Saint Eadfrith

To set our context, I want to introduce a man whose life was very much affected by our Saint of the day.  Nechtan was aarguably the greatest overking of the Pictish people, in the north of what we know today as northern Britain.  Enthroned in 706, he was not only the military and political leader of a powerful, warlike people, but he was also a man of great learning.  His great goal was to expand and consolidate Pictavia.   He did that generally by military means, as when we took Orkney, a place we recently visited.  The one exception was Northumberland, the northernmost English province which stood immediately south of his jurisdiction.  Military aggression did not work, so he resorted to the logical alternative, diplomacy.

Now in those days a diplomatic settlement had to include not only political agreement but also the agreement of ecclesiastical leaders.  While the English territories were in the western, Roman Catholic orbit, resulting from the synod of Whitby, the Christians in the north, including the Picts, Scots, and others still followed the old practices of the Celtic Church and found their leadership at Iona, the religious centre on the northwest coast.  Two particularly distressing practices were the Celtic use of archaic methods to calculate the date of Easter, keeping them out of synch with the rest of the world, plus a method of tonsure of monks that was different, probably inherited from Druidic practice.  As important part of the peace negotiations,  Nechtan agreed to bring the north into western Catholic practice and ordered his clergy to comply.  Those who did not he expelled from the kingdom in 717.  Finally, he abdicated in 724 and lived the rest of his life as a monk.  The Picts eventually were to be absorbed into the Scottish tribes, and their culture and language disappeared in the mists of history.

Eadrith from 698 was the Bishop of Landisfarne, the Holy Island in Northumberland on the east coast.  He was negotiator with Nechtan for peace and religious unity.  Desiring to leave a permanent legacy, Eadfrith alone produced the Lindisfarne Gospels, now in the British Museum.  This most magnificent examploe of illuminated manuscripts, he toiled over for two solid years.  A legacy indeed!  And, in the spirit of his agreement with Nechtan, Eadfrith chose for his masterpiece Latin texts preferred by the Roman clergy, over against the texts used by Iona, and moreover he incorporated for the first time Celtic and Roman elements.   His story should inspire us to discern deeply what talents we have to bring to God's work and what kind of legacy we would like to leave behind.