Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery
Bishop Higbald prepares to bless a new abbot chosen from among these monks. A stranger here would assume I am a monk, but of course, all here know I only wear a borrowed robe so, I simply observe.
I see that the bishop has the full administrative duties for the shrine also, and now, the role of the abbot is simply to give voice to the few monks who will stay. The bishop oversees the judgment and it is the sins of Lindisfarne that are at the forefront.
A monk is chosen as the new abbot, then the bishop asks for parchment and ink as he prepares to send a letter to Alcuin, a friend and scholar now in Francia. I’ve found a few things while looking for salt, so I bring inks and vellum to the bishop and I offer to be the messenger who will carry this letter.
With my circumstances as they are, I am still groping for this future I have awakened into and I would really like to journey to “Francia” as it is now called. I would like to visit, once again, Frankish Gaul, and learn if the changes that make all things new are a matter of time; or is it only power and wealth that change the world? I don’t expect my old homeland will be the same.
Now I will be traveling from Northumberland then across the British Sea by ship. When I reach the Lowlands at the mouth of the Rhine, I will use a fast horse to take me on to Aachen Castle to deliver the letter. The bishop provides a purse for my costs and for my expected return with a response from Alcuin.
It will be good to cross through the lands that were once my home, and now are my own places of grief. On other journeys I’ve visited old homelands and I know not to expect the longed-for familiarity, except maybe the scent of the land itself and the same skies everywhere and always. I once visited Bethany only one hundred years after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and there the old battles between Romans and Jews were still simmering deep in the earth and the Christians, in their own little groups, had simply wandered off.
When Ana and I traveled, before the children were born, we saw the place near the Loire that was her childhood home. We found it to be a garden of stunted memories.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 