#73.10 Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Historical Setting: Jarrow, 793 C.E.

         I shouldn’t be surprised by the practice of placing children out and into situations for learning at an early age.  That is when a precocious nature of a child reveals itself. I’ve seen it happening through my own generations as a parent. I’ve seen infants sparked to learn new things by an insatiable curiosity. It does seem to be a gift of angels. Or in some places, with girl children particularly, it’s seen as a devil’s curse. When it is blamed on devils the spark for literacy in a girl child seems hardly a blessing.

         My wife, Ana, from another time, was such a girl child. Named Anatase, after a stone laid loose in the mines, she was given up by her mother to a pagan tribe for fear she was cursed because she was discovering, without any tutoring at all, the use of letter sounds on a sign posts. Her mother saw it as frightening and abnormal and gave her up to the pagans. 

         One son, from an earlier generation, found her with this pagan tribe and arranged for her to be the student and the assistant to his sister, my daughter, Eve, who was a gifted healer. I knew Anatase when she was a child, and she was a great help to Eve. Then I met Ana again in the generation when she was a young woman. We were wed, and she I had a very fine family of our own. Some of our children were precocious also. All of our children were literate, eventually, as Ana and I were able to bring them through the rigors of learning to read and write and reason sensibly. When they were in their teens they were able to choose their own paths, but we continued to gather often as family. We were fortunate. I know, even since the time of Samuel, as was told in the ancient scrolls, parents have surrendered children to be educated by priests.

         My frustration with the Benedictine Rule, (or here, just called “The Rule” as though the Celtic option never existed) is that it was designed for a bishop or an abbot to manage groups of young boys. It was not really about the wandering spirits of desert fathers in tune with God. The nurture of mysticism just happens by the grace of God and the redundant practices of worship. It is God who lets themself be known, regardless of human plans or the rule.

(Continues tomorrow)


#73.9 Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Historical Setting: Jarrow, 793 C.E.

         Apparently, my simple sentence of purpose in the librarian’s log book reveals my long past connection with Luxeuil. What I thought was standard manuscript lettering is now only one of several styles used by monks. The style of lettering used can reveal when and where a manuscript was copied so my flourishes and downstrokes belie my Merovingian years, and the spread of the ink reveals my time as a follower of Father Columbanus.

         As I explore the books on these shelves at Jarrow, I see there are several different manuscript styles and the style used by the monks here spaces the letters apart more for a simpler clarity, fewer down-strokes tapering off below the line all clean and simple but with beautiful curves, making for faster reading and faster copying. That may explain this vast collection of books here and multiples of the books this monastery is known to have inspired at Bede’s hand.

         I first asked for the book The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the Venerable Bede. [Footnote] That’s the book that brought me here.

         The old librarian says, “Copies of the sixty-two-year-old text are here to be read by anyone using this library.”

         I place the book on a reading stand, and I am preparing to fill the curious little place in my wondering with a whole new history of things. It is a blessing not to have to learn about this land in these times through an interpreter reading runes chipped in stone.

         I see, in Bede’s list of chapters of this Book 1, that this history begins with the Roman emperors.

         Old Wilbert interrupts before I even read the list of chapters and he asks me to sit with him at the table in a private room.

         “So, Eleazar, it is good to see a student, who, by his own accord, chooses to read this work by my own teacher and spiritual guide.”

         “You knew Saint Bede in his lifetime?”

         “I did. When he was very old and speaking his last, I was the one privileged to be the scribe at his side.”

         “He was prolific I see by this vast collection of his works.”

         “And he always worked in the company of angels.”

         “As I supposed. How did you meet him?”

         “Like Bede himself, I was brought to the double monastery as a young child. He was only seven years old when he was delivered here for his education.”

         “Is it usual for children to be left here?”

         “Only as God commands it.”

[Footnote ]Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, The Greater Chronicle, Bede’s Letter to Egbert  is still available for anyone to read in modern English through Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, Rev. 2008, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Judith McClure and Roger Collins. No monks with quill, inks and parchment were needed for this blogger to have this opportunity to read it, thankful for the gifts of 2025.

