Homily given at the Diocesan Theological College
21 November 2007
The Feast of St Hilda
The Very Revd Michael J. Pitts
Ephesians 4:1-6
Matthew 19:27-29Coming up to 40 years ago, I was ordained, first deacon and then priest in the Cathedral Church of Christ and St Mary the Virgin in Durham in the North East of England. I was thus ordained between the tombs of St Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede. The Cathedral was in fact originally built, in the 10th century, to be the final resting place of the remains of St Cuthbert. It took a long time for poor Cuthbert to be finally laid to rest, for he had died some three hundred years previously in 687.
At first he was buried in the church at Lindisfarne, a beautiful semi-island off the coast of Northumberland. At high tide, it is an island, but at low tide you can reach it from the mainland by walking, usually barefoot, across the wet sand. The ruins of the abbey that you can see today on Lindisfarne date from the 11th century and this is therefore not the church known to Cuthbert. But in Cuthbert's day Lindisfarne was the centre of a revival of Celtic Christianity, with Aidan, Chad, Cedd, Egbert, Colman and Wilfrid, along with Cuthbert, among its leaders.
Christian faith had first come to England in the days of the Roman Empire, and was probably already established in the second century, and certainly strong by the third. But with the collapse of Roman authority, England was invaded by Anglo Saxons. This early church became scattered to the mountainous corners of Ultima Thule, to Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, Iona and Lindisfarne.
I will return to this part of the story in a moment, but let me for a moment jump forward again to the death of Cuthbert. He was not long in his tomb on Lindisfarne, for this time it was the Danes who attacked from across the North Sea, and the monks fled, taking the remains of Cuthbert with them wherever they wandered. The wanderings, as we have seen took three hundred years, until the remains arrived in Durham, where they lie behind the high Altar of the Cathedral. At the West end of the Cathedral lie the bones of the Venerable Bede, who was born a few years before Cuthbert died, probably in 673. His remains also did not arrive in Durham until the 11th century, but I know of no story to tell what was happening to them for those three hundred years.
Bede was a Biblical Scholar and a scientist but, for our purpose today, the main thing about him was that he was a historian, who is known as the Father of English History, and it is from Bede that we know most about early Christianity in England, including about the life and times of Hilda, whose feast we celebrate today.
Hilda was born in 614, a descendant of the Royal family of Northumbria. She was baptized by Paulinus, Bishop of York in 627. It is here that we must take up again the story of the Celtic Church. As I said the church had been, for several centuries, scattered to the remote corners of the British Isles and its existence was largely unknown to the church authorities in Rome. Pope Gregory the Great sent first Augustine in 597 and later Paulinus to England. As Augustine and Paulinus settled down, respectively in Canterbury and York, they began to meet the Celtic Christians, and immediately problems emerged. The Celtic Christians had a different way of calculating the date of Easter. They also had different tonsures (the haircut of monks) and a different structure. Whereas the Roman Bishops tended to be attached to the great cities (which were called, as we still call them, the see cities of the Bishops) the Celtic Bishops were wandering monks. These problems rumbled on for a generation, until finally King Oswy called all parties together to a Synod in Whitby Abbey, which took place in 664. Fifteen years earlier, Aidan had appointed Hilda as Abbess of Whitby, and so she played host to the debate. Among the Celts, Colman and Cedd fought for the maintenance of the Celtic rites and systems. Wilfrid sided with the Roman Party. Despite her contact with Paulinus, Hilda at first joined Colman and Cedd, but when King Oswy decided to solve the problem by imposing the Roman solution, Hilda accepted the decision. Colman and Cedd went back to Lindisfarne in a huff, which, to steal a line from Stuart McLean, was the usual way of traveling on those days.1
I tell you this story for a number of reasons. First of all I like the story, and it intersects with my own story. As well as being ordained in Durham, I have on several occasions made the pilgrimage across the wet sands to Lindisfarne and prayed in the ruins of the church. I have also visited the remains of the later abbey of Whitby and walked on the stony beach below the cliff on which the abbey stands. I have picked up the petrified snakes which Hilda had thrown from the abbey with her bare hands when the abbey was invaded by these venomous serpents. Of course what you see are really fossilized ammonites from the chalk cliffs, but it makes a good story, anyway, of this powerful, important and formidable woman.
Then, of course I tell the story, because today is the Feast Day of St Hilda, a saint who is very dear to the heart of your college chaplain and my dear friend and honorary assistant at the Cathedral. If you don't know why, you will have to ask her.
But there are other directions we can take, beginning with this story of the seventh century. When we later come to the Reformation in the sixteenth century onwards, the story of that time is often told as though Henry VIII and his successors, ecclesial and royal, created a new church, which had torn itself away from its catholic roots, to become a protestant church, the Church of England. I prefer to see the story differently. What happened in the Reformation was rather a restoration of the catholic church which, before the Synod of Whitby, had existed in England quite independently of the authority of Rome. In spite of what the Roman Catholic Church may say, there can be, has been and is a fully catholic church independent of the Pope and the Roman hierarchy. In our own day we have seen a revival of interest in that original Celtic church, in its spirituality and its liturgy.
I believe there is another helpful parallel between then and today in the dynamic of the debate which was carried out in Whitby. For assuming good will on both sides, one side was being driven by the value of principle, and one side by the value of unity, a dichotomy which is interestingly presented in our Biblical readings for this feast. This same dichotomy is, I believe, a large part of the dynamic of our current debate, or war, depending on how you look at it, in our Anglican Communion today. For some the most important thing is to maintain the unity of our Anglican communion. For others what is most important is the principle at stake. Though unlike in seventh century Whitby, today there are two opposing principles. Some see the absolute truth of the text of the Scriptures, literally interpreted, to be the principle for which they are fighting. Others, and I count myself among them, are concerned to maintain that what is important is the Gospel message of compassion, welcome and full acceptance in a boundary free community. Hilda ended up with those who found unity to be the greater value. In the present state of play, I am not sure that I can agree with her.
1. This line occurs in a CD entitled "History of Canada" Stuart McLean CBC 2006.