Our retreat began on Monday with an introduction to St. Aidan by Norman and Ingrid, our retreat leaders. The retreat's name is "Celtic Saints and Sites." Norman and Ingrid are from Gloucester, England. He is a singer/songwriter, so we hit it off well from the very beginning.
We were engaged by good story-telling aided by artwork related to Aidan via PowerPoint, and original songs written and performed by our retreat leaders. Since we are close by and others who are here for the retreat had not been there, as I had, the plan was to go to Lindisfarne on Wednesday.
I struggled with the decision whether to go or stay at the retreat center. In the end, I went. The primary reason was the opportunity to walk "The Pilgrim Way," across the inlet at low tide. I had walked the causeway in the first day of my retreat on Lindisfarne. It was warm, much longer, and I had to contend with cars from both directions while dragging a suitcase and carrying a backpack.
At least this trip offered the opportunity to go unencumbered and walk the likely path that pilgrims coming to the island would have traveled. It also offered an entirely different perspective on the island.
IT WAS COLD! It was also highly windy, with strong, steady winds of forty-fifty miles per hour blowing. My eardrums froze. We also had to walk on an uncertain surface...sometimes mud, sometimes, sand, sometimes really mucky mud, sometimes ankle-deep water, and sometimes over seagrass.
Although much of the actual travel to and from the Abbey and Priory on the island eventually took place under sail, I wondered about early trips to the island. How did they get there in winter when it was colder than the day we went? How did they manage on rainy days? How did they tell the tides to know when it would be safe to cross? How would they have gotten supplies back and forth to the island? How many monks on pilgrimage drowned because they did not judge the timing of the tides properly?
The thing that so impresses is what these men (and women) were willing to give up for the Kingdom of God and the spread of the Gospel. They were actually looking for ways to practice asceticism (self-denial). If we were to go back and live in their time and attempt to live at the height of their bounty in terms of food they had raised, wool they had shorn, spun, and woven to make their own clothes, bread they had baked, five to six chapel services per day, planting, cultivating, and harvesting regularly, fetching water from a well, fishing out to sea, and maintaining an active communal and personal prayer life, we would feel we had given up quite a lot.
They would have felt they gained far more than they sacrificed.
Aidan's story is one of great courage in stepping out to take over a project at which someone else had failed. It also demonstrated great leadership to enter unknown territory, even under the protection and validation of the King, to preach a message the people had scarcely heard before, encourage them to be baptized, and then teach them how to follow Jesus in the Way.
Tonight after dinner, we tackle St. Cuthbert.
The Celtic saints didn't believe that Jesus' words, "If any person would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me," were a mere suggestion. Part of the attraction of the Celtic Saints is that they "walk the talk, just as much as they talk the walk."
This is my hope, coming out of this retreat, that more and more each day, that the power of Christ may be found in me and that each person I meet will see Christ in me.
I have the rest of my life to work on it, but the work has already begun,
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