Righteous Beorhthelm, Wonderworker and Hermit of Ilam

Saint Beorhthelm of Ilam

Today in the Orthodox Church we venerate another English saint, a rather obscure hermit, a friend of Saint Gúðlác of Crowland, named Beorhthelm [later Bettelin, Bertolin or Bertram], whose chapel, font and holy well lie in the village of Ilam near Stafford in the Peak District.

Beorhthelm, apparently a well-to-do youngster from Mercia, went courting a bride from the other island. He won the heart of an Irish lass, the daughter of a king, and brought her back with him to his homeland heavy with child. She went into labour as they were travelling in the woods near the village of Wetton, and he left her to search for a midwife. When he returned, he found her body being devoured by wolves. Stricken with grief and remorse, Beorhthelm resolved to put the world behind him and seek after a holy life in Christ. The life of the hermit was the one that most appealed to him, after the manner of Gúðlác and thus also the Desert Fathers. He sought, and was granted, a small piece of land in the hills near Ilam, in the Peak District.

Beorhthelm made his hermitage there and took up the life of a hesychast in a cave on the land that was given to him. One local tradition has it that the Devil tempted him to pray to turn stones into bread, but the stubborn Beorhthelm reversed the Devil’s prayer and prayed instead to turn bread into stones! This prayer seems to have been answered, as some of the loaf-shaped ‘Saint Bertram’s stones’ are still housed at a parish church in Cheshire, and regarded as relics.

In those days, hermits in the Celtic tradition – or rather, in the Ægyptian tradition recently borrowed from thence by Saint Gúðlác – were given deep respect by local people. Many were the ordinary folk who went into the hills around Ilam to seek Beorhthelm’s wisdom, both in everyday matters and in matters of the spirit, and not once did the loving ascetic turn any of them away, but provided all who came to him with consolation. Even so, so many were his visitors that he often withdrew himself into his cave for long periods to be in conversation only with God. He lived to an old age in Ilam, and was commemorated as a saint very soon after his death. Holy Father Beorhthelm, pray to God for us!

Like newborn lambs are we lacking in any defence,
Unable to withstand the onslaughts of the spiritual wolves who seek ever devour us;
But do thou, O righteous Beorhthelm, come unto our aid,
And with the staff of God’s grace which abideth in thee
Drive far from us the savage minions of Satan,
That by thine entreaties we may find safety
And rest in the fold of Christ in paradise.

Holy Cross Church, Ilam
Burial place of Saint Beorhthelm

Absurdistan: light magic-realist Veit Helmer comedy

Temelko (Max Mauff) and Aya (Kristyna Malérová) in Absurdistan

Absurdistan is a modern adaptation of a classical Greek comedy, inspired by a Turkish news story from 2001, featuring a Czech leading lady and an East German leading man, both speaking Russian in an Azeri village with Georgian supporting actors and extras. Given that the story of Absurdistan all takes place in the same small village of fourteen families in an unspecified post-Soviet Central Asian republic, this is quite the cosmopolitan undertaking. Nonetheless, it is an enjoyably-cute Veit Helmer film. Yes – this is the same man who would later write and direct the similarly-endearing Baikonur, and it shows. There is a similar fascination with the interstices between a færie-believing traditionalist antiquity and a Soviet high-modernity that never quite realised itself, and, also as in Baikonur, there are intimations that the two of them are somehow intimately bonded.

Somewhere in Central Asia there is a Silk Road village which has been conquered consecutively by the Mongols, the Persians, the Turks, the Soviets – and which was primarily famed for the charms of its women, whom the traders and caravan guards would linger days at a time to admire. Its men, in turn, fancy themselves famed for their lusty virility – but are really marked by their extreme laziness. Indeed, much of the day-to-day business of the village, though it is owned by the men, is nonetheless vastly run by the women, who for the most part put up with their husbands, who much prefer spending their days philosophising over vodka in the local teahouse to working.

Temelko (Maximilian Mauff) and Aya (Kristyna Malérová) are both born in the village on the same day, in the same maternity ward, at the same time – and have been inseparable since, being close friends throughout their childhood and even ‘marrying’ each other at the age of eight with the help of other village children. However, their feelings for each other change when, during one of their romps in the dusty local countryside, they happen upon another couple having a – well – romp in the dusty local countryside. Temelko starts literally chasing Aya, but Aya, who is no less desirous of Temelko, wants her first time to be perfect: she wants to feel like she’s flying. Her babushka (Nino Chkheidze) uses what seems to be a dubious mix of a Klingon blood oath and astrological mumbo-jumbo to predict that their chances of having perfect sex will happen when Sagittarius and Virgo will come into alignment four years later.

