciplines. As a spiritual guide and companion he models wise ‘accompaniment’ in the path of wisdom and discipleship. I could go on and on. Whether it is on his windswept Holy Island or Inner Farne, washed by the surf of the bleak grey North Sea under the wide Northumberland sky, or kneeling by his simple black slab beneath the soaring vaults and arcades of Britain’s best-loved building, we find ourselves drawn back to his story in ways that continue to inspire us, and put to us the inescapable questions of what it means to be human and to be Christian in the complex century, so different from Cuthbert’s, in which we live and seek to bear Christian witness to our generation as he did in his.

Michael Sadgrove

Dean of Durham
Lecture to the Society of the Friends of St Cuthbert’s Edinburgh, October 2012 

 

Welcome to New Students

It’s a great pleasure to welcome you to Durham as you arrive to begin your time in the University.  If you are from overseas, welcome to our country.  If you have come from other parts of the UK, welcome to north east England.  I am sure you will soon feel at home here as you get to know this beautiful region and its people. 

And welcome to this great building on the day of your matriculation, especially if this is the first time you have set foot in the Cathedral.  Last year one of our national newspapers ran an online poll to find the nation’s favourite building.  Durham Cathedral won.  Look around you at the magnificence that surrounds you and perhaps you’ll see why.  You’ll be glad to know that this Cathedral has a Facebook page with one of the biggest supporters’ group among cathedrals anywhere in the world.  You can also follow us on Twitter.  So you see, not everything in Durham Cathedral comes out of the middle ages.

You are sitting in a World Heritage Site which we share with the University.  Durham has a longer history of continuous study and learning than almost anywhere else in Europe, going back to the first Cathedal that was founded here in 995. 

The working life of these historic buildings continues today. The Castle is a working place of education.  This cathedral is a working church: services are held here three times on every day of the year.  But it’s also a place to walk around or sit quietly in, to enjoy its art, architecture and heritage, to explore its spirituality or to ponder the big questions of life.  There are scores of artistic, musical and cultural events to enjoy, many of them organised with the University.  There are lively debates about such topics as science and religion, the criminal justice system, peace-making and reconciliation, and what it means to be human.   Whatever your religious beliefs, I hope you come here often, that you think of it as your place and feel at home here.

As students you bring great liveliness to Durham and our region. I hope your time here is happy and rewarding. I wish you the very best for the years that lie ahead. 

Who is like God? A sermon for Michaelmas

Yesterday was Michaelmas Day.  It is a prince among seasons. I love it not just for the light and colour of autumn or because of my Christian name but because of the symbolic power of its themes. I was first a vicar in the parish of Alnwick where the whole town, not only the church, is under the protection of St Michael the Archangel.  At this festival the beautiful medieval church would overflow with Michaelmas daisies.  I left there to go to Coventry Cathedral, another hill-top church dedicated to St Michael, and persuaded the flower guild to do the same.  They were a bit sniffy at first and said that Michaelmas daisies were no better than weeds.  But in time they succumbed. After that I went to Sheffield Cathedral where I missed St Michael and his daisies, so the flower guild took pity on me and always put a vase of them on my office table for Michaelmas.  I have yet to work on Durham.

Who is Michael the mighty archangel?   That name asks a question in Hebrew: ‘Who is like God?’  It is a question, not a statement.  Angels are the Bible’s great questioners.  When an angel appears to Daniel and strengthens him, it is with a question: ‘do you know why I have come?  When the mysterious shadowy figure wrestles with Jacob in the dark, he asks him his name.  An angel in the book of Zechariah pesters the prophet with a full-scale catechism: ‘what do you see?’, ‘do you know what this is?’, ‘do you not know what these are?’  It’s as if God sends angels to tease us mortals with questions that are bigger than they seem. 

Who is like God?  The Book of Genesis says that we are made ‘like God’, in his image.  Early on, the Hebrews thought this measnt that human beings looked physically like him.  Later, the image of God came to mean being aware, knowing right and wrong, being male and female, recognising beauty, or being capable of thought and speech. But I think from the way Genesis tells the story, that the image of God is most closely linked to the idea of authority and dominion.  ‘God said, “let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air and over all the wild animals of the earth.”’  To be a man or a woman, in the Old Testament, means the care and responsibility for the world.  One of the psalms says: ‘the heavens are the Lord’s, but the earth he has given to the children of men.’  And if ever we needed to take seriously the thought that we are stewards of this good earth, it’s now.  The threat of climate change has made it all to clear how fragile our planet is and how easily the human race could wreck the delicate fabric of the life it sustains, including our own.  

