LENT · 20 MARCH ◆ Celtic Saint
Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne
Bishop & Confessor · Apostle of Northumbria · c. 634–687
O God, who didst call thy servant Cuthbert from the shepherds’ fields to feed thy flock in the wilderness places of the North; Grant that we, like him, may hear thy voice whether in the stillness of the cloister or in the burden of thy Church’s need, and follow whithersoever thou dost lead; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Cuthbert came to God as a shepherd boy on the hills above the Lammermoors, watching his flocks on the night that Aidan of Lindisfarne died. He saw a vision of a soul carried by angels into heaven, and the sight of it determined the whole of his subsequent life. He did not choose a contemplative vocation so much as he was apprehended by one — laid hold of from outside himself by a light that fell on the hillside before he had any say in the matter. This is the Lenten note struck at the very beginning of his story: the calling that arrives before we are prepared for it, that finds us tending to quite different things.
He entered Melrose under the prior Boisil, who greeted him on arrival with the quiet prophetic certainty of a man who already knew what he was looking at: Behold the servant of the Lord. From Melrose he went to Lindisfarne, and from Lindisfarne, after years of the common life, he withdrew to Farne Island — that small, storm-lashed outcrop off the Northumbrian coast where the sea never quite stops moving and the wind carries a kind of perpetual argument with the land. There he built himself a cell sunk into the earth so that he could see nothing but the sky. There he planted barley that the birds kept stealing, and spoke to them as one speaks to creatures who ought to know better, and they desisted. There he stood in the sea at night to pray, immersed to the neck in the cold North Sea water, and when he came ashore the otters came with him and dried his feet with their fur. Bede records this without a trace of irony: the creation serving the holy man, as it served Adam before the Fall. In Cuthbert, the Lenten journey inward arrives at something like its destination — the man at peace with himself before God, who is therefore mysteriously at peace with everything else.
He refused the bishopric of Lindisfarne twice. The first time the king came to Farne Island in a boat with a delegation of bishops and clergy, and Cuthbert would not move. The second time the king came ashore and knelt in the mud before him and wept, and Cuthbert at last relented — weeping himself, says Bede, as he left the island. This is the most Lenten thing about him: the acceptance of office as a species of self-surrender, the willing exchange of the hermit’s freedom for the bishop’s bondage. He served two years as bishop before returning to Farne Island to die. He had always known that the island was where he was meant to end.
The story does not stop at his death. His body, exhumed eleven years later for translation, was found uncorrupted — the flesh intact, the joints still flexible, the grave-clothes undecayed. For a hundred and twenty years after the Viking raids devastated Lindisfarne, his monks carried him in his coffin across the north of England, seeking a safe home for him. He accompanied them in their wandering as he had always accompanied his people in theirs. When they set him down at last in Durham, an ox-cart carrying the coffin refused to move in any direction but one, and that direction was the hill above the River Wear where the great Cathedral now stands. The wandering saint found his own resting place. His incorrupt body and his wandering coffin are together a parable of what the Lenten journey is for: that the self laid down in obedience is not lost, but carried — carried through every wilderness — and set down at last in the place that was always prepared for it.
O Almighty God, who didst call thy servant Cuthbert, while yet a shepherd on the hills, to leave all and follow thee; and didst so fill him with the grace of the Holy Ghost that he became a light to those who sat in darkness: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the same faith and obedience, may at last be gathered into thy eternal fold; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.