Temelko, reluctantly, agrees to keep his hands off Aya until then. But the village’s only water source – a leaking, rusty pipeline – runs dry five days before this rare alignment of the stars, and the women of the town find themselves having to do all the work of keeping the town running without water, which becomes an increasingly dirty and smelly proposition in the absence of water for laundry, dishes, bathing or drinking. After Temelko returns to the village, it’s Aya who comes up with the idea of a sex strike – as long as the town’s water main is out of action, the women are to withhold sex from the men. The result is a battle of the sexes which accelerates in comic ways – the two halves of the village become armed camps separated by barbed wire, and the two would-be lovers in the middle find themselves involved in farcical misunderstandings and embarrassments throughout, as Temelko makes efforts to prove his love to Aya by fixing the water main before the stars are out of alignment.

Again, it’s a cute film. The plot is predictable, but that doesn’t detract from its watchability. As one might expect from a romantic comedy in this genre, there are a lot of bawdy double entendres, awkward compromising situations, cross-dressing gags and slapstick. But a lot of the humour – indeed, a lot of the charm of the movie, full stop – derives from the young, awkward, disarming narration and inner monologues of the two protagonists, which drive the movie forward – dialogue being employed much more sparingly. Mauff and Malérová make a convincing young couple in love; a definite late-adolescent chemistry is present even when they’re staring each other down over the barbed-wire fence and the war of the sexes around them is escalating.

But it’s Veit Helmer’s magic-realist eye which really makes the film sparkle. Just as in Baikonur in which the comatose cosmonaut provides us with a convincingly-æthereal Sleeping Beauty, here as well the stars, fate and thwarted love combine to produce a heroic quest for Temelko. Aya’s father had once gone down to fix the pipe along with four other villagers, and all of them drowned. Temelko must similarly journey to the subterranean land of the dead to provide the dying village with water – with life. But this is all handled on-screen with an eye on the prosaic detail (often with a sepia-toned grainy-and-scratched filter applied in post-production), on a post-Soviet village’s struggles to satisfice with rusting and failing technology, which here as well operates by a kind of færie logic. Temelko’s romantic efforts to help Aya realise her dream of flying – including a jury-rigged rowboat hooked to a pulley between their two houses, and a much more precarious-looking makeshift rocket built from an old tractor seat and what look like a fire extinguisher and an old propane tank – add to the sense of post-Soviet whimsy.

Absurdistan is certainly a light film that’s easy on the eyes and doesn’t require a great deal of deep thought. The local touches, the post-production grit and the dry, hilly Azerbaijani scenery do add to the movie’s flavour. But the story is one which appeals to a primal, universal mythos that relies on the tension between the sexes for its narrative power.

Réketır: the bowl of our own injustice

Ruslan (Murat Bisembin) and Saıan (Saıat Isembaev) in Réketir

Last month before leaving for Tulsa, I watched the Aqan Sataev film Jaýjúrek myń bala, the dastanic national epic written for the twentieth anniversary of Kazakhstan’s independence, centred on the life and exploits of the orphaned Sartaı. Sataev’s later piece is a tribute to Kazakhstan’s now ex-President Nursultan Nazarbaev, who – the end of the movie states explicitly – finished the grand historical task for which Abylaı Khan and Sartaı and other Kazakh heroes had fought for centuries. This was not, however, the film that made Sataev (and his studio, SataiFilm) famous. One of Sataev’s first movies was a neo-noir crime film: Réketır (that is, Racketeer), which was far less laudatory and far less heroic – but which was hailed on its release as a true reflection of a certain era in post-Soviet history.

I do have to wonder a bit if Aqan Sataev and Sergei Bodrov don’t have something of a friendly rivalry going on: the films they produce and direct are often very similar to each other. This film, for example, bears a number of surface-level resemblances to Guka Omarova’s Shıza (Schizo): both movies are about a youngster’s ‘descent’ into, and possible redemption from, a violent life of organised crime. Both movies were produced on a shoestring budget with drama-school casting. They share a number of thematic elements as well. Both Shıza and Réketır are, at bottom, commentaries not only on organised crime but on the entire capitalist ethos of the post-Soviet 1990s – with its shock therapy, individualism, materialism, alcoholism, violence, naked greed and (often literal) backstabbing.

But Mustafa’s understated revolt in Shıza against the norms of his time – his selflessness; his sense of fair play; his familial loyalty and particularly his love for Zinaida and Sanjik – keeps him somewhat aloof and preserved from the base grasping and thievery going on all around him in a greedy and materialistic society which inevitably sees him as stupid or crazy. By contrast, Sataev wants us to inhabit and sympathise with the mentality of a ‘normal’ person in this society. Saıan (Saıat Isembaev) is the main character as well as the narrator – his Mike Hammer voice-over often providing us with interior monologue and other context. A below-average student in school – much to the disappointment of his mother in particular – he enlists in the Soviet Army and comes out with a scholarship and a job as a courier. The one thing Saıan is good at – even though in his youth he didn’t enjoy it – is boxing. However, we see from flat shots of his parents watching Gorbachev on an old black-and-white TV that the times are changing.