(Continues tomorrow) 

#73.8 Thursday, October 16, 2025

Historical Setting: Jarrow, 793 C.E.
 

         Today I’m still owned by God, but that’s my secret. I’m dressed as a student, not a monk. I find Jarrow’s renowned library has a magnificent collection of books. It is well-known among the monastic communities and that reputation enables this monastery to borrow more and more books to be copied and added. A collection that began a century or more ago with one abbot’s books increased many times over with this sharing among the monasteries and the industrious work of the monks copying the borrowed volumes. This is also home to an author of history and hagiography, Bede, who lived his life as a monk here in St. Paul’s. I was told of him in Lindisfarne, and that’s why I came.

The librarian sits at the entryway with the log book for visitors.  He asks that everyone who uses the library put, not only their name, but also a brief statement of purpose.  Maybe putting down a purpose gives this librarian a way to be helpful in guiding the visitors to the books they’ve come to find. Or, it is simply a literacy test, to catch commoners and novices who would pretend to use the library when they can’t read or write. He watches carefully when I sign in.

It has been a long while since I’ve held a quill and inked anything on parchment so I take care that my penmanship is exactly as was required at Ligugé and Luxeuil.  “My purpose is to read the works of Bede.” And my name? I choose not to use the Roman version of Lazarus with all that weight of a biblical sign for a monastery to ponder. Instead, I write the Hebrew version, Eleazor, which seems a better fit for my new secular appearance as a young scholar.

The librarian, Wilbert, is hovering over every letter as I write. He looks closer and closer at my letters with a scowl that wrinkles between his brows and gathers at the top of his nose and draws his nostrils outward. Clearly my letters are more beautiful than the person signing in above me. So why does this call for such scrutiny?

 “Eleazor?” he asks. “Is that a Frankish name?”

“No, it is old Hebrew.” 

         “So, you are Jewish, yet educated at Luxeuil? Who would have thought?”

         “Why would you think of Luxeuil?”

         “You make your “e’s” “a’s” with two strokes of the pen in the Merovingian style.”

         “Yes, I am from Francia.”

(Continues Tuesday, October 21)


#73.7 Wednesday, October 15, 2025

Historical Setting: Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, 793 C.E.

Monkwearmouth-Jarrow is a double monastery with both monks and nuns under one abbot, living in separate communities but sharing in some things. It makes common use of books and inks and abbess, and sometimes church. St. Paul is on the River Tyne, and St. Peter, Monkwearmouth, on the Wear. It’s a good long walk from one to the other, crossing the river near the mouth on the sand at low tide. This pattern of a double-monastery was also known by the Irish missionary I remember from an earlier time. He is now called “Saint” Columbanus granted sainthood when he finally yielded the Celtic to the Benedictine Rule. I think God always knew him as a saint.

A young man who is a novice here at Jarrow is trading his commoner’s clothing for the black robe.

He says “I’m so glad the merchant finally came with robes and I won’t have to appear prideful walking among the monks in these common clothes.”

Apparently, these long, black, skillfully sewn, robes of finely spun wool are “less prideful” than the loosely home-spun wool of a farmer’s tunic and rag bands for leggings.

All day the merchant Cloothar makes trades, starting with only the black robes which I recognize as the booty rejected by the raiders of Lindisfarne. He trades with novices for common clothing and he always trades up, for better and better items.

By the end of the day my own trade of the borrowed black robe provides me with a very “prideful” wardrobe: a linen tunic, leggings, a sash and shoes sewn in the new way, pointed at the toe, a brightly dyed hat, a traveler’s bag, and a fine wool cloak in a costly shade of blue.

Cloothar uses a coin for a room at an inn which he shares with me, in payment for helping with the rowing and the market. The innkeeper allows me the use of a vat of lye-water to launder my “new” garments. I spread everything out on the bushes to dry, but, as Cloothar warned, I’ll be wearing them damp all day tomorrow.

Dressed as I am now, I could be mistaken for a young scholar, a rising son of a newly wealthy commoner – prideful indeed.

In times of plague and wars, raids and thefts, material goods survive the first owners, and the heaps of these leftovers of lives become commodity. The humility of a monk’s robe fetches the highest price because having too much good stuff makes an odd paradox of wealth.

