Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne
The returning surviving monks continue their spiritual practice here. Some see Lindisfarne as the vanguard for the great turning of the millennium. There is the notion that this island was chosen to experience the Doomsday judgement first, expected in 999 C.E. The world has only a little more than a century to prepare.
The monks are fasting and carving forever stones to mark this spot in time, so I’m gathering up squash from the withering vines to serve a hearty meal to guests.
When the end of the world seems emanate, some of us carve stones, so that God and the angels, or maybe the next age of giants or sea creatures visiting here, will know what happened. Meanwhile, I am here, a borrowed monk, picking winter squashes off the vines we removed to make a new place for graves. I can make a spicy squash soup, a hearty meal for the visitors we expect here anytime now before the end of the world.
What is the sacred message in this? What is the value of being the first ever “last place on earth?” A shrine of an incorrupt body of a saint would seem the right place for the final judgment to start.
Dear God, I know you as the constancy of love, the never ending, always living, beauty of all Creation and the love, the listening to each heart beating. You have gifted us humankinds, said to be in your image, with imagination, yet we are unsettled and overwhelmed by awe of eternal, and so we seek the edges of what we can know as beginnings and endings. Guide me, as you always have, through these end times. Please bless the soup of daily life. Thank you for the hard-shelled squash that keeps so well for winter anyway. Amen.
Now when the land bridge rises in the tide, and the procession of visitors arrives, we will be ready. The bare spaces on walls where the sconces were torn away and stolen will be scrubbed of candle soot, and the bleak barren tables and rails where lost linens once marked each liturgical season will be polished clean of old dust. Why is it the dust always returns and marks the shape of the missing? Unused space is constantly being blanketed in the pale shroud. I wonder, do the angels continually dust the heavenly house of many rooms promised to be waiting for us? Or is heaven already laden in the grey shroud of dust. I will never know.
(Continues Tuesday, Sept. 9)
Lazarus Ink 