Lindisfarne

Today is the feast of St Aidan and the saints of Lindisfarne. In 1989 I was fortunate to be able to stay there for a long weekend with a religious community and to be able to explore something of its atmosphere.

Getting there is a bit eccentric - the bus from Berwick upon Tweed is the only one in the country, as far as I know, that has a timetable dependent upon the tide-table. Once on the island there are times of great quiet, simply because the tide is up, and the tourists cannot get onto the island. There is a refuge mid-way along the causeway for cars that get caught out by the North Sea.

There are the handsome remains of the Norman priory church - a cell of Durham - but now yet another example of the wanton destruction of the reformation era, the medieval parish church and Tudor castle, together with a modern statue of St Aidan and a very good English Heritage museum that presents a substantial array of finds from the great age of Lindisfarne in the seventh and eighth centuries.

Besides that there is a numinous quality to the place. Yes, you know it is historic - I took a copy of Bede to read whilst I was there, and yes, the light is such that the landscape and seascape are always changing in an elusive, ineffable way (Bishop Trautmann please note) that one wants to capture - I took up sketching again to try to do so. There is more though, indefinable as it is, but the knowledge of what was achieved there is not just of material achievements in the museum or pictures of the Lindisfarne Gospels, or the relics of St Cuthbert in Durham - rather it is an awareness of men seeking God at the frontier of land and sea, of earth and heaven, and in so doing making their way forward into the unseen.

To sit and look at St Cuthbert's Isle, where he used to go just off-shore to meditate, and to know something of his story, and then to go, as I did, on to Durham and see the majestic building of the cathedral rising up above the city and dominating the view, and to understand the extent to which it as building celebrates the life of the saintly hermit and bishop is to have a disclosure of God's grandeur as mediated through one human life and soul.

St Aidan and the saints of Lindisfarne pray for us.

Peterborough

The church at which my friends were received in Peterborough was The Sacred Heart and St Oswald. I was delighted to find a modern church which by its dedication revived an ancient devotion in the city.

The story can be found in St Bede's Ecclesiastical History of how St Oswald, King of Northumbria 633-641 not only sent out the remains of a feast to the beggars outside, but ordered that the silver plate on which the food was carried be also broken up and given to the poor. His guest, St Aidan, who sensed that Oswald was not long for this world, was so moved that he took the king's right arm and blessed it, with the prayer that it should never decay. When, not long after Oswald was killed in battle at Oswestry by King Penda of Mercia his corpse was hacked to pieces by the victors and displayed. His head eventually returned to the north and is now in the coffin of St Cuthbert at Durham, carried thither by the monks of Lindisfarne when they fled the Vikings. Other relics went to Bardney abbey in Lincolnshire.

St Owald's right arm, incorrupt as a result of St Aidan's prayer, eventually came to Peterborough, and was the principal relic of the abbey. It was kept in a chapel in the south transept of the monastic church, and still venerated by pilgrims, until the dissolution of the abbey in 1539 and the later establishment of the diocese in 1541. What happened to the Holy Arm thereafter appears unrecorded. To get some idea of such a royal relic look at my recent post about the "Holy Right" of St Stephen of Hungary here.

St Oswald,
pray for us!

Photo: De Cura Animarum

In the modern church hall there were pictures from a parish pilgrimage to Lindisfarne and Durham, so there is clearly an awareness of the continuing link with St Oswald and a wish to share that with parishioners.