Saıan’s father is fired from his state-provided job, and falls into depression and drink. His mother takes to selling things on the street. Saıan’s high school girlfriend Asel (Asel Sagatova) leaves him for a richer man. One day in 1993 after a boxing match, a man named Ruslan (Murat Bisembin) approaches Saıan with an offer of a steady job – which, unsurprisingly, Saıan doesn’t turn down. Ruslan, it turns out, runs his own local extortion ring, and is hiring Saıan to be one of his ‘boys’, that he sends to shake down (and ‘protect’, if they’re compliant) local businessmen like the bartender Abu (Bolat Qalymbetov): breaking a nose or a leg or an arm if need be. Saıan then introduces us to his partners in the business – most notably Aman, who murders one of Ruslan’s rivals and does ten years in prison as a result, only to seek solace in the Qur’an while in prison. One of Saıan’s ‘brothers’, a petty crook who cheats passersby with a shell game (played by Tolepbergen Baısakalov, who landed a supporting rôle in Tulpan about the same time), boasts that he just got back from America on his bike just before a couple of Russians, whom he presumably conned earlier, demand their money back from him. They get into a fight with Saıan and Ruslan’s other ‘boys’, who leave them all out cold and bloodied. However, these Russians are connected to the police, who arrest them all.

Ruslan’s gang doesn’t just dabble in such petty crimes, though – they also muscle their way in on bigger business. They manage to earn their keep ‘protecting’ an up-and-coming businessman, with Western fashion sense in the new nineties mould, named Jan (Janat Baıjanbaev), who is currently aiming to start in on a big industrial venture with the help of partners from Moscow. Ruslan is promised a cut of all his future business. For a while, things start looking up for Saıan – his parents are no longer in as desperate a situation, though neither of them are happy with the shady business he’s gotten into. He also runs into Asel again, who is divorced. Now that Saıan is doing better for himself, she wants to rekindle their relationship, and invites him over to her house for ‘a cup of tea’. Things start to go south, however, when Jan runs into financial problems – and brings in another ‘business partner’ with more money and more muscle than Ruslan & Company have.

The film alternates, sometimes startlingly, between treating its story with scowling seriousness and with a certain satirical, comedic eye. Sataev seems to have a preference for these flat shots of the businessmen Ruslan and his crew shake down, as they make obsequious gestures to the ‘boys’, that are clearly meant to draw laughs. The relationship between Saıan and Asel has none of the same charm as the parallel relationship between Mustafa and Zinka in Shıza; Zinka clearly cares about the money Mustafa brings her, but only insofar as she’s a foster mother who has to make rent somehow – Asel just comes across as mercenary. This unfortunately causes the one scene in which Saıan shows true, unguarded grief – when Asel miscarries in the maternity ward – to fall slightly flat. For the most part, however, we come to sympathise with Saıan, whose normalcy, despite his indisputable criminality, can sometimes disarm us. When he is suddenly and unexpectedly thrust into the position of gang leader for the first time, we can sense his indecision, and we know that despite his willingness to use his fists, he simply doesn’t have that streak of sadism and ruthless vindictiveness he needs to be ‘successful’ from the perspective of his own enterprise. Despite being somewhat alienated from his old friends in the army and from college, really he’s still just that college kid who got in way over his head.

It was clear to me from Sataev’s Jaýjúrek myń bala that he has some deeply-held Islamic convictions, and they do show up quite strongly in this movie also. But here the Islamic voice does not serve any nationalistic or triumphalist purpose. Sataev’s Islam is much more that of the Sûfî poets: he is looking for a specific kind of repentance. The voice of conscience in the film is Aman, the hit-man from the first act who went to prison for putting one of Ruslan’s rivals out of action. As Aman drives Saıan to a mosque to pray, he begins talking about what he learned in his time in prison, how he learned to put away old grudges and live his life with a sense of contentment rather than greed. For Aman, if God judges everybody at the end, and if His judgements are not our judgements, then we have only our own acts and our own injustices to be responsible for, and have no need to seek revenge. Aman says that there is a bowl hanging over every man’s head containing all the injustices he does, and if it overflows, the evil will pour out upon him. It seems that for Sataev, as well as for the Russians who struggled with these issues at the same time, the ‘way out’ from the cruel, cutthroat materialism of the 1990s lay in a return to God – the ‘long walk to mosque’, if I may appropriate and slightly abuse the Orthodox phrase. Saıan never quite finishes that walk, though, despite Aman driving him right up to the door – and he is left with that bowl of his own evil poured out upon him.

As crime movies go, Réketır, despite its few dabbles into possibly comedic or satirical territory with regard to its subject matter, still comes across as effective. It moves at a quick clip. It strikes just the right note of gangster bravado: letting us see the big Western luxury cars, the Rémy Martin cognac, the discos and the dinner parties that were the putative earthly reward for the spent casings and bloody knuckles, without rubbing them in our faces, romanticising or glorifying them. The violence itself is likewise gritty and understated, not cartoonish. And the religious themes – particularly as they relate to the gangster code of retribution – here seem to mirror those in, for example, a Martin Scorsese movie a bit more so than the Russian crime films from the same period.

