#70.10, Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery

Brother Ealdwin tolled the bell and when he comes down from the tower I ask his help to lay out a meal to serve these brothers and visitors. Brother Ealdwin is guiding me as I look for the supplies and the utensils left here so we can serve food.  The wine cellar was raided.  The larder was picked clean of cheese, and neither Brother Ealdwin nor I thought to start bread rising. But we do have a sack of barley and one of peas so porridge will be abundant. We can’t find the salt.

While we were alone here, Brother Ealdwin and I have been feeding the animals, milking the cow and gathering the eggs. We’ve had plenty of fresh dairy for just the two of us here, but now we have more of the monks and guests besides. When finally, everyone is seated at the benches with a cup of porridge for sustenance, the bishop stands to offer the prayer.

It is no humble table grace, blessing these morsels, thankful for a gift of food and asking God for the useful strength of porridge where hunger had been. Instead, it is a prayer such as an earthly king might offer to the High King of Heaven, gilded in unctuous, holy phrases and verbose addresses of importance, both on earth and in heaven. My wandering mind frees me from the actual words of the prayer and, in fact, from the actual experience of praying.

My thoughts are on those who are grieving here, feeling the pain of losing their fellows in this community and their heavy hurting hearts of guilt for abandoning those who were suffering and dying here. Today they have visited the bleakness and the losses, the abandoned monks’ cells, the oratorio stripped down of all its silks and satins and gold. Has no one noticed the gospel is still in its place?

When the section of the prayer for penance comes around, the sins are not the “secrets of our hearts,” but, it seems these returning to this community are in search of this community’s own personal sins that saved their physical selves.  What was the sin that Lindisfarne committed against God that caused such a horrific judgment to be imposed here in the name of holy justice?

Everyone saw the signs in the atmosphere, the drought, the raging displays in the skies, and everyone guessed at sins to explain why God was speaking so harshly. The judgment was obvious. It was against Lindisfarne.

(Continues tomorrow)

#tolling the bell, #food for the mourners, #table grace, #guilty hearts, #Lindisfarne’s sin, #sin search,

#70.9, Thursday, July 17, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery

         Brother Ealdwin speaks his gratitude to God for each of the monks who escaped the slaughter and here they have come back today. But things can never be as they were before the raid.

The monks are grieving.  We are seeing the devastation and the grief. We are told many of the pilgrims who would come to the shrine are waiting on the mainland. Maybe there is a fear with these would-be visitors that, were they to come here, they would be flaunting their own good fortune simply by living — survivor’s guilt.

         As a dark-clothed mourners, all of us on this island, move as a group from the burial places to the priory. This oratorio is bleak appropriately matching the hollowness in everyone’s hearts. There are no golden sconces on the walls, and the tables that held the reliquaries are stripped clean of cloth and purpose. The golden boxes are gone. I won’t tell them that I witnessed sacred bones and saintly relics discarded in the beach grass. Knowing that can only transfigure the marauders’ disregard for Christian tradition into more hate. I’ve already gone to that eastern beach, unnoticed by Brother Ealdwin, and gathered up what I could find, then I, alone, buried the discarded relics to lie with the saints properly venerated in the cemetery.[Footnote]

There is concern circulating about the Shrine of St. Cuthbert. Brother Ealdwin assured them no harm was done to the shrine itself.  But the earthly treasures brought by pilgrims bearing gifts, were all taken. The treasury was sacked. The specially carved Roman styled chair where the presider of worship once sat as royalty is gone now. The altar itself is still here, but empty of the gilded carvings. What will pagans do with a carved relief of Jesus ascending? They took the altar clothes and raided the vestry. Someone remembers there was a carpet under the altar which is probably already being traded as a rare treasure with no mention of the Christian source.

Does no one wonder that the gospel remains here? It was surely the greatest treasure of Lindisfarne, and yet it is still here.

Brother Ealdwin is sent to the tower to toll the dead. He did that when we buried the monks, but these men didn’t hear it, so he goes again to toll the bell. And I should feed the fires here, and start a pot of porridge. People will be hungry later. 