(Continues tomorrow)

#73.6 Tuesday, October 14, 2025

Historical Setting: Northumbria, 793 C.E.

         Here is this stout little fellow coming down from the village just now with a traveler’s pack over his shoulder. He’s wearing a loose linen tunic, just long enough to reach his bare knees, hiked up with a sash that his belly hangs over. His calves aren’t wrapped, I would suppose, so he can wade into the shallow water and push his boat away from the shore. This is surely that fellow Cloothar.

He sees me waiting here.

         “Aye, and there you are! I was told an ill-fitted monk was waiting for me to bring him a better habit.”

         “I was hoping to trade this robe for a layman’s tunic. But it looks like the selection is limited.”

         “Only temporarily, my man. No one is entering Lindisfarne anymore. But I’ll be going on to Jarrow where postulates are still abandoning their garb for the monk’s robe.”

         “To Jarrow? I’ve heard they have an excellent library there.”

         “Yeh, but the market for books is slim. Only them that writes, reads, so anyone who wants a book would already have written one.”

         “Do you need someone to help with the rowing on your journey to Jarrow?”

         “To Jarrow you would be faster walking there. It’ll take me a while to get there because as soon as we have a day with sun and fresh winds, I’ll be stopping off to air these wools on the rocks.  They need freshening before market.”

         “I can help you launder them if you wish.”

         “Launder? You mean soak all this wool in a tub of lye?  I think not. It would shrink them to felt and they’d be forever damp and moldy. No, a good airing will do.”

         “Whatever, I’d be glad to help you with it since I have to wait for you in Jarrow anyway to trade layman’s clothes for this robe.”

         So, it is a few days rowing the Jarrow. The mouth of the Tyne offers a harbor from the surf of the sea for this little boat. Up this river a short way is a flimsy little dock set over the sandy riverbank, apparently all familiar to Cloothar, where we unload the market goods. He sets up his booth as I’m sent up to the monastery to find his potential customers.

The sun shines today, brightening a shoreline said to be so often veiled in fog.  From the high view by the buildings, it seems the distant Sea is flat out drunk on the sweet azure of sky.

(Continues tomorrow)

#73.5 Thursday, October 9, 2025

Historical Setting: Northumbria, 793 CE.

         Here, in this Northumbrian village I do find some merchants’ stalls set out selling sacks of grains for winter stores, beets and chard; but today there is no one here dealing in fabrics. I ask at a wine seller’s stall where I can find Cloothar, the merchant who is known to provide black robes for monks. He casts his gaze up and down my ill-fitting robe, raising one eyebrow, finding my conspicuous need to be his entertainment.

         “Of course you are on a hunt for Cloothar. He must have had quite a lusty mead to fit you out like that. I mean, how hard can it be, to put a black robe on a monk?”

         “Indeed. How hard can it be?”

         “He’s been dealing in Viking loot these weeks.”

         “So, he is probably at the market places across the North Sea?” I ask.

         He gives me a sly eye, and leans in for a secret.

         “There is some Christian loot that won’t sell in the pagan markets, like monk’s garb, for example. So, I happen to know, Cloothar is, this very moment, meeting Norsemen’s ships in the Farne islands, making his trades with the Vikings before those Norsemen cross back to the markets at Jutland. He’ll be back on his way to Jarrow. Might you try a flask of wine while you wait?”

         “How long will I wait?”

         “No more than a week, I suppose.”

         “That would be a lot of wine.  I’d best beg bread from a baker while I wait.”

         I find a field of oats, ripened and late for harvest, and here the farmer welcomes my help in trade for shelter and straw for sleeping, and a fair share of gruel.

Here, I can watch the harbor for Cloothar’s so called “merchant ship” which, I am told, is nothing more than a leather currach. It is a week or more, and I begin to wonder if the dry goods merchant has chosen not to return to Lindisfarne after all. 

But now, on this Thursday, just such a craft is tied at the dock. It is a three-man boat with only two coracles for oars, and in the middle space, in a third rower’s place is a large bundle of monk’s robes, but no colors in linen or silks for any liturgical pomp.  This Viking booty has been picked over and the only things he has left wouldn’t be of value in the secular, pagan market.

