#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)

#69.12, Thursday, June 26, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery

         This one monk who saw the desecration has survived as he escaped into the tower to ring the warning. But it all happened so quickly there was no warning. Now, I see it will be our task to bury the dead.

         I tell him, “I was a monk in another time in another place, I was known then as Brother Eleazar, so this borrowed robe isn’t uncomfortable for me, it is only too long. And for that, I grieve for the one who wore it before me. You called him, Brother Jabari, from Egypt?”

         “Brother Eleazar, Brother Jabari’s body isn’t here among these. He was dark skinned. Even with the distortion of death, I can see he isn’t here. And I didn’t see him killed.”

         “He was probably the last one they slew because his robe was on the top of the heap of monk’s robes they took with them.”

         “I watched the marauders from the crack of the tower door, and they started with the abbot, taking his garb, then running him through with the spear. Here is his body.”

         The monk shows me to the top step, right in front of the altar. It is the body of an older man. We each take a moment to speak our prayers aloud. Then, it is he who breaks our longer silence.

         “I am Brother Ealdwin.”

         “Brother Ealdwin, ’Old friend’ that is, though you don’t seem that old. Sorry we meet in this hard time. It is a grueling task before us.”

         “Maybe not gruesome, so much, as my own chance to bid these, my friends, a glorious journey now that they are set free from earthly bonds.”

         “So let me help you with the hard work of it.”

         Brother Ealdwin goes into the vestry to look for linens to use as shrouds, and he returns, miffed by the thorough looting of every little corner.

         “Why would they take every fiber of fabric? First, they took the abbot’s priestly garb, dazzled they seemed by the fine silks and the deep blues of the dyes, but then, they took the clothes of the common monks as well, and now even the vestry was raided!”

         I know they trade in fabrics, and some, like I was recently, are, wearing mostly raw skins of hunted beasts. But I can tell you, if I were ever to see a Viking in a monk’s robe with a chism on his head, I would be appalled.

(Continues Tuesday, July 1)

#69.11, Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery

The monk with an unlit lantern was shorn just this morning as any monk would prepare for a normal day.  I think I had a glimpse of him, looking down from the tower when I was outside. But when I turned around now, he was startled by the sight of me, bearded, as I am, and unkempt as a slave. Or maybe he is terrified by me, because I am dressed as a monk in a robe cut for a giant. Surely, he was expecting me to be someone he knew – “Brother Jabari” — he called me. I try to explain myself.

         “I was just sent back here to return the book.”

         “Who sent you here?”

         What should I say? The Marauders? The fear of God? Was it God who allowed me to return to Christians, as wounded as Christianity is in this time and place?

         “I was a slave for them, but I am a Christian here.”

         He takes a small flame of a still burning candle tucked into a niche, and he lights the lantern illuminating the heap of pale corpses strewn on the altar steps, each step named for a piece of Trinity, “Father, Son and Holy ghost.” It is how the priest who ascends to the most holy place. It is the place where these guardians of the holy were felled.

         “I was a slave waiting with the ships when they returned with a heap of robes, and the stolen treasures.  They had no understanding of the gospel, so I was sent to return it to its place here. I traded my slave shirt for this stolen monk’s robe. It must have belonged to the one you knew as Brother Jabari.”

         “When I looked out from the tower, you were there and I thought surely Brother Jabari was safe also. He had the dark black hair – he was from Egypt, Alexandria, rich with the spirit of ancient saints.” This monk is weeping in his grief, “and now I see his robe was collected from him as he was slain. I saw them.  One-by-one everyone was stripped of their robes, then driven through with sword or spear. Some howled, some just gasped, no one fought. I ran into the tower to reach for the bell to toll the danger for others when I looked out and saw the looters tumbling their way over the rocks, and sailing off in their ships. Then I looked down, and saw you there.”

(Continues tomorrow)

#69.10, Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery

         The raiders were in this holy place at Lindisfarne an hour ago when I was still their slave.  They came here to find an unguarded stash of wealth, knowing nothing of the Christian nature of a place for worship. Unable to find the “Jewels and the gold” inside the precious covers of a gospel, they saw it as worthless and feared Christian magic and curses, so I was assigned this task of returning it. Now, from this high place just outside the walls of the Christian oratorio I watch the sea as the sails of the longships that brought me here catch the west wind to take them swiftly back to their own lands. I’m wearing a borrowed monk’s robe made for a giant, having shed my slave’s shirt. As they disposed of me along with this book that I’m returning to the altar they are set free of owning me and my Christian conscience. It was a convenient fix all around.

         Inside, the oratory the wash of light is tenuous in narrow shafts, harboring mostly shadows in dust. There is the smell of fresh blood. My eyes adjust. Naked corpses are at my feet splayed and strewn, each in his own dark pool. Walking in this long robe in this place has stained the hem of the borrowed garb in crimson. The altar here is stripped clean of linens by the Viking raiders and is an empty place now. There isn’t even a candle or a lantern. The sconces were ripped from the walls.  I place the gospel on the stand where it had been as though it was simply out of place for a few moments for the housekeeper to dust.

         With only my own voice in this void, I speak my prayer aloud.

         “Dear God, As I return this great gospel to your post, let also, these devoted and precious souls of your servants return to you, broadening the depths of love, as all of Creation weeps for them. Amen.”

         “Amen” I hear echoed.

         I turn around to see who is here. In a dusty shaft of light is a living monk, all properly shaven in shorn, in shock, frozen in terror at the glimpse of my face. I believe he is the monk I saw peering down from the tower outside.

         He stares hard into the darkness riveted on my face, trying to make sense of me, “I thought you were Brother Jabari.”

Maybe he doesn’t even see the horrors and deaths all around in front of the altar. 