[Footnote]https://rumblinginthewind.wordpress.com/2017/10/31/veneration-of-saints/

(Continues Tuesday, July 22, 2025)

#70.8, Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery

I came looking for the Gospel of John to read again John Chapter 15 because I wanted to remember Jesus dancing the vine dance or sitting at the table with us, all of us, the world of us, and saying, once again what he says so often, “We are all one vine, beloved together.” It was that oneness that took us through the pain of seeing Jesus himself and so many others murdered on crosses by the Romans. It wasn’t a passionate murder, rather an abuse of love. It was simply a fear that a great unity of love, which Jesus revealed in his simple words, that must have seemed so terrifying to those who had staked their lives on power and wealth. If God is all there is and God is love, then empire is meaningless. Now, here I am, reading from this beautiful rendition of the gospel that the marauders couldn’t see as valuable while my own imagination, sees all the glosses by the inks of imperialists striving for power.

         The Norsemen came for the simple things that would sell for gold at earthly markets.

         It is high tide now and Brother Ealdwin runs up here to tell me to come to the shore.

         “They are coming back!  I see the boats – There is a whole flotilla of boats rowing toward us from the mainland.  Come and greet them!”

         I follow him, running down, down to the shore just as the little hide currachs are being drawn onto the shore. Each little boat is peopled with men dressed in the monks robes familiar here, dark clothes for mourning.

         “It is the bishop, himself who leads them.”

         Brother Ealdwin runs into the waves, and I follow after him to help haul the boats higher onto the sand. These mourners who had fled, return today and wade ashore.

         Brother Ealdwin is crying on the shoulder of the bishop. Bishop Higbald will soon see this tearful greeting is not the only thing here that will shatter his stately presence. Brother Ealdwin guides this procession to each station of destruction.  He shows them the stone he is carving so any visitor will know that on one side is an army of endings, and the other the names of their Norsemen’s victims. When finished, that will mark the newer place where we buried the dead. Brother Ealdwin speaks the name of each mound of earth we’ve heaped here. The mourners genuflect and weep. At each little mound of earth, stories are shared of the remembrances.

(Continues tomorrow)


#70.7, Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery
 

         I opened the beautiful pages of this gospel to a place where I know I will find Jesus’s love for all the people interconnected as the vine. [John 15] Usually, I can look past these intrusions of fear and judgment and just picture Jesus as I remember him with his friends, pleading to us to keep the deep love connection. He was begging for his love to be both his and ours, as one love together. Then, after the cross, we were left empty and terrified. Reading that gospel aloud it sounded too personal — too touching — for a the newly baptized Christians, so maybe some carets of corrections evolved, reading it and copying again and again, it becomes less intimate and more about the Roman style of judgement.

         The imagery of beautiful vines — lush leaves and curlicues at every turn, along with cascades of grapes, sweet orbs of fruit, quenching, comforting, answering every thirst with the vintner’s clippers of judgement – then, the “fruitless” encumberments get lopped off.

Every time Jesus says the metaphor “I am the true vine and you are the branches” Someone fixes it to say, “well, except for…” 

Somewhere the words of God’s love for everyone, when Jesus speaks of a vine that connects all people as part of the vine of God’s love, comes with the weight of human requirements on our own earthly selves. Fruitfulness hangs heavy in the Jesus words.

Or maybe these discriminating exceptions could simply be a shoring up of the gardening instruction for a vine metaphor offered by carpenter Jesus who serves wine, yet knows very little about vines. Or it could be adding more of that Roman anti-Semetic jargon already edited into this gospel, or it could mean as the sin-seeking Christians believe, that God prunes the sinners from the beloveds.

How many times and how many ways did Jesus have to say the fact of the matter, “we are all one together in God’s love.” Even though that would include the Roman soldier whose ear was mended in Luke, and Judas sitting at the table. It would include the monks we buried here yesterday far from that sinner novice buried among the saints and the pure. God’s love would include the Pagan raiders who didn’t find value in keeping the gospel as a treasure, or even as keeping me for their slave. Maybe God really also loves fruitless vines.

