Miracles of St Cuthbert
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Miracles of St Cuthbert’
Bede is reminded of another great Christian saint when St Cuthbert shoos some troublesome crows from his barley crop.
A good example of the way Bede uses miracles comes from the story of Cuthbert’s barley. Some later chroniclers took a story about Anthony of Egypt and some wild asses and transposed it, donkeys and all, onto more recent saints. Bede, however, was content to draw parallels with a quite different miracle attributed to St Cuthbert.
The Northumbrian monk was touched by two thieving birds who repented of their misdeeds.
Cuthbert had a particular attachment to the many wonderful birds of the Farne Islands, which remained a key feature of devotion to the saint at his shrine in Durham. He was not, however, a bird-pleaser any more than he was a people-pleaser, and if his birds needed a little moral correction he would steel himself to provide it.
Cuthbert’s friend comes asking for a priest to attend his dying wife — so long as it isn’t Cuthbert.
St Cuthbert’s miracles not only brought healing or deliverance from danger, but left others wiser and kinder for having lived through them. In this example, his friend Hildemer learnt that illness, and specifically mental illness, is nothing for a Christian to be ashamed of.
When the plague once again visited Northumbria, Bishop Cuthbert of Lindisfarne left his island retreat and brought comfort and healing to the suffering.
In 664, a particularly nasty epidemic of plague struck the British Isles and lasted for over twenty years. It nearly killed monk Cuthbert, who was never completely well for the rest of his days. Shortly after he was consecrated bishop of Lindisfarne in 685, the plague broke out again. Undaunted, Cuthbert left his beloved island retreat to tour the villages of the mainland, bringing comfort to the sick and bereaved.
A monk living in the tumbledown hermitage that had once belonged to St Cuthbert reluctantly decided that it needed more than repairs.
After many years of tramping about the Kingdom of Northumbria preaching the gospel and healing the sick, monk Cuthbert retired to the island of Inner Farne, just over a mile off the coast at Bamburgh. In 685, he reluctantly combined this with being Bishop of Lindisfarne, six miles further north; but he still managed to live out most of his days in his cell. He was buried on Lindisfarne, but seemingly left something behind.
An everyday act of charity triggered off a series of extraordinary events.
Alfred the Great ruled Wessex (roughly, southern and western England) from 871 to 899, but he had to reclaim it from Danish invaders first. The King had only a handful of loyal men to rely on, and was hiding out on a hill amid the Somerset levels, at that time a marshy lake.