St Bartholomew offers St
Guthlac a whip to scourge his tormentors (from the St Guthlac Roll, originally at Croyland Abbey; now held by the British
Library)
It’s wonderful to be here, at Crowland Abbey
our spiritual home, in our centenary year and shortly before our centenary
service on 28 November. Just up the road there is a stone which is called St
Guthlac’s cross. St. Guthlac was the hermit who
inspired the foundation of Crowland Abbey in AD 714. The stone, which is
inscribed ‘HANC PETRA GUTHLAC’ is thought to be one of a number of boundary
markers indicating the limit of influence of Crowland Abbey in medieval times.
And
there could scarcely be a better occasion on which to hold this ‘parish away’
Evensong than today, 29 September, the feast of St Michael and all Angels. For
angels are very much a part of the story of Guthlac, the hermit, on the island
of Crowland.
The Anglo-Saxon poem known as Guthlac A reads thus: ‘the
time was within the discretion of God at which he would assign an angel to
Guthlac in his conscience so that the cravings for sinful things subsided
within him. The hour was at hand: two guardians watched about him who kept up a
struggle – the angel of the Lord and the terrible demon… they incited him on
both sides until the Lord of the heavenly multitudes made an end of the strife,
in favour of the angel…’
A little later on, the poem continues:
‘Guthlac was good. In his soul, he carried celestial hope; he attained the
salvation of eternal life. Close by him was an angel, a trusty guardian to him
who, as one of the few, settled the wasteland… Zealously [Guthlac] equipped
himself with spiritual weapons and vestments; he sanctified the place and as
his rallying-point he first raised up the Cross of Christ. Where this soldier
outvied a host of perils, many of God’s martyrs became active. Guthlac’s
precious part in this we attribute to God; he gave him the victory and the
strength of prudence, the protection of mighty powers, when with sudden volleys
a multitude of devils came to begin feuding. In their malice they were
incapable of leaving him alone and they brought many temptations to Guthlac’s
spirit. Help was close by him; the angel fortified him with courage when they
furiously menaced him with the greedy turbulence of fire…’
The tests and challenges
to Guthlac continue for another ten pages or so in the poem. ‘Then’, we learn,
‘from heaven came a holy messenger of the Lord who by word of mouth proclaimed
supernal terror upon the miserable spirits…’ We are not at first told who this
holy messenger was, but he proclaimed his message thus: ‘I am the judge; the
Lord commanded me to say at once that you should heal each one of his hurts
with your own hands and thereafter be obedient to him at his own discretion. I
shall not conceal my aspect in front of the multitude of you. I am servant of
the ordaining Lord. I am one of the twelve whom he, in human form, loved in his
heart as most trusty. He sent me here from the heavens. He saw that on earth
you were inflicting torments on his dependant, out of envy. He is my brother;
his tribulation distressed me. I shall see to it that when this friend – with
whom, now I am allowed to succour him, I want to keep up this friendship – is
living in that sanctuary, you will often see my face. I want to visit him now.
I shall bring his words and works to the Lord in witness; he will know his
doings.’ And only after this speech is the name of the angel revealed.
‘Guthlac’s spirit was filled with bliss then, once Bartholomew had proclaimed
the message of God.’
The monk Felix, in his life of St Guthlac,
notes that he arrived at Crowland on 24 August (he says 25 August), St
Bartholomew’s day, ‘with whose help, under divine providence, he had made a
beginning of his dwelling in the desert. He was then about 26 years of age when
he determined with heavenly aid to be a soldier of the true God amid the gloomy
thickets of that remote desert. Then girding himself with spiritual arms
against the wiles of the foul foe, he took the shield of faith, the breastplate
of hope, the helmet of chastity, the bow of patience, the arrows of psalmody,
making himself strong for the fight.’
Felix goes on to tell us
how ‘the blessed Bartholomew his trusty helper presented himself before his
gaze in the morning watches’. Bartholomew ‘remained in his presence and began
to comfort him with spiritual precepts, promising that he would come to his aid
in all tribulations. Felix tells us that there was ‘a certain hermit who dwelt
in the midst of the fen on an island called Crowland, whose fame for miracles
of various kinds filled almost the whole of Britain, far and wide’. ‘For no
sick man went away from him without relief, no afflicted person without
healing, no sad ones without joy, no weary ones without encouragement, no
mourners without comfort, no anxious ones without counsel; but as he abounded
in true charity, he shared equally in the sufferings of them all.’
Guthlac died relatively
young on 11 April 714 at the age of 41, fifteen years after he began his
solitary life. He
recalled on his death bed that from his second year at Crowland God had sent
him and angel every morning and evening to talk with him for his consolation,
‘who showed me mysteries which is not lawful for man to utter, who relieved the
hardness of my toil with heavenly oracles, and who revealed to me things which
were absent as though they were present’. Twelve months after his death his
body was found without corruption and the garments in which he had been wrapped
shone with all their former newness and original brightness.
Scholarly attention to the
embellishment of Guthlac’s life after 714 has shown that the solitary hermit
who was venerated for his ascetism was
gradually transformed into the image of the promoter and defender of a wealthy religious institution. By the fourteenth century, this stifled popular veneration for St Guthlac, who
in earlier times had been second in popularity only to St Cuthbert. And this is
probably why, now, sadly Guthlac is relatively forgotten while Cuthbert (whose remains were translated to Durham as late as 999) is well
known. It’s difficult to be regarded both as an ascetic and the defender of a
wealthy monastery.
Today, Crowland is no
longer a wealthy monastery. It is a splendid historic church with associated ruins, but the church itself requires a great deal of conservation work because its splendid masonry is
damaged. We should not, perhaps, regard English Heritage as the modern
equivalent of St Bartholomew, coming to the rescue of St Guthlac against his
tormentors by handing him a scourge. Yet it certainly is the case that without the current work on restoring the
fabric of the Church, the historic church would have had a very uncertain
future. Already pews have been cordoned off because of falling masonry.
Eventually, the area that was safe to use would have become too restricted to
be manageable. So we wish the abbey well in its restoration and pray that the
parish’s finances will recover from the considerable outlay that the work is
costing even with the assistance of English Heritage.
All
of which introduces the question of ‘mission versus conservation’ but this is an
either/or question that should not need to be posed. All our historic buildings
should be conserved, but this task of maintaining our heritage should not have
to be at a cost to the mission of the church. All too often, up and down the
land, our historic churches are faced with continual challenges as to how to
finance work that needs to be done just to maintain (not to improve) the
fabric. Sometimes it leads to the development of a new relationship with the
local community which seeks to join in the collaborative task of maintaining
that which is unique and irreplaceable to the community. On other occasions
this is simply impossible because the costs are too high and the building is of
national, and not just local, significance. The problems of securing the fabric
of Crowland Abbey are greater in scale than the problems of adapting St
Guthlac’s, Knighton, into a church appropriate for the twenty-first century;
but they are not necessarily different in kind. If and when our present
national funding crisis passes, there will have to be a new assessment of the
purposes and possibilities of assisting the funding of church buildings
dedicated to the service of their communities, or as in the case of Crowland
Abbey, which are a potential attraction to tourists and pilgrims. At present the original religious purpose of the building
serves too often as the reason or lame excuse for funding assistance being
denied rather than facilitated. It is unlikely that we will return to the era
when whole communities and wealthy benefactors paid for the construction of great
cathedrals and huge churches; but in a country with so many churches of
particular interest and beauty it seems perverse in the extreme to make it so
difficult, as at present, to keep what is usually the
central, or even the only, public building alive and vibrant for the future.
