Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne
Low tide opens the way for the great procession on the land bridge. The bishop’s guards set the walking pace, followed by the bishop and the people of his own household who come here often, I am told. The next to come are the wealthy patrons whose gifts support this monastery: representatives of the local king and others of worldly power and wealth.
Small rowboats, the currachs are rowed alongside the land bridge. These are usually kept on this shore but they had been used at the time of the attack to carry some away from the danger. I’m told the monk who keeps the kitchen is with those in the boats. Brother Ealdwin tells me he will know if the salt was hidden somewhere or if it was stolen. It will be missed in the soup I’ve set to simmer.
Everyone goes first to the Shrine of St. Cuthbert to pay homage. The repository for gifts is still intact. These dignitaries processing become, for this moment, humble pilgrims as they are blessed by the bishop receiving requests for special prayers.
But all the pomp yields to the intended purpose, as the procession moves to visit the cemetery. The brothers who have been hard at work carving forever stones to mark the new graves guide the visitors, not to the area of the old graves with that controversial burial of the unforgivable, but to the new place we’ve made where the winter squash had only recently escaped the garden wall.
Here are the new stones, the sandstone memorials to the named dead. But also, here are the stones carved for the welcome of Doomsday, scheduled soon in one hundred and a few years. Where other tombstones would have bas-relief showing the great works of the deceased or blessings of heaven in winged creatures – doves and angels – here is the story of an army with their weapons flinging above them as they march up into the ravage. And on the other side of that stone is the sacred explanation of the end times. Here is a cross, symmetrically, and balancing on each side a reaching hand, while the lights of heaven are foreboding from above. It is a stone that attributes the deaths to the first sign of the fulfillment of the Doomsday prediction feared to arrive in fullness in its time.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 