St Bede of Jarrow
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘St Bede of Jarrow’
St Bede says that Christ’s Transfiguration should remind us that we live in two worlds at the same time.
One day, Jesus took three of his closest disciples up a mountain, and there briefly revealed himself to them as he truly is. For St Bede, the 8th century Northumbrian monk, it was a reminder that the light of heaven comes to those whose hearts are in heaven.
St Bede explains how the Exodus and the Ten Commandments are related to Easter and Whitsuntide.
Just as the Jewish festival of Passover commemorated the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt, so the Feast of Weeks fifty days later commemorated the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. St Bede explains how these two feasts are taken up in the Christian year as Easter and Whit Sunday or Pentecost.
In the fourth century, Britain’s Christians acquired a taste for watering down the mystery of their message.
When the Roman Emperor Constantine ended decades of persecution for Christians in February 313, those in Britain returned to their churches with simple joy. Yet missionaries to Anglo-Saxon Britain in 597 found a church scattered and plagued by alien beliefs. St Bede blamed a priest from Egypt, Arius, for the startling change.
A young monk was rewarded for taking his duties as guest-master seriously.
In about 658, Abbot Eata sent Cuthbert from Melrose Abbey away south to Ripon, to be the guest-master in a new monastery there. It was while he was at Ripon that Cuthbert had a remarkable experience which left him trembling with excitement and fear.
Cuthbert trusted that keeping his promised fast would not do him any harm.
A shieling is a temporary stone hut, built for the summer months when sheep or cattle are taken to higher ground. Bede tells us that a near-contemporary, the seventh-century saint Cuthbert, once had a remarkable experience in one of these huts, as he was journeying across the empty moorland of Northumbria.