EDIT: I know where that song from the scene with the Moscow big-shot came from! That’s ‘Kokil’ from the album Jumyr-Kylysh by the Kazakh folk-metal band Ulytau!

Early maps, space and the post-colonial Western mind

In my recent attention to matters Old and English, I haven’t been focussing on hagiographies to the exclusion of all else – though my piecemeal calendar-driven re-read of Bede has certainly lent itself well to that purpose. But I recently came across an Old English map. A map of the world, in fact, dated to a couple of decades before the Great Schism and perhaps as many as four decades before the Norman Conquest. This is a digitised image of that map here:

Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi, ca. 1030

Several things strike me immediately about this map. The first is that the Old English placed the Eastern Mediterranean at the centre of the map. As is still more clearly evident in a Psalter map from the late 1200s, the centre of the world was held to be the city of Jerusalem. (For the benefit of the wags – not literally, of course: Bede, as did all mediæval minds, held the world to be a globe.) The second is that, because ‘east’ is ‘up’ on the map, the British Isles are all the way down at the lower left-hand corner.

Psalter map, ca. 1290. Note the iconographic depiction of Christ at the top.

This map orientation may look odd to us moderns, but it makes sense. Jerusalem was the site of the Temple, and Golgotha – just outside Jerusalem – the site of Our Lord’s Passion. It makes sense that a mediæval European mind which places God at the centre of the cosmos would adopt an Incarnational logic that places the life and place of Christ at the centre of her understanding. Additionally, it fully makes sense that a mediæval European would regard ‘east’ as ‘up’ or ‘forward’. Think about the way Orthodox and historic Roman Catholic churches are built – which direction is the altar in, and which way do the people face the iconostasis? How do we set up our prayer corners? We pray to the east because that is the direction that Scripture indicates the Second Coming will happen, and also because that is where the Holy Fathers direct us to pray. That is also where the sun rises. And this is also according to Classical logic and mindset. The name Yemen – from the Arabic al-Yaman اليمن and the Hebrew Teyman תימן from whence also comes the name Benjamin – refers, as Dr Paul Tarazi informed our Hebrew class – to both the right hand, and to the cardinal direction south. Hence, Yemen is ‘the South’, and Benjamin is bin-yamin, the ‘son of the right hand’! Which way do you have to be facing for the south to be on your right hand? Our very word ‘orientation’ itself derives from the Latin root for ‘east’: to the Classical mind, when you are orienting yourself you are literally ‘finding east’. For a culture like that of the Old English that was transforming itself in the Church, steeping itself in the wisdom of the Holy Fathers, a map orientation that relegates your homeland to the lower left corner of the world map was not only perfectly acceptable but sensible.

Gough Map, ca. 1300

It’s noteworthy that, as the Psalter map (and the contemporary Gough map) makes clear, this ‘east-up’ map orientation survived the upheavals of the Great Schism which severed Rome from Jerusalem (and Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch). However, it did not survive the age of conquest. As mapping became a more technically-intricate process to meet the needs of navigation and maritime trade, the portolan chart replaced the classical mappa mundi. The first portolan charts were drawn in the mid-13^th century in the same Italian city-states that were busy laying the mercantilist foundations for capitalism: Genoa, Venice, Florence, Pisa. Starting ca. 1375, these portolan charts directed the user, not east or towards Jerusalem, but instead north – because they were designed to be used with a compass that pointed to magnetic north.

Portolan chart of Europe by Grazioso Benincasa, 1470

This might sound like just a harmless technological innovation, meant to better aid sea travel. But ‘north-up’ maps were also a mark of egocentricity. The focus had shifted away from God, away from the Creator of the fabric of space which the map was meant to serve – away from the east, in other words (at least from the perspective of the European). Instead the entire fabric of space and its understanding was fitted to suit the cartographer, the navigator, or whoever was reading the map. This is a very similar æsthetic and philosophical development to the rest of sæcular Renaissance art – painting, sculpture, architecture – that was crafted to honour not God but rather some wealthy mortal patron. The map serves the technological works of human hands, and thus the [European] human subject himself. No longer is Jerusalem, or Christ, to be found on this map. Instead the portolan chart is just bare fact, with no universal referent. North is the direction of orientation because that is where the iron points. The portolan chart is pure ideology, and that ideology is nominalism.

Del Chierico map of the British Isles, 15^th century.

The error of the overcorrecting ‘south-up’ proponents of nowadays is that they mistake this nominalism for Eurocentrism or white supremacy or some later ideological formation. And even here, they are very close – but not close enough – to being right. Of course this nominalist turn (literally!) in cartography was ultimately linked to the ideologies of conquest of man and nature that characterised the age. By the 1400s Florentine cartographers like Francesco del Chierico had introduced ‘north-up’ oriented portolan charts and less cumbersome maps to England and France, where they were used by both navigators and land-based generals to wage the last stages of the Hundred Years’ War. The use of these early ‘north-up’ maps was undoubtedly linked to the early growth stages of nationalism in both countries – but not in as neatly-packaged and idealistic a way as the ‘south-up’ maptivists would like to make it.

