Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Marmoutier on the Loire
Tonight, I’m staying in a guest room at the monastery near the shrine of St. Martin of Tours waiting here for the king’s scholar, Alcuin, to prepare his answer to Bishop Higbald’s letter with news of the Lindisfarne raid.
It is the dark of morning, the prayer time when monks stagger from sleep with their worries to hear God’s answers and receive anew the creative “ah-ha.” In this thin space of night before dawn the teacher Alcuin has been mulling the tragic words in the letter I delivered here from Bishop Higbald.
I was awake and reading the psalm for this day by candlelight when a monk came to the door of this guest cell. He said Alcuin requests the presence of one who knows the depth of the sin Bishop Higbald spoke of in his letter.
“Depths of sin” isn’t normally my morning nourishment. I am friend to Jesus whose message was love, though it is often wedged awkwardly amid human fears of sins, hates and end times. And Jesus was a follower of John, who preached the turning, the repentance and the cleansing in baptism. So, the popular rise in sin-wallowing doesn’t much appeal to me. Maybe it is spoken often by holy men in these times because it lays the emphasis on human control of our own circumstances. By blaming our own behavior, we can blame sin as a reason for things we otherwise can’t control. Then human beings are empowered to heal the woes of the world, simply by un-sinning, confessing, repenting…
As I follow the monk down the hall to Alcuin’s chamber, I am thinking through the details of blame/sin in Higbald’s letter.
Here at his door –
“Ah, good messenger for my dear friend the bishop. I apologize for waking you at this hour.”
“I was already awake for prayers.”
“I’ve not slept with my worries over my friend’s plea. And I need a listener to hear my words as Higbald would hear them.”
“I know he wrote to you to hear words of God’s forgiveness for what he called the sins of Lindisfarne.”
“Please try to listen to my answer with his way of hearing it. He speaks so much of God’s retribution for a particular sin. What possible sins are there, that could be committed by a whole monastery?”
“I do know of the incident that concerned Bishop Higbald.”
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 