We are called then to hold dominion responsibly, on God’s behalf.  In the Book of Revelation, there is a passage that speaks of the archangel Michael as the mighty warrior who ‘takes dominion’ against evil.  He stands for salvation, truth and justice against all that is evil and false, all that comes from the adversary Satan, ‘the deceiver of the whole world’.  By throwing the dragon out of heaven, Michael re-enacts the creation battle of ancient myth where sea-monsters are defeated and the world comes into being.  So there is a new creation: the universe is saved from chaos and destruction, and restored to the order and goodness it had at first.  By the one who is like God, what was lost in the fall is won back, put right. 

So much for what is going on in heaven.  But now come down to earth.  This question ‘who is like God?’ looks beyond the archangel, for Michael is not alone in taking the victor’s crown.  In that same passage from Revelation, the victor’s crown also belongs to ‘our comrades’ whom Satan had accused night and day before God.  It is they ‘who have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death’.  It’s a beautifully drawn contrast between the huge apocayptic events taking place in the sky, and the human scale of what is happening on earth. The vast canvas on which the angelic conflict is fought out is mirrored in the personal victories won by individual people, the martyrs of Christ.  We can imagine how this picture of evil defeated in dimensions unseen would strengthen those facing persecution at that time. So the question ‘Who is like God?’ is answered in those who follow Jesus in the fiery ordeals of passion and death, who ‘bear witness’ at the cost of their lives.  Their suffering shows the true meaning of dominion.  ‘This is the victory that overcomes the world, even our faith’. 

Discipleship, said Jesus, is to be so free within yourself, so given up to God, so focused on the kingdom of heaven that you can contemplate losing your life in order to find it.  And whatever the way of the cross holds, it means having the inner soul of a martyr which is what a ‘witness’ literally is. I believe the New Testament sees the disciple as a potential martyr: to be baptised is to be ready to bear witness to Christ wherever it leads, whatever it costs. It’s a hard truth for us to hear, and I find it as tough as you do, wondering how on earth I have got myself into this, not only as a Christian but as a priest, a public representative of this way of living.  What else might we have done with our lives if we had not chosen this way of crucifixion that commits us to live courageously for truth and righteousness, to reject worldly power and success, to disown human glory? 

In the early church, when persecution subsided, many chose what came to be called ‘white’ martyrdom, by entering monasteries as a way of dying to the world.  Perhaps baptism is a kind of white martyrdom, where being a Christian is unusual, eccentric, bizarre, an offence against the lazy tolerance that does not like the idea that truth is something you might not only live for but die for. There are many who have and they inspire us to this day: St Francis embracing Lady Poverty and kissing the leper; St Martin giving his cloak to the beggar; St Cuthbert turning his back on what comforts he knew to live alone on the Inner Farne and fight evil through his prayers; St Therese, the ‘Little Flower’, full of simplicity and purity, a young girl’s life offered to God’s love; Mother Maria Pilenko stepping into the queue to go into the gas chamber in the place of a frightened old woman.  It is stories like these that make me realise that Christianity is true. 

I am nowhere near it, though on my better days I do want to be, I do want to live a life that has this single focus of loving God with all my heart and being.  You become like the gods you worship, said a Roman philosopher.  The issue is, whom do we worship, what do we put first in our lives?  So this question, ‘who is like God?’ must be the question for all of us who want be serious about Christianity.  How do we live up to our name and bear faithful witness to Jesus so that our dominion reflects his own everlasting reign?  For if the demons that stalk this world are to be conquered, and the storms that threaten to overwhelm it are to be stilled: if people are to feel after God and find him, so much turns on how we live out our discipleship.  I ask myself the question, if you were up in court on a charge of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you? 

Jesus calls us to lay aside everything that stops us giving ourselves to this great project of the Christian life.  For God walks the earth and looks for those who will bring in the just and gentle rule of Christ.  He asks us the archangel’s question Mi-cha-el, who is like God, who will take the dominion of Jesus and bear God’s grace and truth to our world?  He waits for our answer, and only God knows what it will be. 

In the Name of the Trinity and Very Wet: a baptism sermon

Today we are baptising Christopher Newitt.  I am of the school that says that baptism should be in the name of the Holy Trinity, and very wet. It is, or ought to be, a ceremony of few words and lots of water. And this morning, it is the wetness of baptism I want to speak about. Christopher’s very name reminds us of the watery legend in which the saint used to carry travellers across a river.  Once he was presented with a small child whose weight made the big man bow beneath his burden, none other than the Christ himself.

It is a paradoxical rite, because water is itself paradoxical, ambiguous.  In our celebration of baptism water is the focus.  Yet baptism has a dark side, for water is dangerous, unpredictable, capricious.  Outside its proper bounds, it threatens our stability, our safety, our very existence even. In sufficient quantities, it stirs up our primeval fear of chaos.  The ungovernable deep, in the mythologies of most cultures, is where demons lurk: Leviathan, Rahab, Tiamat, Moby Dick, Titanic, all symbols of terror and destruction.  Creation, in many myths, is to subdue the deep, establish its bounds which it cannot pass.  Chaos is kept at bay only at great cost.

