Bible and Saints
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Bible and Saints’
Cuthbert, struck down by plague, was vexed to find that his brethren had been praying for him all the previous night.
When the monastery at Ripon was founded in 661, Cuthbert served there under Abbot Eata. Eata clung loyally to a peculiar and not very accurate way of dating Easter borrowed from Ireland, and three years later King Oswy, who preferred the calendar used in Canterbury, Rome and the East, appointed Wilfrid in Eata’s stead. Cuthbert returned to the Abbey at Melrose in the Scottish borders.
In the days of Henry II, relations with our cross-Channel neighbours were fractious, but we were fast friends with the people of Norway.
Charles Isaac Elton, QC (1839-1900) was a distinguished barrister, antiquary and Somersetshire MP. Following a tour of Norway in 1862-3, he recorded some of his experiences in a little traveller’s guide, Norway, the Road and the Fell, (1864) in which he celebrated Britain’s natural affinity with her northern neighbour.
The city of Great Novgorod in Russia was a mediaeval pioneer of a decidedly rumbustious kind of parliamentary democracy.
In the thirteenth century, England was the westernmost partner of the Hanseatic League, a German-dominated European trade bloc. At the eastern end, in Kievan Rus’, was Novgorod, which shared with London a Viking past and a rebellious public. But even the barons who made John sign Magna Carta (1215) and Henry III the Provisions of Oxford (1258) dreamt of nothing like democracy in Novgorod.
One Christmas Eve back in the twelfth century, a monk keeping midnight vigil in Lindisfarne priory watched spellbound as two great doors opened all by themselves.
During Viking raids in 793, the monastic community on Lindisfarne hastily exhumed the body of St Cuthbert (?635-687) and fled. After two hundred years of wandering they found a home for him at Durham, and in 1093 the Bishop of Durham re-established the priory on Lindisfarne. In the early days it was staffed by just a couple of Durham monks, but one Christmas, we are told, they received some visitors.
When Sir Rodbert became Brother Martin, he found the change so difficult that he began to wonder if even the saints were against him.
The following story is paraphrased from The Little Book of the Wonderful Virtues of St Cuthbert, compiled by Reginald of Durham, a monk at the Benedictine Abbey in Durham in the latter half of the twelfth century. It tells of monk Martin, who in the world had been Sir Rodbert, a prosperous knight, but who found the simple life of the Abbey challenging and exasperated his tutors with his oddly sluggish wits.
Abraham invites his son Isaac to accompany him to a nearby mountain to offer sacrifice, and the boy is naturally curious to know what gift his father proposes to offer.
The story of the sacrifice of Isaac seems troubling until it dawns upon us that Abraham risked his son’s life precisely because he knew Isaac was never in danger. The heartwarming tale stands as a rebuke to human sacrifice and to all evil done in God’s name, as a blessing upon the sacrifices of the Temple, and as a prophecy of Christ, the ‘lamb of God’.