#69.9, Thursday, June 19, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery

         I’m reaching the priory of the Lindisfarne Monastery, the gathering room used as a sanctuary and probably also the scriptorium. I find the marauders stopped here outside the walls. The stains on the earth mark their feet and axes soaked in the blood of innocent monks. Here they sorted through their sacks of loot to decide what was valuable.  In their way of seeing, a reliquary was valuable for its outside, the gold and jewels, so here they emptied out the contents of these little chests.  Here, mingled in the blood of unnamed monks are the treasured remains of more ancient saints – the gray dust of ash, the yellow spikes of teeth, the clump of silver beard hair, a bone or other remains.  These physical, earthly remnants of ancient saints, for some Christians, are a desperate grasp at something physical when possibly the need was really for something spiritual and invisible, the mingled namelessness in the fullness of the one love.

         I’m not the one who values this, who would be chosen to gather up these remnants of saints and return them to the altar from which they were stolen. But this gospel on its vellum pages, yes, I will return that to its proper place.

         Dear God, I know you don’t expect me to return the bones of the saints to make a shrine for lost pilgrims to come seeking their legendary three magical wishes.

         Looking up, I see someone in the tower here is looking down at me, but when I notice him, he is gone in an instant.

         I trudge my way around the outside of the wall to the entrance.  Out here, in front of this larger building in one direction are hovels for monks, made by hand as leafy shelters or rocks stacked, as the dessert fathers and mothers have always done. And in another place on this hill is a smoldering fire, oozing with molten lead perhaps a wooden chapel. So, this place was once in the Celtic style, even though the Benedictine rule was so prevalent when I last visited monastic communities.

         Now I see, stretched out on the steps just as he fell, the naked body of a man, reaching out an arm ahead of his fall, blood pooled beneath his wound, slaughtered as Jesus was by a spear to his side, a single cut in the same way young calves gave their lives for the vellum for the pages here.

(Continues Tuesday, June 24)