Or maybe God is sharpening the pruning shears just now.

We are human, and we can only know some things.

(Continues tomorrow)


#70.6, Thursday, July 10, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery

Ealdwin still chips away at the stone.

 I say, “Seeing everything from a Christian point of view may have skewed my understanding of the Vikings.”

“How is that possible that truth can only be known from a Christian point of view?”

“I’ve heard that said.”

From this place by the sandstone outcropping, Brother Ealdwin keeps a watch. I think he expects the others will return any day at low tide. I leave him to his work and go back to the priory where the altar holds the gospel. That’s what I would most like to see now.

This gospel is so beautifully rendered.  St. Jerome’s translation keeps the holy words holy so the readings in worship sound as grand as the psalms. But the parts I read over and consider so often are the bits and pieces of reminders of my friend and my first family in Bethany.

Those times have become the Christian gospels that we copy and translate and study now. None of us knew anything of Christianity then, even though we were already everything there was of it. We were survivors of a crucified leader and a plundered temple when this gospel was finally put together from old diaries and told stories.

Ealdwin watches the pathway relentlessly hoping for familiar faces as I am looking for the familiar in the gospel stories. We all look back at our own history in each era.  With the destruction of Solomon’s Temple it was generations before the people returned to build anew. They were the grandchildren of the Hebrew people who were taken as captives. Sometimes a homeland is a history and not a memory.

The history of the Jewish people is kept in sacred scrolls for the generations. But instead of debating the discrepancies from one generation to the next, until tiny sprouts of truth can be gleaned, Christian stories were newly told to fit the Roman politics. The Jesus words [John 15] that all may be one in God who is love [I John 4:18] all people connected like a vine but somehow in the writing of it, useless, fruitless vines infiltrated and needed righteous prunning. So now, Jesus is the true vine but the chapter begins with some version of an imperialistic God, like the Roman army raiding the Temple, pruning the vine and putting the whole Jewish heritage in the burn pile. [John 15]

It is a good thing to keep history on a carved stone.

(Continues Tuesday, July 15, 2025)

#70.5, Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Art Note: This is a rough rendition of the military procession on the verso of the so called “Domesday stone,” now in the Lindisfarne museum. This blogger chose to draw it, rather than print out a copy, in order to gain a better personal understanding of the artwork .

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery

         This is our second day for assessing the horror. Brother Ealdwin splits off a piece of sandstone from a layered rock. With a chisel and a hammering rock, he is chipping a picture into the stele. 

         “Carving a stone honors those slain.”

          On one side he’s marked his plan with a scratch of a rock. I ask if those men with weapons are the Vikings.

         “No, Vikings weren’t that orderly. This army is the last earthly thing.”

          Then he shows me the other side of his rock. In a lower section he is using runes to inscribe the names of those we buried here. 

         It’s a remembrance, but also, it is something for him to do with his hands to share his grief for ever and ever. It is a marker here, for any others who return searching.  He says he has yet to carve the panel above the names. That will be the heaven side of earthly life.

         He says, “If I were more skilled in the craft I would make a large cross for this garden of graves, and it would have deep pictures of these who are lost and would tell this story far better.”

         “I think the story is told well just with the sorrow that is left here. And from what I’ve seen of runestones, this one is very fine.”

“A runestone maybe, but have you not seen the high crosses on the mainland?”

“No, I’ve not visited any Christian lands in these times. I was taken from Gaul by happenstance and landed among the Norsemen. I’ve only recently learned of runes when I was asking for books. And there I saw the Norsemen carving boarders in wood similar to the illuminations in the great books inked here and in the monasteries founded by Irish saints. I assumed Norse people had some kind of writing. But they are pagans there. So of course, there are no crosses but I also found no writing other than rune stones. Now I suppose writing on vellum is just a Christian thing.”

         “I’m sure some of the Norsemen are Christian. They are known to come in numbers to trading cities and line up for baptism. Did you not meet all the Christians there?”

         “I met no Christians except for one little girl who was a slave captured from a Christian land.”

