This ‘shroud’ was made in the 1440s for the Yuriev (St George) Monastery in Great Novgorod, Russia, and shows angels gathered about the crucified body of Christ. From about the fourteenth century onwards, the Eastern Churches began to keep Good Friday by placing a cloth icon like this on a table in the church that represented the sepulchre of Christ while the clergy circled it, singing hymns and offering incense; it is a rite that strongly recalls the vision of St Godric two centuries earlier. See a video from Russia.
Introduction
St Godric of Finchale (?1065-1170) was a bed-ridden invalid near the end of a long and eventful life when Reginald, a monk from the nearby Durham Abbey, went to see him in his hermitage in a bend of the River Wear. It was a Saturday, the night before Easter Day. Back in the Abbey church, the monks were eagerly awaiting the sunrise, but Reginald had dozed off.
IT was the custom for a priest of the community at Durham to celebrate communion for Godric on feast days. One Easter, Reginald came and stayed overnight with him so he could look after the frail and aged hermit.*
In the small hours, Reginald woke from a doze to find Godric rejoicing in a very loud and clear voice, and calling often on the name of St Nicholas. Reginald watched and listened eagerly, but could make nothing of it, so next morning he asked the hermit what the singing had been about.
“I looked, and I saw visions of God,” Godric replied, “and of angels of God coming down to Christ’s tomb. There they rejoiced to raise their herald-voices in sweetly flowing praise to God; and there among them was the Lord’s holy confessor Nicholas,* rendering thanks with the clearest voice in the melody of hymns. My delight in the sweet flow of melody was such that I could not restrain myself, but joined my voice to theirs in such prayers as I knew.*
* For more on the hermitage at Finchale, including an artist’s impressions, see English Heritage.
* St Nicholas (270-343) was Bishop of Myra, in what is now Antalya Province in southwest Turkey. Thanks to a story telling how Nicholas, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, raised a sailor from the dead, sailors throughout the Mediterranean world took him for their patron. See St Nicholas and the Luckless Sailor. As a young man, Godric had been a sailor and had travelled in the Holy Land, so it was natural that he should feel close to St Nicholas. Godric made two pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
* Godric’s linguistic knowledge could be surprising. On one occasion he repeated the substance of a conversation conducted in Latin between the monks of Durham Abbey, on another he burst into fluent French, but Reginald had never heard him speak in either language before. It is true that Godric knew some Church Latin and had many years ago travelled in France; but many people who know their way around the Breviary and have popped over the Channel once or twice would be hard put to it to hold a conversation in Latin or French.
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