Thinkabout for The Campfire Church on Facebook for today, the feast of St Michael and All Angels.

 

The British Isles experienced evangelisation from two sources.

One was St Augustine of Canterbury. He brought a version of Christianity that came to us from Italy, after the conversion of the Roman emperors. This form of Christianity was shaped and structured by Roman concepts of civic life and their judicial system — it arrived in England already filtered through the Roman cultural perspective.

Now, this didn’t sit well with all of England. In fact the division in church practice was eventually addressed by King Oswiu at the Synod of Whitby in 663 and 664 AD. St Peter was the person in the gospels to whom Jesus said, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” Until then, Peter had been know by his birth name, Simon (he was renamed by Jesus because of the word Petrus meaning “rock”)   Peter was therefore considered to hold the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and there is a strong association between St Peter and Rome — according to writers of the time, he was martyred there under Emperor Nero.

So in honour of and deference to St Peter, King Oswiu ruled in favour of Roman Christianity, and thus England followed the Roman expression of Christianity after that until the Henry the 8th’s Reformation.

The synod where this decision happened took place at Whitby Abbey — a double monastery for both men and women under the leadership of Abbess Hilda — who nurtured and encouraged Caedmon the poet, who wrote the fragment that remains as one of the very first evidences of English verse. Hilda would not have been pleased at the outcome of the synod vote, because she — like Queen Eanfled (King Oswiu’s wife) — favoured the other expression of Christianity that had come to England from St Columba’s monks based on Iona. They were the original missionaries to the British Isles, and under their influence Northumbria was converted before Augustine arrived.

Now, St Augustine was prior of a monastery in Rome when, in 595AD, Pope Gregory the Great sent him to evangelise King Aethelberht and his Kingdom of Kent. Up until then, the Kentish people followed the religion of Anglo-Saxon paganism.

So there was a two-pronged ingress of the Gospel into England. When Columba was thrown out of his monastery in Ireland, he was commanded to go until he could no longer see Ireland any more. So he travelled by sea up as far as Iona, and from there he could no longer see Ireland, so that’s where he settled. He established his monastery there on Iona, and so came down through Scotland into Northumbria, evangelising first Scotland and then England.

Meanwhile Augustine sailed from Italy to south-east England — he landed at Thanet in Kent — and brought the Gospel by that route.

You would have thought, then, that southern England would have been evangelised by Augustine. But he encountered resistance. The Sussex people have a saying, “We won’t be druv”. In case you don’t understand that, it means we will not be driven. The Sussex people are markedly stubborn. Here, where I live, in East Sussex, in this little pocket, Augustine completely failed. But where he failed, Columba’s monks, as they gradually permeated the country, succeeded.

King Offa of Mercia, who ruled for about forty years in the second half of the 700s, took advantage of instability in southern England to establish himself as an overlord. His daughter Eadburh married Beohrtric of Wessex, and between them they established sovereignty over south-eastern England — Beohrtric and Offa. Towards the close of the 700s, when King Offa gave a parcel of land on England’s south coast at Bexhill, to be dedicated in perpetuity to the praise and glory of God, the treaty was signed according to Columba’s Celtic form of Christianity.

The difference between these two approaches to Christianity (Columba’s and Augustine’s) was massive.

Roman Christianity was highly structured — it was based on the Roman legal system, after all — hierarchical and patriarchal.

Celtic Christianity was more rooted in the natural world, both in inspiration and expression.

Anglo-Saxon paganism harmonised far better with Columba’s approach than Augustine’s. Augustine’s was imposed from without and above and established dominance— and yes, it took hold — but Columba’s monks worked with what they already found in place, and showed the people how it connected with the vision of the Gospel.

In the old religion, the natural world was sacred, alive, ensouled. The wells were holy, seen as the places were life issued from the womb of the earth, as a woman’s waters break when a child is born. Everything was holy — the trees, the streams, the rocks, the birds, the animals. All of it was alive with spiritual power. 

Their religion was expressed in the wheel of the year, the turning of the seasons in farming and in the seasons of the light — England is quite far north, the winters are very dark and cold, but the summer days are long; and we have prolonged dawns and dusks at the beginning and end of each day, the mysterious twilight times when the veil between the world is thin; the veil that separates us from what the old Celts called “the realm of weird”).

What Columba’s monks did was to settle upon each of the existing pagan festivals a Christian equivalent, exploring a Gospel theme that resonated with the seasonal theme of the Old Religion — but at a respectful distance of a few days, to allow space for the observance of both, and it worked.

At the very xenith of the year, at the midsummer solstice in June, when the light is at its greatest ascendant, Columba’s monks set the feast of John the Baptist, the herald of Christ. 

This is brilliant. Christ is the light, the day-star, the sun is analogous to his glory. But that’s not his feast. Standing there at the height of the year, John the herald points down to the dark, deep days of the winter. It is there, at the deepest, darkest, coldest moment, the time of hunger and frost and death, that the infant light is born at the winter solstice; what the Old Religion spoke of as Yul, “the Turn”, the moment when, in darkness and death, light and life are born again. That’s where the monks settled Christmas, the feast of the Incarnation.

But halfway between the feast of St John the Baptist in June, and the feast of the Incarnation at the winter solstice, comes the Autumn Equinox — Alban Elfed, the Harvest Home.

The harvest season begins when the sickle is put in to reap the barley at the beginning of August — Lughnasadh in the Old Religion, where Columba’s monks settle Lammas, which comes from Loaf-Mass, for the barley loaf that fed the people.

But the harvest season concludes at the autumn equinox when the weather changes — and now by this time all must be safely gathered in, so the barns are full because the cold, lean days are coming.

There at the autumn equinox, alongside Alban Elfed, Columba’s monks settled the feast of St Michael and All Angels. The angels are the reapers of God’s harvest, ensuring all is safely gathered in. St Michael stands at this golden time of harvest thanksgiving, pointing down the year to the coming winter; and his message is “Prepare, for the dark days are coming. Be ready.” He’s not talking about the harvest of wheat and barley, he means the harvest of souls. He’s pointing down to the ending of our days in death, the winter of life. The time of the coming of Christ, but this time in judgement. And he’s saying, “Prepare. For yourself and your household, your family: are you ready?”

Today, the 29th September, is the Feast of St Michael and All Angels.

May we heed his word to us — “Prepare, for the dark days are coming. Do the work of body and of soul. Life is uncertain, and it ends. Stand always ready.”