My Thoughts 31/08/2022
A memorable holiday I had with friends some years ago was when we went to spend two weeks in a cottage right near Bamber castle in Northumberland. We spent time going to Lindisfarne known as Holy Island.
Today we celebrate the feast of Saint Aidan, Bishop and Missionary, and the saints of Lindisfarne. Monks from Iona chose Holy Island for their monastery as it was cut off twice a day from the mainland. It is here that Aidan lived in the monastery that he founded and it was from here that he would walk from one village politely conversing with the people he saw and slowly interesting them in Christianity: in this, he followed the early apostolic model of conversion, by offering “them first the milk of gentle doctrine, to bring them by degrees, while nourishing them with the Divine Word, to the true understanding and practice of the more advanced precepts.”
By patiently talking to the people on their own level (and by taking an active interest in their lives and communities), Aidan and his monks slowly restored Christianity to the Northumbrian countryside. King Oswald, who after his years of exile had a perfect command of Irish, often had to translate for Aidan and his monks, who did not speak English at first.
The late Cardinal Basil Hume wrote “All of us today are challenged by Aidan’s authenticity and simplicity. Such simplicity of life has two levels: the first is single-mindedness, being so concentrated on God and serving him that other things are subordinate to that; the second level is simplicity of lifestyle trying to live lives of material simplicity. This is what speaks to people outside the Church. As St Paul VI said: “Modern man listens more readily to witnesses than teachers: if they listen to teachers it is because they are witnesses.”
After 16 years as bishop, Aidan died at Bamburgh in 651 AD