(Continues tomorrow)

#69.9, Thursday, June 19, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery

         I’m reaching the priory of the Lindisfarne Monastery, the gathering room used as a sanctuary and probably also the scriptorium. I find the marauders stopped here outside the walls. The stains on the earth mark their feet and axes soaked in the blood of innocent monks. Here they sorted through their sacks of loot to decide what was valuable.  In their way of seeing, a reliquary was valuable for its outside, the gold and jewels, so here they emptied out the contents of these little chests.  Here, mingled in the blood of unnamed monks are the treasured remains of more ancient saints – the gray dust of ash, the yellow spikes of teeth, the clump of silver beard hair, a bone or other remains.  These physical, earthly remnants of ancient saints, for some Christians, are a desperate grasp at something physical when possibly the need was really for something spiritual and invisible, the mingled namelessness in the fullness of the one love.

         I’m not the one who values this, who would be chosen to gather up these remnants of saints and return them to the altar from which they were stolen. But this gospel on its vellum pages, yes, I will return that to its proper place.

         Dear God, I know you don’t expect me to return the bones of the saints to make a shrine for lost pilgrims to come seeking their legendary three magical wishes.

         Looking up, I see someone in the tower here is looking down at me, but when I notice him, he is gone in an instant.

         I trudge my way around the outside of the wall to the entrance.  Out here, in front of this larger building in one direction are hovels for monks, made by hand as leafy shelters or rocks stacked, as the dessert fathers and mothers have always done. And in another place on this hill is a smoldering fire, oozing with molten lead perhaps a wooden chapel. So, this place was once in the Celtic style, even though the Benedictine rule was so prevalent when I last visited monastic communities.

         Now I see, stretched out on the steps just as he fell, the naked body of a man, reaching out an arm ahead of his fall, blood pooled beneath his wound, slaughtered as Jesus was by a spear to his side, a single cut in the same way young calves gave their lives for the vellum for the pages here.

(Continues Tuesday, June 24)


#69.8, Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery

         The robes of murdered Christians are laid out on the sand. I can see from the silks and brocades they also raided the vestry. In another heap are the robes of monks delivered to these sands unbloodied. I can imagine these monks were stripped of their robes before they were driven through with these weapons. What will I see at the altar when I return the gospel to its rightful place?  What has become of the monks of Lindisfarne?

         Gunnar would have me wear the finest garb to return the book, but I would rather pretend my way into the church as a monk than a father with higher authority. This is no task for a saint. As I choose the monk’s robe from the heap, there is talk among the raiders about the value of the haul and the risk of letting a slave possibly escape into the monastery wearing valuable fabrics. I leave the red shirt on the sand to assure them I am not coming back. It is obvious I am “escaping” and I will leave as a monk.

         I’m sure they were already of a mind that I wouldn’t be returning to the boats. Gunnar acknowledges a farewell to me, as the ships prepare to sail back on the westerly winds.  So now, I wear a borrowed monk’s robe and take up the weighty treasure to follow the path back from the sea to the church. I don’t look back.

         It is a steep climb with a heavy book and a robe too big. I climb onto each wide stone, setting the great book ahead of me for each step upward. All this way I see where the feet of the marauders left their footprints in the sands between the large stones. 

         Now, reaching the edifice walls that saved no one, the path of the raiders returning to the sea tells the gruesome story. Stains of blood – droplets & stained footprints, become more intense as I near this summit. And here is a place with sanctified debris – ashes and teeth and bits of bone – this is where the marauders stopped to open the reliquaries when they found no jewels. They, no doubt, kept the golden and bejeweled boxes anyway. 

         Dear God, I only come as a borrowed monk, not a true pilgrim seeking miracles, forgive me if I don’t seem appropriately devout. You know my heart, and for all the terrors and losses in this, I still grieve. Stay near. Amen.

(Continues tomorrow)

#69.7, Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery
 

         This beautiful treasure of Lindisfarne, a magnificent work of art is a gospel now laid out on the sand before me, right in front of the thieves. They were expecting a great hoard of jewels and discover now, that all they have are pages of artwork and inked letters imagining words not even carved as a rune stone. It is opened to the beginning of the gospel, where, amid the scrawls of Latin words, is a great illumination of the Chi Rho. I know these Greek letters are the initials for Christ. Even before the symbol of the cross was venerated, Christians understood the Chi Rho. And now, that is questioned.

         “Look” Gunnar, is standing right behind me, seeing this right side up and he wants everyone to take notice of this. “It is a bind-rune!”

         Gunnar reaches over my shoulder, with a pointing stick and traces the “x” of the Chi, then the Rho, to show these letters to us as the whole symbol.  How does he know this?

         “What is a bind-rune?” I ask. That was the word I heard Sjókona say as I was leaving her, “I hadn’t learned the bind-runes,” she shouted at me.

         “It is when runes are stacked together to make one meaning. Here is the Gebo,” he points again to the Chi, “It means ‘gift’” And this other, Wunjo is joy.”

         What can I say?  What can anyone say? We are awestruck by the presence of the holy in this. What do these murderers know of holy? Yet this circle of men is muffed in solemn silence. It is such a quiet that the blood dripping from an unsheathed sword makes a wailing sound as it slides off the blade.

         Gunnar speaks for all the men. “This will have to be returned to the place it was.” There are nods and whispered “aye’s” and someone says “keeping it would be a Christian curse on us all.”

         Now there is an expectation that the one who brought it out will be the one to return it. Gunnar glances back toward the ruin, then he looks at me, and says to the men, “It should be a Christian slave who returns it.  We should dress him up as a Christian brother.”

         Is a thrall in a red shirt not already dressed up a Christian? They paw through the booty of silks and satins, deciding what of their loot they will render for the Christian to wear who returns the book.

(Continues tomorrow)