Lives of the Saints
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Lives of the Saints’
The lives of men are like voyages across stormy seas, but we no longer have to sail them as if they were uncharted waters.
Christ is a long narrative poem by Cynewulf, a poet writing in Old English at the turn of the ninth century, about seventy years after the death of St Bede. In the following extract, he likens human life to the tossing of ships on stormy seas, and the Christian gospel as a chart to bring our ‘sea-steeds’ safely to heaven’s harbour.
Shortly before Easter, an ivory box went missing from the gifts presented at the shrine of St Cuthbert.
Reginald (?-?1190) was a monk of Durham Priory where St Cuthbert, the seventh-century Bishop of Lindisfarne, lay buried behind the High Altar. Pilgrims came from all over the country with stories of the saint’s miraculous interventions, and Reginald compiled a catalogue of them, and of the miracles reported at Cuthbert’s shrine. Some he witnessed with his own eyes, such as this one.
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.
When the capital of the Roman Empire was in the grip of a violent earthquake, it fell to one small child to save all the people.
According to tradition, the Trisagion or Thrice-Holy Hymn was revealed by angels one September 24th during the tenure of Patriarch Proclus of Constantinople (434-446). Some thirty years later Peter, the abrasive Patriarch of Antioch and a former fuller by trade, took it upon himself to add an extra line. Three centuries after that John Damascene was still upset about it.
Imma claimed to be a harmless peasant, but there was something about him that Ecgfrith, King of Northumbria, found downright uncanny.
In 679, King Ecgfrith of Northumbria’s imperial ambitions were severely dented at the Battle of Trent, when he failed to defeat King Ethelred of Mercia somewhere near Lincoln, and lost control of the Kingdom of Lindsey. After telling us about this sorry business, Bede recalled hearing a story about one of Ethelred’s thegns (royal servants), told to him by friends who had it from the man himself.
Luka had netted a nice little haul of stolen coins and antiques, but he could not resist stripping down the historic Icon of the Sign too.
The ‘Virgin of the Sign’ is a twelfth-century icon of the Virgin Mary kept to this day in Great Novgorod, Russia — the ‘sign’ refers to the promise made by the prophet Isaiah to King Ahaz, that one day a virgin would conceive and bear a son. In 1170 the icon saved the city from a siege, and a special church was built for it, but it would seem that by the seventeenth century the mystique was beginning to wear off.