Footnote: O-Sullivan, Deirdre, and Robert Young. Lindisfarne Holy Island. (London:B.T. bateford Ltd. English Heritage 1995.)

(Continues tomorrow)

#70.4, Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery

         On this terrible day Brother Ealdwin and I have been burying the dead left in the wake of the Viking raid. There are more empty cells where monks lived, than are the number of bodies we buried. Apparently, more monks than just Brother Ealdwin escaped death, but they aren’t here on the island. Did they flee by boat? Did they escape into the sea and drown? Were they taken as slaves?

         This whole long morning Brother Ealdwin watches the pathway rising in the ebb tide in case someone would return. Then he watches the water path to the main land for the currachs. Those boats that belong here may surely bring some who are returning. Do they even know someone here survived and is waiting for a familiar person to share in this grief?

         Brother Ealdwin imagines some were taken as slaves. I chose not to tell him what I know of that. I actually don’t know anything of the Viking slave market so it may be possible. I don’t even know if stolen monks would demand a good price. But I do know the Vikings themselves aren’t using slave power for digging any tunnels or building pyramids. They aren’t doing things that would require lots of able-bodied men who are really longing to escape. They have their own artisans carving ships and sailing ships and that is what they do. I found slave duty was only to help with the rowing and guard the ships. Of course we weren’t trusted to help with the raid. I would assume raiders can’t depend on slaves to commit brutality when their slaves share languages and names with those who are being attacked. So, I really can’t imagine monks were captured and taken away by the Vikings.

         The day is nearly done so I ask Brother Ealdwin if we might check for any food available at the cooking hearth. He isn’t very hungry, he says. And besides, the monk who tends to the cooking isn’t here. So, we can’t eat? I understand grief. And fasting is not impossible.

         If we can’t keep meals times, at least we can keep the hours.  I speak the call of each verse of the vesper psalm and Brother Ealdwin whispers with me in familiar response:

         “If I say surely the darkness shall cover me”

                  “And the light around me becomes night,”

         “even the darkness is not dark to you,”

                  “the night is as bright as the day,

                  For darkness is as light to you.”  [Ps. 139:11-12]

(continues tomorrow)

#70.3, Thursday, July 3, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery

         Brother Ealdwin and I take the donkey cart to the shore to collect the bodies there for burial.

         The one accidental kindness left by the attackers was to trade the slave who I was, for a brother, who I am now, to be with this man through his shock and grief. Dear God, help me be the creek bed of your love, pouring over a needy land.

         The tide is out. Brother Ealdwin leads me to the edge of the island where a wide expanse of sandy sea bottom stretches all the way to the mainland. Just for this moment Lindisfarne Island seems to belong to a wider empty earth. He shows me the sandy bank that only a few hours ago was covered with the sea. Here are the fresh wounds in the earth where boats were dragged from the embankment for a quick escape.

“Some of those who aren’t here now must be safe on the other shore.”

Brother Ealdwin is kneeling over the bodies of the two men we have come for – a pale blue monk, and a tall man with darker skin.

“Brother Althar was drowned, and it appears Brother Jabari was slain trying to rescue him.”

As the sandy plain dampens in the returning tide we realize another drown man, still fully clothed as a monk is lying on the sand bed.

“We have to move quickly” Brother Ealdwin knows the nature of these tides. “And the sand is already too soft for the donkey cart.”

So, he and I go out onto the sand as quickly as we can. Our robes are a burden, so we leave them on the shore. Unclothed, we are able to reach this monk’s body still in his water laden robe. It is something of a struggle to drag him to the shore in the wind and the relentless sea. The pathway, a tidal land bridge, Brother Ealdwin tells me is the path of the pilgrims as they come to the shrine of St. Cuthbert and then on to this other far-traveled place, Lindisfarne.

“Some must have escaped in boats, and maybe others successfully by swimming.”

“One can’t swim fully robed and we found no other robes on the shore where we laid our own.”

But I know the Vikings trade in fabrics. If clothing was on the shore, it would have been collected by them. So, we can only guess at how many made it safely and how many died in the raid. “Dear God have mercy.”

