Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery
The Viking raid on Lindisfarne was swift and brutal. I was a slave waiting with the ships and saw nothing of it but their return to the beach with the loot. Brother Ealdwin, watched from a slit in the tower door and saw it happen.
The Viking fear of the Christian God granted the grace, at least for me, to change my slave’s shirt for a monk’s robe and return the great gospel to the Christian altar while the Vikings fled.
In shock, seeing the slaughter, Brother Ealdwin looks deep for a message of God’s love amid the mayhem. “It was a blessing the abbot’s death was at the foot of the altar with the cross he loved. Here they all are, relieved of their earthly garb.”
“God is weeping with us, now.” I answer.
“God will get vengeance on his enemies.” Brother Ealdwin mumbles through his tears. “Surely God will sink their ships and drown every last one of them.”
I understand Brother Ealdwin’s human rage in this, and yet, in all my years I know God also weeps for the hollow hearts of the Vikings. This isn’t the time to speak that sermon. The fervor that rises in our human wishes is for a vengeful God, who can make our own hatreds seem like justice. If God yields to these human prayers for retribution and bad things are because of our bad human nature, then why would a horror like this come to a monastery at all? I surely can’t believe these monks and Christians were murdered as God’s judgment for their sins.
Brother Ealdwin goes out to search through the monk’s hovels for any overlooked personal items that can be used for grave clothes. I take up a shovel and find a clear place of earth to make the burials sacred, but Brother Ealdwin is horrified that I would choose a place so near the burials of other monks. He leads me to a more distant site.
I press the spade into the virgin earth to make a hole the size of a man. Earth shovel full, by earth shovel full, I am creating an emptiness — a shrine to what is no more. It is a project assigned by sorrow that uses every bone and muscle of this living person to match the deep emptiness of the earth with the depths and widths of grief.
One grave is dug. How many more graves must we make here?
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 