Historical Setting: Jarrow, 793 C.E.
Wilbert, the elder serving the library, sees my interest in Bede’s books of history and has taken me aside from the large hall to tell me something of the life of this man — his own spiritual guide.
“The venerable Bede was delivered to the abbot at Monkwearmouth a couple of years before this part of the double monastery was complete, so he knew the saints of our foundation very personally.”
Wilbert’s old fingers flip through pages of the book I prepared to read, he finds some particular chapters.
“Bede was left in the care of St. Benedict of Biscop, then it was St. Ceolfrith, who came after Benedict, here.”
These are the ramblings of an old man, gazing off as he lectures me in the names of saints.
“I think it was Ceolfrith who was here at the time of the plague. It spread through the whole choir of monks taking away every last one of them who sang with the angels in worship. Only the child and the abbot were spared. Then, as young as Bede was, he saw so many others off to their deaths. It was possible he actually had a glimpse of heaven, even as he lived on earth.
“They all feared that the singing of the antiphons is what brought down the deaths because it was the whole choir it carried off; so Ceolfrith, in an effort to save the monastery, ruled against singing antiphons after the chanting of the psalms. Bede felt the loss of the lives of the monks, but also, he grieved for the music. [Footnote]
“When I was brought here as a young child also, a new assemblage of monks was filling the emptiness and the music was fully restored.”
“I can only imagine the grief he endured as a child, called to care for the dying, then losing the music from worship.”
“Of course, what would a common scholar know of this? For someone ordained in holiness, the prayers and the music of worship surround us every day with the full witness of angels.”
I am so tempted to argue from my place, oddly knowing this wider and deeper, but I say nothing. My years of chanting those same antiphons and that nearness of God is not just a privilege for brothers with tonsures shaven as crowns. People touched with the holy are everywhere.
Footnote: https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2019/05/27/103796-venerable-bede-the-church-historian — retrieved 2-20-25.
(Continues Tuesday, October 28)
Lazarus Ink 