         (Continues Tuesday, October 14)

#73.4 Wednesday, October 8, 2025

Historical Setting: Northumbria, 793 C.E.

                Religious rule is narrow. To a monk bound to the community by the Rule it may appear that another’s relationship with God is no relationship at all. Brother Ealdwin knows my robe is borrowed and assumes I am spiritually adrift because I don’t seem to value the Benedictine Rule. I seem to be on an opposite side of this centuries-old controversy.  Should we chant the Hallelujah of Easter on the day the Pope proclaims it to be, or should we follow the tradition of the Celtic saints who apparently founded this community?

         “Good Brother Ealdwin, I know you think I’m lost in spirit but God still knows me. I am only lost in the earthly sense, a stranger in a borrowed robe, showing up here amid all the sorrow, arguing against the Rule. I do keep a hermit’s spirituality.”

         “You are searching, Brother. Perhaps, you’re not ready to become a monk at this time.”

         “Maybe I should just shake the Lindisfarne sand from my shoes and go to Jarrow on this quest to learn the history of this place.”

         “What do you even know of Jarrow?”

         “I’ve heard it is one part of a double monastery, the St. Paul, of Peter and Paul.”

         He says, “If you don’t appreciate the rule here, just wait till you get to Jarrow.”

         “I’ve heard they have a very fine library there”

         “The writings of the Venerable Bebe are in that place. It was his home.”

“As I’ve heard.”

         “That will definitely put your studies on the righteous path. If you can ever bend to the rule, Jarrow is the place that will bend you.”

         “So, I’ve heard.”

         “There is a merchant, Cloothar who sails down the coast to the rivers Wear and Tyne to Jarrow. He trades in dry goods and will gladly take Jabari’s robe that fits you so poorly and provide you more suitable clothing for a layman.”

         “Of course – new clothes can make all things right. My tonsure, pretending a crown is already giving way to my common hair.”

         “Farewell Brother, may you one day learn to value the orderly teachings of Rome.”

         I walk the causeway to the mainland to find this merchant, Cloothar.

I hope Ealdwin’s parting wish won’t follow me. I’m not craving more Roman order for my prayers just now.

(Continues tomorrow)

#73.3 Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Historical Setting: Lindisfarne of Northumbria, 793 C.E.

         As we walk with the visitors to the causeway, I’m hearing more divisive talk of the old debate. The patron I walk with tells me of a monk at Jarrow who wrote a book of the history of these people affirming the singular righteousness of Rome. It’s written as history but it includes a biting commentary on this place.  Dressed, as I am as a monk with a crown for a tonsure, this chatty fellow assumes I fully agree with the Roman pope’s edicts. But the division between varieties of monasteries still seems a raw issue here.

         Once I was a victim of this controversy, (Note: Blog post #44.5, May, 2023). Yet, it still seems trivial to argue over uniformity of external matters among Christians. It is what it is.

         Dear God, your love is all around, never failing us.  Thank you.

         If God answers this prayer, it is simply to tell me, “You are welcome to love me uniquely as you do.” And I believe God heard my prayer and I am beloved too.

         If the spiritual nature of Christianity is a love relationship and we have so many models for love and they are all varieties and experiences, nearly always beautiful and gracious, rarely uniform and orderly, then… why do brilliant, respectful and holy people persist in finding a singular rule for religion.  There are many varieties of holy metaphor of love in our earthly ways of family. Even though each person comes as an infant into some sort of relationship of family yet one familial pattern is never the same as another. There is no orderly sameness of love among siblings and parents — brother to brother — mother to child, sister to father — and on. There is no particular righteous order on earth as it is in heaven. Love takes many forms. One person’s love is never the same even within a relationship. Love is always many faceted and often disorderly and usually completely unique and yet we are always calling it love regardless of how it is not exactly what another would call love.  So, over and over again, I am befuddled by our human controversies demanding a singular righteous way of being Christian. 

         I’m just wondering, or maybe I know, and this prayer is simply my prayer of gratitude to thank you for letting me love God and everyone else in my own way. Dear God, thank you.