“Christ have mercy,” Brother Ealdwin answers in trained response.

(Continues Tuesday, July 8, 2025)


#70.2, Wednesday, July 2, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery
 

         Brother Ealdwin finds me digging graves in this field. He has with him some garments for wrapping the bodies.  And he tells me he walked the width of the island from one shore to the other shore and found two more bodies by the water.  One is Brother Jabari.

         “You only saw two others? Did you see signs of anyone surviving?”

         “I saw no one. It was high tide when the marauders came, so no one could escape by walking on the pilgrim’s path on the shallows. We have three currachs that we keep on the shore. A few men can drag them to the sea and I did see the marks in the mud bank where they were dragged. So clearly some escaped by boat.”

         I lay the shovel aside to go back with Brother Ealdwin to bring those two bodies back for burial. We stop first at a donkey shed and find the donkey was unharmed but braying for his morning grain. He’s glad to see us.  It is a pleasant reprieve to find this little creature waiting so calmly here with his simple need amid all this devastation. Brother Ealdwin takes his time with this chore, rubbing his hands over the fur of the living creature.      Thank you, God for this one thing, living.

         It is something I should pray aloud. “Thank you, God, for finding the life gift amid the losses, thank you for the lives of this donkey and Brother Ealdwin.”

         Brother Ealdwin melts into a heap, sobbing now as he tries to speak the proper psalms of the hour which doesn’t fit this moment. The donkey stretches his neck to the brother to offer a tender nudge – maybe this is just to take notice of the one who gives the oats, or maybe it is truly compassion. I’m only human; how would I know the heart of a donkey?

         I do feel the shared grief with this man and with God’s love for him. I kneel down where he is sitting and rub his shoulders. “God shares our human pain.”

         “God let this happen!  Why is God punishing us like this?”

         Like a child with two parents and grandmother’s spirit, just now I can kind of see a need for humans to pray to a triune God.

         “Brother Ealdwin, God weeps with us, because God knows the grief of a cruel death of his own son. God shares our sorrows.”

(Continues tomorrow)

#70.1, Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery
 

         The Viking raid on Lindisfarne was swift and brutal. I was a slave waiting with the ships and saw nothing of it but their return to the beach with the loot. Brother Ealdwin, watched from a slit in the tower door and saw it happen.

         The Viking fear of the Christian God granted the grace, at least for me, to change my slave’s shirt for a monk’s robe and return the great gospel to the Christian altar while the Vikings fled.

         In shock, seeing the slaughter, Brother Ealdwin looks deep for a message of God’s love amid the mayhem. “It was a blessing the abbot’s death was at the foot of the altar with the cross he loved. Here they all are, relieved of their earthly garb.”

         “God is weeping with us, now.” I answer.

         “God will get vengeance on his enemies.” Brother Ealdwin mumbles through his tears. “Surely God will sink their ships and drown every last one of them.”

         I understand Brother Ealdwin’s human rage in this, and yet, in all my years I know God also weeps for the hollow hearts of the Vikings. This isn’t the time to speak that sermon. The fervor that rises in our human wishes is for a vengeful God, who can make our own hatreds seem like justice. If God yields to these human prayers for retribution and bad things are because of our bad human nature, then why would a horror like this come to a monastery at all? I surely can’t believe these monks and Christians were murdered as  God’s judgment for their sins.

         Brother Ealdwin goes out to search through the monk’s hovels for any overlooked personal items that can be used for grave clothes. I take up a shovel and find a clear place of earth to make the burials sacred, but Brother Ealdwin is horrified that I would choose a place so near the burials of other monks. He leads me to a more distant site.

         I press the spade into the virgin earth to make a hole the size of a man. Earth shovel full, by earth shovel full, I am creating an emptiness — a shrine to what is no more. It is a project assigned by sorrow that uses every bone and muscle of this living person to match the deep emptiness of the earth with the depths and widths of grief.

         One grave is dug. How many more graves must we make here?

(Continues tomorrow)