The ill-uses of religion in the service of nationalism happening around this time, under the revolution in military technology of which cartography as a discipline was a significant part, are probably worth not passing over in silence. The irony, for example, of that Thespian-immortalised slogan ‘For God, Harry and Saint George,’ invoking a Palestinian saint in an English national cause, was born at this time – and even then, that Palestinian saint was invoked last, after the English king! To minds as sensitive as Shakespeare’s to the Classical ordering of reality, this slight inversion of human and divine agencies would have been significant: it essentially creates an equation of the earthly sovereign and realm with the sovereignty of God which to the mediæval mind would have bordered on hubristic. And the English were not alone: just think of the rather sordid ideological purposes the French put that poor delusional young country girl before the English put her to the stake. Of course her canonisation by the Latins in the age of World War and nationalism at its highest fever pitch is not accidental either – let alone blameless.

Still, it seems fairly hard to deny that the egocentrism of this cartographical convention had some relation to later nominalist developments. If space has been reoriented to the comfort, convenience and mastery of the cartographer or navigator or general rather than to Christ, of course it becomes far easier to rationalise conquest within that same spatial fabric.

But what is interesting to me is this: as long as the Old English had been under the tutelage of the Church, they were – in a very real sense – crucifying their egos on a collective basis, in a way that should be instructive for us. In accepting a God who had taken on a human Incarnation in Palestine, they had accepted that they did not occupy an exalted or central place in the world. This is a very far cry from later centuries, when intoxicated with their own imperial pride the British people placed themselves not only on the top of the map but also in the very centre, with the longitudinal prime meridian running through Greenwich Village on every standard map of the world. When the imperial centre of gravity shifted to Washington, certain map projections placed the North American continent instead in the top-central position.

I am not, of course, advocating for the maptivist ‘south-up’ position or for a retro-mediæval ‘east-up’ position; at this point, even that inversion would be something like vanity, and in any event it wouldn’t solve the underlying problem. We live in an age where, in the wake of imperial hubris, a kind of spiritual egotism has been allowed to fester and deepen and darken. For multiple generations now, we, particularly white, Americans of all political stripes have been taught – whether by indulgent parents, by school administrators and college deans, by the legal system, or by films, books, talk radio, cable news, presidential candidates or the omnipresent corporate advertisement – that we are the centre of the universe and that the universe owes us. We are taught we are owed comfort, security, high living standards, the starring rôle. This is culturally every bit as much ingrained in us as the idea that ‘north is up’ on a map. But of course, reality refuses to oblige, and that same egotism that we are taught embitters us. It leads us to stubborn denials of our past. It leads us to an empty and morbid fascination with preserving, as if in formaldehyde, the physical material outer remnants of ‘Western civilisation’. It leads us in some cases, as seen from recent news, to inward darkness and outbursts of homicidal violence.

Those of us who go to church are also taught to put Christ at the centre of our lives, but the vast majority of us have no conception of how to do this. Unlike the Old English, our removal from the cultural context of the Incarnation has convinced us that Christ is merely an abstract reflection of us: a liberal-individualist, white, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic. Speaking from personal experience, this is an incredibly tough and painful intellectual habit to break. The most useful way to do this, still (and this is not something I remotely pretend to be good at), is to find the least of our brothers and sisters near us, and look to them to point us to Christ. That’s probably a surer way than relying on any map to tell us, even subconsciously, where the centre of the world is.

Such reflections may sound harsh, but they are necessary for those of us who are not anti-Western at heart. Indeed, if we love the West we need to seek its return to a more humble and less œcologically- and sociologically-taxing way of life. And the contours of the Old English worldview – still flavoured by a Teutonic heathen heroism, yes, but also shaped by Benedictine monasticism and an openness to Greco-Syrian, North African, Ægyptian and Palestinian spiritual influences – point a possible way out.

Aragorn’s archetype: exile, king, martyr

Saint Óswald of Northumbria

I’ve posted before about Óswald, the saintly Martyr-King of Northumbria whose feast day also happens to fall the day before the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. But I have never quite done him justice. The man figures very large in the Christian imagination of the British Isles, having figured not only as Holy Bede’s model of the ideal king, but also the model for Aragorn in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Like his literary spiritual descendant Strider, Óswald was raised in exile, his family having met with misfortune before any of the English nobility of the north were ever baptised. His father Æþelfríð King of Bernicia, was killed in 616 in battle against the East Angles when Óswald was probably only eleven or twelve years of age, and when his East Anglian-allied uncle Éadwine took power in Bernicia he was forced to flee with his brothers into the Scottish kingdom of Dál Riata (in the far west, nowadays encompassing Argyll and parts of Ulster in Northern Ireland). He became aware of Christianity through the Scottish monks on the isle of Iona at the monastery of Saint Columba, and it was there that he received Christ.