So baptism, like all rites of passage, is an ordeal. It symbolically dangles us over the abyss, then plunges us without mercy into it, into the deep waters of death as the baptism rite puts it.  There, we are ritually speaking drowned.  Something in us is put to death for ever, for there can be no going back on baptism. The rite is as cruel and unforgiving as the waters that swept across the old world in the days of Noah and engulfed it. The waters of the font confront us with our mortal destiny, which is that we must die.  And Christopher, who is little and innocent and has no notions yet of mortality must pass through the ordeal of the waters. It is a time of trial. Jesus knows this well.  In today’s gospel he speaks about it, not for the first time: ‘the Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him’ he says.  But his disciples didn’t understand, and were afraid to ask.  But the waters of death do not lie.  Which is why Christopher will be marked with the sign of the cross, the reminder that none of goes up to joy but first we suffer pain.  That is the character baptism confers: the identity of the suffering servant of the Lord.  Bonhoeffer said: ‘When Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die’. 

Yet - such a big word for three letters - yet when we pass through the waters, God is with us. The ordeal is ours, true.  But it is also his. Where we walk, and are tested, and know pain, he has been before us. And that is to draw the sting of death out of the baptismal waters, for we know that we are saved through the ordeal of water just as Noah was delivered safely through the flood, and Israel walked through water towards the land of promise, and Jonah was not swallowed up by the deep but was spared to serve God. These archetypal stories embedded  in our baptismal imagery are our stories too: we who came through the waters of our mothers' womb towards light and life; we whose fragile life evolved out of the womb of the primeval ocean, we who are re-born in the womb of the font by water and the Spirit.  This is the other side of baptism: its glorious side. Water is gift. By water we are kept alive, sustained, enabled to grow. It is the symbol of life itself. Its natural sources - springs, wells, rivers, the sea - are amongst the great mother symbols of humankind, images of a good earth that is kind to her children and cares for them.

So baptism is a rite that holds out both risk and promise. It symbolises burial and resurrection, ordeal and deliverance, mortality and everlasting life. Plunged into the water, we are lost in it. We become as nothing and as nobody. Yet at the same time we inherit the kingdom of nobodies where all of us become somebody: where we are marked for Christ, uniquely precious, known by name, held, valued, loved for ever.  This is how I read the touching episode in our gospel where Jesus takes a child in his arms and says: ‘whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me’.  Children were the lowest-status members of the household in ancient times.  Yet Jesus reverses that assumption and make this little creature somebody of infinite value and importance.  So as Jesus welcomes Christopher at the font, and takes him in his arms, he gives him the noble dignity of being a human being and a Christian. Baptism saves us because it is the proclamation of Easter. As Jesus says in the gospel, his destiny is not only to be killed by to rise again.  Today, Christopher becomes a member of the Easter people. Today he learns to sing alleluia. Today he joins in the laughter of the saints and begins to play before God.

We are here at this eucharist on the first day of the week because of the resurrection. We are what we are, an Easter people, through this watery ceremony of baptism.  Today is the day of Christopher’s ‘yes’ to Easter, when he begins to enter into his inheritance, and be marked as a child of God. And if that is his destiny and ours, it is no less the destiny of the entire cosmos to be redeemed from the chaos out of which it was born, which the creation story likens to the watery deep.  In the little child Jesus held in his arms that day in Capernaum is encapsulated the entire history not only of the human race but of the whole created order: to be ordered, redeemed, held, sustained and loved by the one who welcomes us home and gives us space to be.  In Christopher we re-enact this wonderful drama of how it is God's wise and loving will to bring all things in heaven and earth into unity in Christ.

So much is gathered up in baptism. Nothing less than death, judgment, hell and heaven are hidden in its waters; infinity in the palm of the baptiser's hand; eternity in the liturgical hour; an old order passed away, a new order begun. It consists of a few simple words and lots of water, sign of the grace, mercy and peace of an abundantly generous God.  Your name Christopher means ‘Christ bearer’.  And that is what your baptism means: to bear Christ, to wear Christ, all your life long.  It feels like a heavy burden being laid upon your tiny shoulders, yet your baptism is all gift, for his yoke is easy and his burden light.  Indeed, in our gospel it is not we who carry Christ but he who carries us.  His pledge is that he will do this all your lifetime and beyond.  So, marked with his cross, wear his grace and truth joyfully before the world.  In baptism, all things are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.  Alleluia.

Michael Sadgrove

Durham Cathedral, 23 September 2012
At the baptism of Christopher Newitt
Mark 9.30-37

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