Lives of the Saints
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Lives of the Saints’
Wonder spread through a Tyneside monastery after Bishop Cuthbert asked for a drink of water.
St Cuthbert was Bishop of Lindisfarne for just two years, but his overwhelming popularity did not come from high office. It came from his tireless journeys to forgotten villages in Northumbria’s bleak high country, taking the Christian message and a fatherly affection to every corner of the kingdom.
St Bede explains how the Exodus and the Ten Commandments are related to Easter and Whitsuntide.
Just as the Jewish festival of Passover commemorated the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt, so the Feast of Weeks fifty days later commemorated the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. St Bede explains how these two feasts are taken up in the Christian year as Easter and Whit Sunday or Pentecost.
In the fourth century, Britain’s Christians acquired a taste for watering down the mystery of their message.
When the Roman Emperor Constantine ended decades of persecution for Christians in February 313, those in Britain returned to their churches with simple joy. Yet missionaries to Anglo-Saxon Britain in 597 found a church scattered and plagued by alien beliefs. St Bede blamed a priest from Egypt, Arius, for the startling change.
Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf imagines the farewell between Jesus and his Apostles, forty days after his resurrection.
Cynewulf (possibly the 8th century bishop Cynewulf of Lindisfarne) imagines Christ’s last words to his Apostles, before a cloud came and took him from their sight, never to be seen again – and yet, somehow, never to leave them.
The earliest Christians longed to celebrate the resurrection together at Passover, but that was not as easy as it sounds.
To keep Easter together during the Biblical festival of Passover was the shared dream of all the earliest Christian churches. But everyone seemed to have questions about how and when to celebrate the most important feast of the year, and no one seemed to have answers.
An Irish princess fled to Cumbria to escape the Vikings, clutching her precious silver bracelet.
St Bega gave her name to the former Priory at St Bees, on the Cumbrian coast. Later biographers buried her life under conventional mediaeval romance, and confused her with St Begu, founder of a monastery at Hartlepool in the 7th century. But beneath it all lies a ninth-century Irish princess, and a mysterious bracelet.