Óswald’s uncle Éadwine, who in the meanwhile had also been baptised, met his end in a beatific manner at the hands of the allied heathen princes Cadwallon ap Cadfan and Penda of Mercia before he had the chance to convert his people. His heathen kinsmen Éanfrið (Óswald’s brother) and Ósríc took power, but they too were slain by Cadwallon, who plundered and despoiled Bernicia and Deira for a full year. Óswald was compelled by the suffering of his folk to return, despite being outnumbered. Cadwallon had a ‘vast force’ of Britons ‘which he boasted of as irresistible’, whereas Óswald had only about seven hundred troops – a mix of Scots and exiled Angles. On the eve of the battle, taking shelter near one corner of the old Roman Wall, Óswald righted a rood before him, knelt down and asked God’s intercession for those who would trust in him in their need and plight. The rood had been wrought and bound together in haste; and a hole dug to right it in the ground – and Óswald, not content that his men should do the work rather than he himself, held the base of the rood upright with his own body while his hireth filled in the earth around the foot. And then he shouted to his men, saying: ‘Let us all kneel together, and ask the true and living God Almighty of His mercy to shield us from the overbearing ill-rule of our foes, since He knows that we fight in a righteous cause to save our people!’

The battle at Cantscaul, thereafter referred to as Heavenfield by the English on account of their victory that day, was a total rout for Cadwallon. As Óswald’s Angles and Scots attacked at the break of dawn (Helm’s Deep, anyone?), the hearts of the heathen Britons melted, and they were put to flight. The Angles gave chase, cutting down the Britons as they fled; Cadwallon himself was caught and killed by Rowley Burn – which was then called Denisesburn. The rood which Óswald had stood there later worked many wonders, and was known for healing the sick. For a hundred years after, English folk would still take slivers from the wood of this cross to put into water, such that sick men or beasts might be cured by drinking it.

Despite his exile from his homeland at his uncle’s hands (and despite not lifting the ban on Éadwine’s widow Saint Æþelburg or their children into the country), Óswald did honour to his uncle’s memory by endeavouring to complete his missionary work. York Minster, whose building had been started by Saint Éadwine for the purposes of his baptism, was completed by his nephew. Óswald brought back with him also several Scottish monks, including the gentle, mild and moderate Saint Aidan, to whom he gave the isle of Lindisfarne which would later grow to be hallowed and many-storied through the fruits of Saint Aidan’s ascetic labours. Saint Aidan at first did not speak English, so Óswald himself – who spoke both Scottish and English with fluency – served as Aidan’s interpreter as he travelled on foot throughout his kingdom. Óswald also gave great sums of money for the establishment of churches and monasteries, and invited more holy men and brothers from Scotland to teach the new English monks how to live a regular and disciplined life of prayer. In this way Óswald became a great benefactor to the Celtic tradition of Christianity (including, as Saint Bede somewhat sniffily notes, the erroneous Celtic method of dating the feast of Pascha).

Óswald became famed for his humility and for his love for the poor. As Bede recounts, on one feast of Pascha, a silver tray loaded down with many fine delicacies and rich meats was presented to him and Saint Aidan when they sat down to eat. Just then one of Óswald’s þegnas, whose job it was to stand outside and give to the needy as they came, came inside and told Óswald King that a great throng of poor and homeless folk had gathered in the street begging alms. Óswald at once ordered all the Easter meats and all the fine food be given to them, and the silver tray it was served on broken up and distributed amongst the needy. When this was done, Saint Aidan grabbed the king’s hand and exclaimed: ‘May this hand never perish!’ Saint Aidan’s words proved later prophetic, for when Óswald was slain in battle, his right arm was severed from his body and was later found to be incorrupt.

Óswald was, in addition to being generous and pro-poor in his outlook, a remarkably effective prince, speaking from a political point-of-view. He managed to unify, without bloodshed, the kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira into a single Northumbrian kingdom. In addition to this, his astute adoption of Celtic custom and his friendliness with Celtic monks in particular made it easier for him to extend his sway over British, Pictish and Scottish subjects – the great majority of whom, unlike the cruel and impious Cadwallon, had not forgotten their faith. He kept up friendly relations with the newly-christened West Saxons who had been baptised by Saint Berin. He served as godfather to Cynegils King of Wessex, and even married his daughter Cyneburg – they had one son together, Œðilwald, who would rule Deira after his father’s death. His kingdom and his influence indeed extended so far that Óswald was called ‘Brytenwealda’: ‘Wide-Ruler’, the equivalent of the Irish title of High King.

Bede recounts that Óswald was steadfast in prayer and often rose early in the morning to keep the service of Lauds. The king would also pray constantly throughout the day, and whenever he sat to eat or rest, he would do so with his palms up as his mind was constantly on the Lord. He ruled Northumbria for eight years.

