‘Why Am I Still Lying Here?’
Cuthbert, struck down by plague, was vexed to find that his brethren had been praying for him all the previous night.
664
© David Dixon, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.
The largely twelfth-century cathedral in Ripon, built on the site of an earlier church founded by St Wilfrid in 671. Wilfrid’s ‘Saxon crypt’ is all that remains of the original. In 664, Cuthbert had to make way for a new team at the monastery in Ripon out of loyalty to his abbot, Eata, but later on Cuthbert (now recovered from his dangerous illness) came round to Wilfrid’s position on the date of Easter, and helped patiently to bring the monastery at Lindisfarne into line too. See also Bede and the Paschal Controversy.
Introduction
This post is number 6 in the series Miracles of St Cuthbert
When the monastery at Ripon was founded in 661, Cuthbert served there under Abbot Eata. Eata clung loyally to a peculiar and not very accurate way of dating Easter borrowed from Ireland, and three years later King Oswy, who preferred the calendar used in Canterbury, Rome and the East, appointed Wilfrid in Eata’s stead. Cuthbert returned to the Abbey at Melrose in the Scottish borders.
ABOUT this time, according to his friend Herefrid the priest, who was formerly abbot of the monastery of Lindisfarne, he [Cuthbert] was seized with a pestilential disease, of which many inhabitants of Britain were at that time sick.*
The brethren of the monastery passed the whole night in prayer for his life and health; for they thought it essential to them that so pious a man should be present with them in the flesh. They did this without his knowing it; and when they told him of it in the morning, he exclaimed, “Then why am I lying here? I did not think it possible that God should have neglected your prayers: give me my stick and shoes.”
Accordingly, he got out of bed, and tried to walk, leaning on his stick; and finding his strength gradually return, he was speedily restored to health: but because the swelling on his thigh, though it died away to all outward appearances, struck into his inwards, he felt a little pain in his inside all his life afterwards; so that, as we find it expressed in the Apostles, “his strength was perfected in weakness.”*
From ‘Life of Cuthbert’ by St Bede (?672-735), as translated by J. A. Giles.
Next in series: Cuthbert and the Weary Hawk
* The ‘yellow plague’ broke out in 664 and spread rapidly over the British Isles, sparing only some parts of what is now Scotland. In 541 a pandemic of plague struck Constantinople and the Mediterranean during the reign of Justinian I (r. 527–565), and spread from there to break out sporadically across Europe over the next two hundred years (541-767).
* See 2 Corinthians 12:9. One is also put in mind of Jacob, who wrestled with God and was undefeated in the match, only to be left halt in one thigh ever after. See Genesis 32:24-32.
