Behind the garden of our new home in Carlisle stands the smart Georgian Parish Church of St Cuthbert’s Carlisle. In many ways it is larger, and dare I say it, more up market counterpart to its name’s sake in Haydon Bridge. With box pews, a gallery, and pulpit that can roll into a central position, it has the same feel of a preaching house which was the original intention for many of these Georgian buildings.
But this quite ‘modern’ style belies its ancient origins which are hidden in plain sight. Unlike the Cathedral which sits on the other side of our house, St Cuthbert’s is not orientated east-west as we would expect a Church to be. Rather it stands alongside Blackfriars street which is itself an extension of Botchergate and the A6. This road follows the line of the ancient Roman road which ran to the entrance to the Roman Fort which stood roughly where Carlisle Castle now stands.
This orientation reminds us of the ancient lineage of St Cuthbert’s in Carlisle which, unlike many of the venerable Churches of St Cuthbert gets its title not from the fact that Cuthbert’s community and his relics rested there, but that Cuthbert himself visited and preached there.
In both Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and his Life of Cuthbert we hear how, in 685 Cuthbert came to Carlisle to ordain deacons. He did that in a church which has been originally a house running alongside the Roman street plan of Carlisle.
It was at that Church, on the site of the present St Cutbert’s, that Bede tells us Cuthbert met with the Royal Abbess Aelfflaed as news of the unexpected death of her father King Ecgfrith in battle, nephew of St Oswald and king of Northumbria, was heard.
According to Bede, Cuthbert’s meeting with Aelfflaed in Carlisle fulfils an earlier prophesy by Cuthbert to Aelfflaed that Ecgfrith would die in battle, and that when that occurred Aelfflaed should call for her holy and learned Uncle Aldfrith from Iona to take the throne of Northumbria.
This Aldfrith duly did, reigning for twenty years, cementing with it the Christian culture and life which had begun with the victories of Oswald and missions of Aiden a generation earlier. His reign ushering in, through his support of Bede and the learning at Wearmouth-Jarrow and Lindisfarne, Northumbria’s Golden Age.
In Bede’s narrative placing of this summit in Carlisle is no accident.
Firstly Bede is reminding us of how intertwined the life of Cuthbert was with political life of his time. We remember with gratitude today Cuthbert’s influence as a man of prayer and holiness. But we also remember Cuthbert’s role as a counsellor to kings and princes, guiding their actions through the certainties of his faith.
Secondly Bede is reminding us of the interconnected geography that tied the early mediaeval world together.
By the time Cuthbert and Bede the line of the wall which Carlisle and these parishes stand alongside had long ceased to be the barrier and boundary that its Roman builders had intended it to be.
Instead the wall and the land which it covered was at the heart of a nexus of journeys of faith and culture and power which flowed from Ireland and Iona to Lindisfarne and Bamburgh and back again. To hear the news of Ecgfrith’s death in Carlisle and, we imagine, for Aellflaed to send for Aldfrith from Carlisle reminds us that Carlisle stood at the centre of the east-west information super-highway that Hadrian’s Wall had become by the end of seventh century.
As a history lesson this is all very well and good, but you might wonder why this is important to us as we gather to mark this Feast of the Translation of Cuthbert.
Well, this story is important because it asks us to rethink our own preconceptions of our geography, and through that rethink how and where we find God in the supposed certainties of the world around us.
Next year, as many of you might know, is the 1900th anniversary of the beginning of Hadrian’s Wall in 122AD. Next year we will be inundated with opportunities to visit well-loved sites, to see Roman soldiers on manoeuvre, and to recognise the extraordinary political, cultural, and social legacy of Hadrian’s Wall. But as we do so I can guarantee one thing. All the maps we will see, all the images we will share will place the wall and its line on a North-South axis.
That is after all how we instinctively see it. But more than this, this instinct runs deep into our imaginations. The historian Peter Davidson argues that we all carry our own idea of north within us.
If, he suggests, we say we will leave for the south tonight, we conjure up images of travelling for pleasure and places of leisured exile. But if we saw “we leave for the north tonight” we immediately think of “a harder place, a place of dearth: uplands, adverse weather, remoteness from cities”. If spoken in a thriller, this portentous phrase “we leave for the north tonight” would lead to, he says, a “fiction of action, of travel, of pursuit over wild country”.
We can, I hope, all imagine our own way into not only the practical, but also the imaginative patterns this north-south thinking draws us into. Our lives and how we orient them are so often suffused with this north-south thinking, suffused, if you will, with an implicit “Borealentalism”, that we don’t even notice.
But as we journey through life we recognise that the journeys and orientations that we find ourselves taking are not always what we expect them to be.
Our Psalm this evening, Psalm 121, is my favourite psalm. The imagery of lifting our eyes to the hills is, like so much of our perception of the world, suffused with this north-south thinking. When we close our eyes and think of the hills we lift our eyes to I would wager most of us imagine we are looking north.
For scholars this is a known as a psalm of ascent. Written and first prayed in the imaginative world of the worship of ancient Israel where the eyes of the faithful would be lifted to the Temple in Jerusalem and temple mount on which it sat. But as this wonderful psalm has become internalised into the life of our prayer and worship, over countless generations, it has become de-coupled from this singular meaning.
As we pray this Psalm we are reminded of God’s presence with us in all the faltering steps that we take through life. That God will not “suffer our foot to stumble”. That God will guide and watch over us as we wake and sleep, that God will watch our going out and coming in.
What this psalm reminds us is that God is with us wherever and however we move through life. We might live fixated on the journeys north and south and how things ought to fit together, but we discover that life is not like that, but in that seeming uncertainty God – the make of heaven and earth – remains close to us, guiding us through the unexpected and uncertain journeys of life.
As we continue to read Bede’s history we find again again how God guided and travelled with his people – as he midwifed the Golden Age of Northumbria not as we might expect from the civilised south to the wasted north, but flowing with Aldfrith west to east, through Carlisle and these Parishes by the Wall from Iona to Bamburgh.
As we celebrate the Feast of the translation of Cuthbert we remember that God remained with and guided the uncertain journeys of the Community of Cuthbert as they moved through these northern lands, from Lindisfarne, through Haydon and Beltingham and Carlisle and beyond. Not in the way and manner they might have thought or expected, but guiding their every step, nonetheless.
And as I return to this Church today I cannot but reflect on the journey we have taken. Not one we planned or expected, but one which we pray God is guiding us through. So, whatever the future may hold for us, and for these Parishes by the Wall, we might know that although the journey may not be as we expect it, or imagine it to be, God will watch over our:
going out and our coming in, from this time forth and for evermore.
