TRINITY · 31 AUGUST ◆ Celtic Saint
Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne
Bishop & Confessor · Apostle of Northumbria · d. 651
O God, who didst send thy servant Aidan from the holy island of Iona to rekindle the lamp of thy Gospel in the kingdoms of the North; Grant that we, after his example, may walk humbly among thy people, giving freely what we have freely received, and loving the poor as the image of our Lord; through Jesus Christ our Saviour, who is the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.
When the Northumbrian king Oswald sent to Iona for a missionary, the community first sent a man of severe disposition who returned in failure, reporting that the English were too stubborn and barbarous to be taught. It was Aidan who spoke up at the council that followed, asking gently whether perhaps the missionary had set too heavy a burden on untrained minds — whether it might not be wiser to begin, as the Apostle says, with milk before meat. The community saw at once that the man who had asked the question was the man who should go. This is the beginning of Aidan’s apostolate: not a grand commission but a quiet observation in a council chamber, the pastoral instinct recognising itself in the act of correcting another’s harshness. He arrived in Northumbria not as a conqueror of souls but as a physician who had first troubled to diagnose the patient.
Oswald gave him the island of Lindisfarne, and Aidan made of it a second Iona — a place of prayer, learning, and hospitality from which the missionaries went out on foot into the surrounding countryside. The detail of the walking matters. Oswald had given Aidan a fine horse, as befitted a bishop travelling through a kingdom, and Aidan gave it away to the first beggar he met on the road. When Oswald remonstrated — were there not lesser animals to give the poor? — Aidan asked him whether the child of a mare was worth more to the king than a child of God. Bede tells this story with evident relish. It is not merely an anecdote of generosity but a statement of Aidan’s entire method: the bishop who refuses the distance that rank and comfort create between himself and the people he has come to serve. He walked because walking kept him among the poor. He gave away horses because horses raised him above those on foot.
Bede, who was in many things a Roman and found much to criticise in the Celtic observance of Easter and the shape of the Celtic tonsure, nevertheless writes of Aidan with a warmth that breaks through every qualification. He neither sought nor loved anything of this world. He gave money to ransom slaves and then educated the ransomed boys to become priests. He gathered round him twelve English boys to be trained in the scriptures — among them, in later years, the young Chad and Cedd. He fasted and prayed and read the scriptures and walked and spoke to anyone who would listen, whether king or slave, and made no distinction between them in the manner of his address. The Trinity season in which his feast falls is the long season of ordinary time, the green weeks in which the Church simply lives out what it has received at Easter and Pentecost, and Aidan’s entire ministry is a portrait of what that ordinary living looks like when it is fully inhabited: nothing dramatic, nothing that requires an audience, simply the daily work of love in the places where love is needed.
He died leaning against the wall of the church he had built at Bamburgh, a buttress-post supporting his failing body as he prayed. He had seen from Lindisfarne the smoke rising from Bamburgh when the pagan Penda besieged it, and had prayed aloud — Lord, see what evil Penda doth — and the wind had turned and driven the fire back upon the besiegers. It was a miracle that saved a city, and characteristically Aidan seems barely to have registered it as such. He was leaning against the church wall because he was too weak to stand unsupported, and prayer was simply what one did when there was nothing else to be done. Fifteen years after his death, when the church was rebuilt, the post he had died against was found undecayed among the new timbers. And on the night of his death, on a hillside above the Lammermoors, a shepherd boy watching his flock looked up and saw a great light, and a soul being carried by angels into the opened heaven. The boy’s name was Cuthbert. He went the next morning to the nearest monastery and asked to be received. What Aidan began in Northumbria, Cuthbert carried to its completion; and what Cuthbert carried, Durham holds to this day.
Almighty God, who didst call thy servant Aidan to proclaim the Gospel in Northumbria, and gavest him the gift of a pastor’s heart and an apostle’s courage; Grant that thy Church may never lack such humble and devoted witnesses, who seek not their own but the things of Jesus Christ, and who spend themselves freely in the service of thy poor; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.