St. Cuthbert's Way Day 7: Sabbath Rest

Landscape is always made.  It is a work.  As I transfer hundreds of photographs from my Smartphone to my computer, although I am relieved that they are safely stored, I am also very glad that I took the time to describe the feelings I had in relation to these places.  The pilgrim’s feelings and her interactions when she is out in a place are really all that matter.  In a poem where she torturously questions the purpose of travel, Elizabeth Bishop concludes quite humbly:

But surely it would have been a pity

Not to have seen the trees along this road

Really exaggerated in their beauty

Not to have seen them gesturing

Like noble pantomimists robed in pink.

The pilgrim witnesses the expressiveness of the world around her.  It is a matter of obligation and devotion to translate the language of trees, brooks, and stones into her own idiom.

I shared a taxi to Berwick with the men.  Despite Palle’s tiny bottle of mead and Robin’s insistence that I buy a tin of haggis to take home, there was no warm hug, no promise to stay in touch, no exchange of emails.  I thought of how often my mother had to part with traveling companions and wondered whether it was hard for her, too.  I sat with my sadness on the bench waiting for the Durham train.  Forward movement is the cure for all loss I suppose.  The train arrived, I stumbled on with my heavy duffel bag, and we were off.  I thought of the way the monks carried Cuthbert’s coffin for seven years all around the kingdom of Northumbria to escape the Vikings.  Before crossing to Lindisfarne, I had asked for my feelings of loss to be healed.  On the walk, every flower and thistle, every bee and cloud salved my scars and scabs.  But crossing over, I had let my feelings out of the bag a bit, and the result was disappointment.  Maybe like the monks I have to carry my dead:  dead father, dead mother, dead lovers, and dead hopes further along down lonesome lanes before I lay them to rest.  I was sitting by a cute old lady from Aran.  Wait.  What?  Isn’t Aran off Ireland?  How long have you been on the train?  She took out a Smartphone and showed me a picture of an electric bike.  “I decided to treat myself.”  She must have been 80 years old.  She, too, evidently thrived on movement.  My purpose in going to Durham was to visit Cuthbert at his shrine.  Healing.  But I had also decided that I would hole up and wool-gather, put together some of my thoughts about the walk, organize my observations before they drifted too far away from me.  I needed the solitude that I’d missed on Lindisfarne.  Wool-gathering.  Idleness.  Solitude.  Prayer.  Return to the Way.  Be with me, Island Saints.

The monks opened the casket and realized that Cuthbert’s body was incorrupt before they began their pilgrimage from Lindisfarne to an unknown place.  The flesh was soft, ruddy and flexible; Cuthbert looked like he was asleep.  This sleeping saint acted as guide on the post-mortem journey.  He saved the Lindisfarne gospels from the Irish Sea when a storm wrecked the ship they were on.  He also selected Durham as the site for his church and his cult.  The site has much in common with Old Melrose (where Cuthbert had first entered the monastery) and Dryburgh, which he must have visited many times.  All three sites are located on peninsulas surrounded on three sides by a curving river.  In Durham, it is the River Wear.  Cuthbert was buried in the first church as Chester Le Street until the Normans invaded and thirty years later decided to invest in the Cuthbert cult and build a massive cathedral to house and to honor him. 

O ancient stones

Quarried and carried

And piled to house

The remains of dear

Saint Cuthbert

Not just to protect

But to teach us his Way

Your towers are the color of earth

An ancient human forest

The lines, the chevrons, the patchwork

All designs he saw or felt

On his journeys through borderlands

Here written out in a building

We can cling to or walk through

A building that stayed strong

Through changing creeds, regimes,

Wars and the wearing down of faith

Because his way was and is

THE WAY

            As I walked down the nave and toward Cuthbert’s shrine, emotions came to the surface.  I felt as if I were going to cry.  

His tomb is in a raised place behind the altar called the ferestory.  Check etymology.  Feral.  I climbed up the stairs and was in the shrine, an island of quiet.  Though the cathedral was crawling with tourists, there was no one inside.  The slab said simply, Cuthbertus, and there was a light burning above it.  