 (Continues tomorrow)


#73.2, Thursday, October 2, 2025

Historical Setting: Lindisfarne of Northumbria, 793 C.E.
 

         Ealdwin and I are washing the dishes and I find it is a perfectly unsanctified time to ask Brother Ealdwin the questions I have about the Irish traditions of this monastery.

         “I’m hearing the patrons and the pilgrims talking among themselves, cursing an Irish root of Lindisfarne. But did this monastery once follow the Celtic Rule?”

         Somber and serious, Brother Ealdwin stacks another heap of bowls on the table, then answers.

         “We are obedient to the pope and follow the righteous Rule of Benedict now.”

         “Of course.”

         “You know, what you are calling a ‘Celtic Rule’ is no rule at all.  It is haphazard and disorderly with complete disregard for righteous obedience.”

         “It’s such an old matter; I didn’t expect to hear it discussed in this new time.”

         Brother Ealdwin doesn’t actually discuss it with me.  He just continues stacking the bowls in silence and I nod my gratitude for his help with the chore.

         I thought the divisive issues of Rule were more than a century in the past and at that time it seemed only a local issue in Francia. I thought it was a personal rift between Columbanus and the Frankish bishops and it was settled when Columbanus yielded to the Benedictine Rule calling for the date for Easter to follow the papal decree. And of course, there was that issue of tonsure.

         Over and over again I fall into the trap of thinking all of us humans in time progress from ignorance to wisdom. In this new awakening it is true that travel by sea is faster and new ways of navigating give sailors better direction. Towers are taller and horses wear iron shoes, and the plough horse wears a collar. But the olden ways of pettiness that divide God’s beloved Creation into warring factions seem only to grow deeper roots so ancient weeds of dissension keep showing up. Old controversies always find a way of sprouting back to life.

         Here, in this new time, this great future of humanity where I have awakened from darkness of death into the new, there still lingers the dearth of old Roman hates.

         Brother Ealdwin suggests I read the writings of a Northumbrian who was collecting the history of olden times here. As Ealdwin says, Bede thought more of ancient dust than new wonders. The tide will be turning soon, so we walk with the visitors toward the causeway before Vespers.

(Continues Tuesday, October 7)

#73.1 Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Historical Setting: Lindisfarne, 793 C.E.

         The reading of the scholar’s letter concludes, then the bishop blesses the squash soup such as it is – without salt. The benches are reset to face the dining board and the held breath of long-listening to the bishop exhales, relaxed now. Regardless, the fasting monks attend their prayers walking the shores with God.  After the meal visitors, pilgrims and patrons await the shift in the tides, mulling the emptiness they came here to see.

         Like little eddies roiling the waters in a rocky creek, the talk among the patronage and the episcopates is lots of little swirls of hates and not a healthy harbor for the flow of Spirit.

         Those who are only rare visitors here may have expected to find everything burned to the ground thinking all this was made of wood. That was just gossip to decry the Irish root of Lindisfarne. It was only the old church of wood, later sheathed in lead, that burned.  In these times the pope’s rule is kept. And in Rome, stone is used for buildings, so the newer oratorio didn’t burn.

         I walk quietly among the visitors as a borrowed monk in another’s robe but with the required tonsure I appear rooted here. I hear the talk among the dignitaries as I gather up the dirty bowls. I thought all this divisive worry over the Irish tradition was well behind us two centuries ago when Faither Columbanus, the abbot of the monasteries I knew in Gaul, finally rescinded to the wishes of the Frankish bishops, and yielded to celebrate Easter on the day of the Pope’s edict rather than following the Irish tradition.  But here we are again, in a completely Benedictine community of monks, resurrecting the same old arguments.

I would have expected to find the future of Christianity unfettered by seemingly petty issues of differences so we could all just celebrate the universal love of Jesus. To say I’m disappointed with the redundancy of all this political maneuvering is an understatement.  To me, all of the contrivances of division are a dark shadow of hates and hurts that continue to divide people in spite of God’s love for all people.

Brother Ealdwin is here feeding the kitchen fire preparing to help me wash the bowls.

(Continues tomorrow)