Óswald would fall in battle against Penda of Mercia at the Battle of Maserfield on the fifth of August, 642, at the age of 38 – nowadays the civil parish of Oswestry in Shropshire (a parish which, if memory serves, receives some attention in the third of Edith Pargeter’s Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, Monk’s Hood). Óswald was said to have been praying for the souls of his soldiers when the deadly blow was struck. Penda had Óswald’s body beheaded, and his head and right arm mounted on stakes for display. Óswald’s successor Óswíu would later visit the place and remove the holy king’s relics: the head and body were translated to Lindisfarne, while the incorrupt arm that Saint Aidan had blessed was sent to Bamburgh. Some years later Óswíu’s daughter Saint Ósþrýð – a fast friend both to the Church and to Óswald’s widow Cyneburg – would have her uncle’s relics translated to Bardney Abbey in Lincolnshire. (The arm is now in the care of Peterborough Cathedral.)

Bede waxes quite voluble about the number of miracles that were later attributed to Óswald’s cross, Óswald’s relics and the spot where Óswald fell at Maserfield. When one of his arms touched the ground there a holy well was said to have sprung up. The beneficiaries of Óswald’s effective intercessory prayers for healing, in Bede’s recounting, are many and various in character. One of Saint Willibrord’s acquaintances from his sojourn in Ireland, a bookish Scot who was rather careless for his soul, was cured of the plague by touching the stake on which Saint Óswald’s head had been fixed. A little boy in a monastery was cured of the ague when he went to pray at Saint Óswald’s tomb. A sack of earth from Maserfield, hallowed by the saint’s blood, was hung from a rafter in a thatch-and-wattle house which caught fire – only the beam on which the sack had been hung was spared from the flames; later, many poor folk would take a pinch of this earth with some water to be cured of various maladies.

Saint Óswald remained a highly popular saint throughout the Old English period, and his name graces seventy churches throughout England. The later West Saxon kings – particularly Æþelstán – certainly felt an affinity for him, and not without reasons: he was, after all, the godfather of Cynegils and the husband of Cyneburg. The House of Wessex did much to promote his cultus including saving his relics from the Danes. His cultus even spread to the Continent – particularly France and Germany – but seems to have fallen into obscurity after the Norman Conquest. Still, the literary figure of Aragorn seems to be proof that the hold Óswald King had over the English imagination was fairly indelible. Holy and righteous martyr-king Óswald, friend to the poor and bringer of the Gospel to Northumbria, we beseech you intercede with Christ our God to save our souls!

Mighty works did the holy Óswald King
Accomplish for the Faith,
For in his great and surpassing love
He willingly laid down his life for the people of God;
Wherefore, Christ God filled his sacred relics
With mighty power, to heal the sick
And move men’s souls to compunction.

Pointed video post – ‘99 Luftballons’ by Nena

Earlier today the administration decided to scrap the signature nuclear arms limitation deal with Russia that has been in place since 1987, and I turned on the radio – KOOL 108, in fact – and heard this song come on. Coincidence? Rather a propos, I thought. The eighties have been coming back with a vengeance recently, and not in a good way. The threat of a further escalation of the New Cold War and a new arms race makes this song unfortunately relevant again. Hast du etwas Zeit für mich?

Holy Hierarch Æþelwold, Bishop of Winchester

Saint Æþelwold of Winchester,
illumination from the Benedictional

Today in the Holy Orthodox Church we celebrate Saint Æþelwold of Winchester, one of the three great hierarchical champions of the Benedictine reforms in England, alongside and in concert with Saint Dúnstán of Canterbury and Saint Ósweald of Worcester.

Saint Æþelwold was probably born to a goodly family of Winchester in the year 909 or 910; his parents loved the Church and raised him to do so as well. From childhood he sought a life close to Christ; though he was for some time a courtier of Æþelstán King. He was ordained a priest on the same day as Saint Dúnstán in 938, by Bishop Saint Ælfhéah ‘the Bald’ of Winchester (not to be confused with the later Saint Ælfhéah of Canterbury). He retired to the holy site of Glastonbury together with Saint Dúnstán, where he was tonsured a Benedictine monk. He gave away all his worldly possessions and his entire patrimony away, and would persist even in the office of bishop in breaking up whatever was given to him and distributing it among the poor and needy. While at Glastonbury under the rule of Saint Dúnstán his abbot, Æþelwold spent the better part of ten years in study of the Holy Scriptures and the Psalms, as well as the writings of Venerable Aldhelm and the Rule of Saint Benedict. He also laboured in the kitchens as a servant of the abbey cook; one of the miracles attributed to him involves the multiplication of the monks’ meat by his prayers. Æþelwold was very soon made prior in the abbey under Dúnstán.

Saint Dúnstán ruled with a fairly gentle and tolerant hand at Glastonbury. He was tolerant of married priests – who were at that time the norm in England – and pursued monastic reforms with a prudent and careful eye. The slightly-younger Æþelwold, however – zealous in his personal austerities and hard physical labour – did not yet possess this patience. He wished to undertake a much more drastic and sweeping reform of the Church. He had wanted to visit the reformed monastery on the Continent in Cluny, but was prevented from doing so by both Dúnstán and Éadred King. Their desire was rather that the priestmonk take charge of renovating the run-down monastery at Abingdon, which housed a chapel erected in honour of Saint Helena the mother of Constantine, the holy patroness of both city and abbey. Since that time, it had been repeatedly sacked by the Danes, and the lands belonging to it had been taken over by Ælfrǽd King.