At times during my two-day visit, there was also a tiny tea-light on the stone slab.  Behind the shrine, next to the lamp, was a headless statue of Cuthbert (Cromwellian violence) holding the head of King Oswald.  The real head was, at one point, buried with him.  I prayed for my mother, the women from my support group in Flint, for my daughter; but mostly I prayed for my pilgrim soul that had been awakened and wanted to stay awake and not fall back into a sleep upon ending the pilgrimage.  I prayed for healing:  the cancer in my ear, the diseases of my spirit, and my awful indecision.  I listened for a long time.  Music.  Beautiful choral singing filtered into the shrine.  What were these voices?  Leaving Cuthbert for a while, I followed to peek into a door which was promptly closed.  Around to the cloister, the chapter house door was open and a woman (my age) listening outside.  The chapter house was packed with middle-aged women absorbed in a rehearsal.  “These are four local rock choirs.  They are practicing for a concert next Friday night.”  I’M ONLY HUMAN AFTER ALL, I’M ONLY HUMAN AFTER ALL, DON’T PUTCHER BLAME ON ME.  DON’T PUTCHER BLAME ON ME.  OH, OH!  Saints are real.  Cuthbert’s body is fresh and flexible under that stone.  Mama, too, has gone to the mountain.  And I’m only human after all, human after all.  Somehow in all of this was the key.  Desire.  Vocalization.  Normal.  Human.  Accept your body and your humanity.  Move.  Sing.  How do I do it?  I began to speak to this other listener, and a conversation unfolded.  A-levels.  School in Newcastle.  Shakespeare.  “I love the way characters escape to green worlds where they are made new.”  She’d seen a student production of As You Like It in her hometown of Newcastle where the forest was the ruins of an industrial city and the students played with the idea of recycling, of remaking and rebuilding through reuse of refuse.  Wow.  Hymen, the god, was made of plastic bottles.  Before I met Fiona, sitting in the shrine with Cuthbert, I’d envisioned the cathedral itself as a big rambling wood.  The builders made a forest of stone to recreate the paths.  The stone ribs of the vaulted ceiling were the criss-crossed trunks of a leafy canopy.  The decorated columns and pilasters were beeches and oak deeply grooved, part of the patchwork of greens and golds.  Lines, squares, chevrons.  Landscape is made.  The builders knew this.  They, too, were walkers.  They, too, experienced their world in the way that I had just done.  They created with their art a get-away, a place to relocate and recharge, a forest for God but also for Cuthbert.  The living song, the fresh and lively conversation, that’s what was supposed to happen here.  We’re only human after all, but when we come together, we must sound to the angels like the wood doves sounded to me in the on the first day of my walk.  Women so fresh, so fat, so lovely.  Not like those dried up, grimed-up city-birds.

            “The cathedral is big, but Durham isn’t.  You should hop on the train and go up to Newcastle,” and Fiona listed in my notebook several literary sites that I should not miss.  But I stayed up late writing and reading.  I woke up to rain showers, and I was tired.  More importantly, I felt like I needed to get back to the cathedral … to the woods (even if it was manmade) and make more discoveries.  Interestingly (and I would learn this much later after returning to Michigan), in Britain’s conversion period after the Romans had withdrawn and missionaries were attempting to spread Christianity, trees and sacred places in nature were used as peaceful gathering places.  In fact, as Nick Mayhew-Smith notes, the first description of a church in Britain comes from the Life of St. Germanus, a text written around the year 480.  To prepare a number of native Britains for an Easter baptism, a church was built, “of leafy branches.”  Early Christians in Britain did not destroy pagan sacred sites but respected their power and used the peoples’ devotion to the spirits within the natural world.

            I wanted to see the cathedral perched on its cliff, to get a sense of its site, and so I found the way to the Riverwalk.  It was like being on the Tweed all over again.  Same plants—peas and giant Queen Anne’s lace everywhere.  I studied one for a long while and felt like I was back in the borderlands.  Meanwhile, a duck swam over the rapids and grabbed a slippery serpentine fish.  Snap, Snap.  In the corner of my eye, I saw it swallow the fish.  On I walked and started to cross over a bridge when an inscription stayed my steps:

Grey Towers of Durham

Yet well I love thy mixed and massive piles

Half Church of God and Half Castle gainst the Scot

And Long to roam these venerable aisles

With records stored of deeds long since forgot.

I could sympathize with the writer’s desire to roam the aisles, but this writer’s cathedral was more archive while mine was Cuthbert’s woods, recreated by the faithful builders (men who probably revered the saint) as a teaching tool.  I walked uphill to the Cathedral, and I made my way to the shrine once more.  No tears today.  Instead, I felt like I was entering a holy place that was also very familiar and comfortable.  There were many people there.  “He talks to people,” was what a guide had told me yesterday, and I perked up my ears to hear his voice.  Sitting quietly along the back wall, I ran my hands along the curved wood of the pew side rails, and wondered about the carvings.  At the very moment I recognized a squirrel on the end of the pew, I saw a woman photographing a rabbit.  The rounded ends of each side rail were carved into the shapes of different animals.  No repetition.  Each one unique.  Otter.  Boar.  Lion.  Rabbit.  Squirrel.  Sheep.  Tiger with cub.  Whoever made these pews loved Cuthbert.  He understood that Cuthbert had a special closeness with the natural world and he wanted the creatures to gather in his shrine.  It was lovely and intimate.  It also made me feel my humanity as creaturely.  I had a sudden impulse to kneel down and touch the stone.  “Please heal my ear, Cuthbert.  I believe you can do it.”

