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The Celtic Way
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St Cuthbert of Durham (part 4)
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Saint Cuthbert of Durham (Part 4)
In 1537, Henry VIII's Commissioners for the north of England came to Durham
as part of the programme of dissolving the monasteries. Always with an eye to
the acquiring wealth for the crown, they stripped Cuthbert's shrine of its
jewels and precious metals and levelled it to the ground with their axes and
crow-bars. Then one of their stooges set about opening up the coffin in order
to smash the relics and destroy all trace of the saint. A remarkable record of
the Cathedral Priory, The Rites of Durham, tells us that he found, instead of
dust and ashes, that the body was 'lying whole uncorrupt with his face bare and
his beard as it had been a fortnight's growth'. An altercation followed, the
Commissioners standing below the feretory wondering why the man had not
completed the work of a few minutes and thrown down a pile of Saxon bones and
detritus. The intact skeleton caused them to stop their work, leave the remains
where they were and seek advice from London. We can be grateful that the advice
ever came.
The relics remained where they were and subsequent openings in 1827 and 1899
confirmed that they had not been tampered with. In 1827 the superb Saxon
artifacts now housed in our Treasury were removed: the pectoral cross of St
Cuthbert, a stole, maniple and girdle, the silk wrappings, an ivory comb, a
portable altar and pieces of the coffin itself. The great black slab, huge,
primitive and unadorned identifies his resting place in crude unembellished
letters: CUTHBERTVS. Its sheer starkness and simplicity are profoundly
moving: the best tribute we can offer as we honour a man whose extraordinary
career in both life and death have endeared him to so many. Millions still come
to Durham to bring to his place their hopes, their longings, their joys, their
fears, their pain. He is, I think, as close as England has ever come to
begetting a national saint. What he is to us is no doubt very different from
what he has been to past generations, and I have tried to show how Durham
Cathedral played a large part in the process of reinterpreting his significance
to subsequent generations.
Cuthbert is the emblem of so much that our churches today need to cultivate.
Here are some reasons why. First, for his askesis or spiritual discipline. It
is not that others did not also practise 'spiritual training': rather, it is
the lengths to which he took it, his complete devotion to the way of a
disciple. It never faltered, even in the midst of a life fully taken up with
the evangelistic, pastoral and organisational duties of a bishop. From this
self-offering, going right back to the night on the hills around Melrose where
he had his vision of Aidan's soul being carried up to heaven and resolved at
once to enter monastic life. Then we honour the memory of a man who lived close
to the natural world, who not only respected it and treated it with courtesy
but befriended it, England's St Francis 600 years earlier.
If we were looking for a patron saint of environmental responsibility, we
could not do better. We celebrate him as an evangelist for his
perseverance in preaching the gospel and the lengths to which he went in order
to bring the love of Jesus Christ to communities in remote places. As a
bishop he is an inspiration to all called to public office in the
church, not simply in the complete commitment he brought to it, but in managing
the boundaries of his public role and personal spiritual disciplines. As a
spiritual guide and companion he models wise 'accompaniment' in the path
of wisdom and discipleship.
I could go on and on. Whether it is on his windswept Holy Island or Inner
Farne, washed by the surf of the bleak grey North Sea under the wide
Northumberland sky, or kneeling by his simple black slab beneath the soaring
vaults and arcades of Britain's best-loved building, we find ourselves drawn
back to his story in ways that continue to inspire us, and put to us the
inescapable questions of what it means to be human and to be Christian in the
complex century, so different from Cuthbert's, in which we live and seek to
bear Christian witness to our generation as he did in his.
| Rev Michael Sadgrove (Dean
of Durham) October 2012 |
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St Cuthbert's Parish Church. 5 Lothian Road.
Edinburgh. UK. EH1 2EP
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