Having been given this holy charge by both his abbot and his earthly king, Æþelwold did not dare to disobey. Bringing with him several brother-monks of Glastonbury, including Ósgár, Foldbriht and Friþegar, together with Æþelwold as their abbot they rebuilt Abingdon on the model of Glastonbury. For some time it was, apart from Glastonbury, the sole site in England after the Danish ravages where the Benedictine life was pursued with any kind of gravity or rigour. Æþelwold later sent Ósgár to the Abbaye de Fleury in France to report on the state of monastic life there; when Ósgár returned, he brought with him a wealth of spiritual insights and practices that Æþelwold was eager to institute at Abingdon.

Æþelwold was also able to restore the church buildings – which he did in the rotunda style of older Greek and Roman churches to honour the patroness – and also to regain a sizeable portion of the lands that the monastery had lost through war and politics. (He seems to have had a fondness for Byzantine church architecture – a similar style was used in another monastic church he renovated at Thorney.) He invited masters of Gregorian chant – then not yet common in England – to teach singing at Abingdon. Even as an abbot, he did not bear himself proudly, but laboured alongside his brother-monks growing vegetables in the abbey garden. Like his friend Saint Dúnstán, too, and Saint Bernward on the continent, he was skilled at crafting exquisite things out of precious metals for the Church; yet he regarded these things as secondary. At one time during his bishopric, when there was a famine, he had these works of his own hands broken down, melted and sold to give bread to the poor: ‘What is lifeless metal,’ he said, ‘against the bodies and souls of human beings created by the Lord?’ The Abbey at Abingdon was indeed a centre of learning and holy life; and it was patronised by the royal family: for a time, even the saintly Éadgár King was educated there.

After Éadgár ascended the throne, he appointed Æþelwold as Bishop of Winchester. The outspoken Benedictine reformer instantly made his presence felt when, after a particular incident with one of the infamously-lax sæcular canons of Winchester Cathedral, he drove out the lot of them and replaced them with monks from his former abbey at Abingdon. Thus he established Winchester Cathedral as a Benedictine house, and founded the tradition of monastery-cathedrals in England. Some of these expelled canons later rued their ill-discipline and penitently took the tonsure at Winchester, and Æþelwold welcomed them back with open arms. Saint Æþelwold thus established his reputation as a ‘lion’, fierce and terrible against those who stubbornly persisted in error – but mild as a dove with those who repented.

Saint Æþelwold took a number of political stances that proved unpopular in the later church. For example, he supported the infamous Éadwig King in his marriage to his third cousin Ælfgifu, who was a close family friend, even after Saint Dúnstán was exiled to the mainland – and also supported the succession of Æþelræd unræd over that of Saint Éadweard. He even survived one apparently politically-motivated attempt on his life by poison: Æþelwold apparently ingested the atter but his body was utterly unharmed, and this was taken as a wondrous sign of his holiness. In all, one may consider Æþelwold to have been something of a patron and builder of an English symphonía.

As Bishop of Winchester, Saint Æþelwold translated the relics of Saint Swíþhún from his wonted rainy spot under the eaves and inside the church. He also encouraged the popular veneration of his relics and maintained his own devotions to his humble and self-effacing predecessor. His love for learning was also evident, in that he had built the first scriptorium in Winchester and himself commissioned a great number of breathtakingly-beautiful illuminations, including the Benedictional which bears his name. He made invaluable contributions to sacred literature, commissioning full and accurate translations of psalms and other holy Scripture from Latin into the (Old) English vernacular. Even the Rule of Saint Benedict was thus translated. Winchester under Æþelwold also produced one of the earliest collections of polyphonic sheet music in Europe: the Winchester Troper. The endeavours of Saint Æþelwold were many, spectacular and successful – not least of which the great undertaking shared between him, Saint Dúnstán and Saint Ósweald, which resulted in a great last flourishing of monastic life and high culture in Old England.

Saint Æþelwold reposed in the Lord on the first of August 984, being seventy-four years of age. His strict asceticism and his relentless work on the Church’s behalf left his body emaciated and in great pain in his last years of life, but he bore this with equanimity. He was known as a saint very quickly after his rest, as wonders were wrought around his relics and through intercessory prayers. Saint Ælfhéah (the other one, the Archbishop of Canterbury) had his relics translated to Winchester and interred there with great honour. Holy Hierarch Æþelwold, loving father of monks, stern teacher of virtues and exemplary archpastor, pray unto Christ our God for us that our souls may be saved!

By vigilant prayer and ascetic endeavour,
Thou didst make thy passions subject to thy reverent soul,
O holy hierarch Æþelwold, man of noble desires;
Wherefore, thou didst uproot evil wherever thou didst find it,
And in thy humility hast shown thyself to be a true model of Christian virtue.
O saint of God, by thy supplications entreat Him to have pity on us all.