Learning from the past

It has been an interesting day so far.  I have followed up some small tasks for work, corresponded with a colleague about the state of things in our department, prepared to teach a Reiki class coming up next week, attempted to mend a fence with a friend (we'll see if that succeeds), made plans to reconnect with a former student tomorrow, and written a section in my dissertation.  It's the writing that is moving me just now.  It's a section on the Life of St Cuthbert, a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon monk who served the monastic community at Lindisfarne.  This monastery was founded by Irish monks who were invited by the Anglo-Saxon King of Northumbria to bring their distinctive form of Christian practice to a largely pagan area of north-eastern England.  In the late seventh century there was a clash between Christian missionaries sent from Rome to convert the pagans, and the Irish-trained monks who were already there.  Rome won, but the Irish communities continued on, and Cuthbert was one of the leaders who stepped into that difficult situation to be a peacemaker, a healer, and a servant among his people.


The section I've been working on just now looks at the last section of Cuthbert's life -- after years of training and solitude he was called to be bishop, and given the way this story reads, poured himself out in kenotic, self-giving care and love for his people.  He healed men and women, infants and adults; he offered freedom and forgiveness to a paralytic, and new life to a baby dying of the plague.  He was a bishop for only two years.  He predicted his own death, just as Jesus did (a common pattern among saints), and retired back to his solitary island off the coast of England to die in peace.  And he healed the monk who cared for him of dysentery just before he himself died.

It's an amazing story.  How much is factual is up for discussion, but I'm more interested in what it says about the life of a servant of Christ.  How close to the Gospel can you be, even as a bishop?  Pretty close, it turns out.  I'm arguing that the whole text is patterned on the Gospel of Matthew!  How humble can you be, even as a high-status leader in the Church?  Pretty humble, it turns out -- the writer comments on Cuthbert's humble heart and 'poverty of appearance' even after he was consecrated.  Perhaps some of today's rather comfortable church leaders would do well to read this little tale.

Sometimes this work makes me laugh -- the saints do some wonderfully comic things sometimes.  And every once in a while, it is so powerful it makes me weep.  Am I willing to be poured out in service?  Am I humble about what I know and what I don't know?  Am I as close to the Gospel as I'd like to be?  Too often the answer is No, or at least, Not yet.  So I keep on soaking myself in the stories.  Jesus, Cuthbert, Samson, Brigit (my other dissertation subjects), and hope to be taught and shaped and eventually poured out.

Blessings, Beth