            The Tower had been closed the previous day and was still closed in the morning of my second day, but by early afternoon, they had opened it.  I bought a ticket and began the climb up a winding, narrow, stone staircase.  It was impossible to pass two abreast, so I listened for oncoming footsteps and flattened myself against the wall when descending others needed to pass.  At the top—oo, how dizzy tizz to cast one’s eye’s so low.  The Wear foamed, and the farms and fields and distant low hills beyond the city limit invited.  But I stood transfixed by the sight of two perfectly white pigeons swimming in the air around the right tower and land together in the arcade.  Natives of the place.  Spirits?  Cuthbert and Bede?  I thought of Gabrielle’s rose.  I thought of the wood pigeons.  Again, I felt at home in the woods. 

Then I discovered the “Sacred Treasures Museum and Exhibit” that begun with displays of stone masonry and book art to the artifacts found in Cuthbert’s tomb, displayed in the Great Kitchen.  These were his personal things that had rested in the casket with him; the intimacy of it all was stunning.  But his casket had been opened so many times.  He’d been checked and double-checked to see if he was corrupt or incorrupt.  I think the body finally did begin to decay.  An ivory comb, a pocket-sized altar, the embroidered bands he wore with his vestments figured with Old Testament prophets, his pectoral cross (gold with garnet and bits of shell and glass, showing signs of wear), and finally his wooden coffin pieced together like a puzzle and covered with human figures.  Not an animal in sight.  “Stand back against the wall,” instructed a guide.  “You are standing in what was one of the monastery ovens.  You have to imagine this place full of monks preparing food and animals.  It would have been very busy.”  Right.  I began to smell the food and the smoke.  But mostly I was sensing the alive presence of Cuthbert.  There was his cross and his comb, and his altar.  He was somehow out of the box and present in this place with his things, offering himself for us to follow.  He was a man who walked and taught.  Who read and combed his hair.  He offered mass to crowds that pitched tents to hear him.  Because he didn’t worry about food, it’s ironic that he must minister to us in the Great Kitchen.  Maybe that’s as it should be since he is our food.  His word.  His way.  His reassurance that we needn’t worry.  Look to the eagle.  Trust your horse.  God works in mysterious ways.  When I left the kitchen, I walked right into the café and bought a cup of tea and a scone. 

            My final hours in Durham Cathedral were spent at Holy Eucharist the following morning at 8:00.  It was Sunday.  There were no tourists at that hour.  The market square was empty and the noisy bars finally quiet.  No photography was permitted.  The shrine locked.  The priests are serious about wanting this to be a place of worship, and we worshipped.  But more than anything I heard from the priest, I was touched by the warmth of an old man who opened the locked shrine one more time for me.  George Hetherington, an octogenarian, remembered that he’d been nine years old when he became a cathedral chorister.  The war was on, and we had to board at the cathedral.  We sung two services and had two rehearsals daily, and that was a lot of singing and discipline for a child.  We missed our parents especially at Easter and Christmas.  They kept you until your voice cracked, and I guess I sung here until I was 15.  They let German prisoners of war stand in the back.  You could tell by their faces that all they wanted to do was go home.  Like us.  I suppose we felt an affinity for them.”  “Affinity.”  That is Mom’s special word.  The feeling of connectedness.  Nature is fine in love and were tis fine, it sends a precious instance of itself after the thing it loves.  Affinities are tenuous and strong.  It’s up to the creature to decide what to make of them.  Everything or nothing.  When we were in the shrine, I knelt and prayed one last time.  Then, Mr. Hetherington told me to look up at the ceiling.  He was pointing to a roundel carving around a bell-pull.  “That carving is as detailed as embroidery,” said the elderly man.  He had looked at it with binoculars and explained the figures on it to me.  “What amazes me is that the workman who carved it must have known that the detail would not be seen by any people below.  But he did the work carefully and well and intricately anyway.  That is devotion.”  He took my hand, kissed it, and we parted.

            Just as I didn’t want the walk to end, I hated to leave this forest of stone.  But I had wended through it, noting the waymarks.  Architects and masons loved Cuthbert and were teaching his Way with every detail.  Like Cuthbert’s pocket altar, his comb, and his cross, the contents of my pilgrim’s pocket—cross, stones, compass, sheep’s wool—must be shared because only when we take out what’s inside can we really truly touch others.  Nothing was in the box, in the tomb, and the spirit of Cuthbert “talks to people.”  I’d asked Fiona if the assembled rock choir had a cd.  Oh, no!  They sing for themselves and for one another!”  George Hetherington, speaking of the ceiling carving said, “today whenever people do anything, they have to put it on Facebook or on television.”  The point is to do small things with great love, and, more importantly, to them for their own sake.  That is contemplation.  That is the Way.  That attitude is what (perhaps) enabled Cuthbert, who loved his solitude to preach and teach and even to be bishop, for a time, duties that carried him away from Lindisfarne and his hermitage on the even smaller Farne.  But he must have also known that he’d found home because he kept returning to those islands.  Places of wind, birds’ cries, and seals’ song.  Why do the seals sing?