Cuthbert and the Wry Face
A man who seems to have everything loses his good looks to a dreadful disease.
1165
King Henry II 1154-1189
A man who seems to have everything loses his good looks to a dreadful disease.
1165
King Henry II 1154-1189
This post is number 22 in the series Miracles of St Cuthbert
In 1165, a priest came all the way to Durham from Lytham on the Lancashire coast, to give thanks at St Cuthbert’s shrine for several remarkable miracles experienced by members of his parish. He told the stories to Reginald of Durham, including this one about a man with a gruesome disfigurement.
A VERY wealthy man from Lytham succumbed to a sickness that pulled his face all awry.* His lips and ears twisted, his skin wrinkled and took on a ghostly pallor. Even his wife and children could no longer hide their revulsion.
Suddenly it came to him to make his prayers in the little wattle-and-daub parish church of St Cuthbert. Not much happened all day, but at dead of night the church blazed with light, and he saw Cuthbert himself. “Most holy Cuthbert” he burst out, “help me, a wretch; the prayers of so virtuous a man are a medicine more potent than any sinner’s.”*
Cuthbert was deeply moved. Holding out a hand, he invited the man with the twisted face to the altar, and bade him kiss it; and when he did, his disfigurement was smoothed away.
As a thank-you, the man used his earthly riches to rebuild the ramshackle chapel in stone,* and dedicate it afresh to St Cuthbert, the wonderworker of Lindisfarne.
Next in series: Ranulf’s Tooth
The identification of Reginald’s ‘Lixtune’ with Lytham in modern-day Lancashire is not certain, but often made. Lixtune was a village on the west coast, at the far northern point of ‘Chester lands’, either mediaeval Cheshire or the Diocese of Chester. Reginald included the story in a section dedicated to events in Copeland, at the southwest corner of Cumbria.
The man’s prayers recall the advice of St James in James 5:14-16: ‘The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much’. It is not that God refuses to listen to sinners. Rather, as St James explains in James 4:1-3, we have not yet overcome the war within ourselves, and (unconsciously) mix self-serving desires in with our prayers; whereas a saint who has trodden the narrow and difficult path of purification, illumination and deification does not do this, and his ‘medicine’ is strong because his heart is pure.
As Reginald tells us, the tumbledown state of the wooden church had already brought another miracle from St Cuthbert, in the case of a bird-nesting boy who fell through the roof. See Cuthbert and the Iron Grip.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
What was wrong with the man who prayed to St Cuthbert for healing?
A disease had horribly disfigured his face.