Journeying with Cuthbert

Today is St Cuthbert’s Day – one of the great northern saints. The story goes that Cuthbert was looking after some sheep in the hills in the Scottish borders, and one day he saw a shaft of light coming down to the earth and returning. He thought it was a human soul going up to heaven, and later discovered that it happened on the day that another great northern saint, St Aidan, died. This was a turning point for him.

Cuthbert went to the abbey at Melrose which Aidan had founded, and became a monk. For the rest of his life he seems to have been pulled in two directions, the outer and the inner. He was a missionary, he ran the monastery at Melrose and then at Lindisfarne, and later he was made a bishop.

But, perhaps rooted in that early experience, he also had a desire to nurture his inner life with God through solitude, and he eventually established an island hermitage on Inner Farne where he lived for ten years before he was a bishop, and where he returned for the last years of his life.

So today is a good day to think about our inner life and our outer life, and the way that they are connected. A few years ago I walked St. Cuthbert’s Way from Melrose to Lindisfarne. Later I reflected in a poem on how the stages of my walk seemed to mirror the stages of life – first exciting discoveries, adolescent questioning, the slog of middle age, settling into a more relaxed rhythm, the view to the sea, and finally arriving on Holy Island – an ending and a beginning.

So we may see connections between our outer and inner journeys, and we could make those connections each day.

The poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, from Colorado, has written and published on her blog a new poem each day since 2006*. She says this.

One of the promises I made to myself is that I will write, every day. Can I show up each day and share something true? That has become my ‘practice’. Can I meet what’s here inside of me, with what’s outside of me, and let the poem be a bridge between these two worlds? Poems don’t fix anything, but they change the way we meet the world.

I love the idea of meeting what’s inside us and what’s outside us each day. And giving the precious gift of attention to this meeting. And it’s interesting to think what might bridge these twin awarenesses. For Rosemerry it’s a poem. We might do it through other forms of reflection. We could use the practice called the examen. This asks us to notice the one thing that has been most lifegiving each day. I think this is very often a point of connection between the inner and the outer. We could allow our reflection to lead us into prayer which acknowledges both the outer circumstances of our lives and the ways these connect with our inner life. We could hold the two together in silence.

Someone once said to me that one of the fundamental movements in our lives with God is the movement from prayer to active life – the movement from the outer to the inner and back again. I wonder how Cuthbert found that. Perhaps part of the invitation he brings us is learning to let our inner and outer walk with God become more closely and easily woven together.

As you come to pray, spend some time bring to your awareness all that is going on in your outer life…

Lord, in all of this, you are with us.

Now bring to your awareness now to what is ‘here inside’, to your inner life, as you experience it now…

Lord, in all of this, you are with us.

God of Cuthbert’s journey, and of ours, lead us more deeply into an awareness of your presence in both our outer and our inner life, and as we walk with you may we know the connection and integration which flows with your healing love. Amen.

* The link to Rosemerry’s blog is here