Fr Alex Swain
Beloved in Christ,
In our round of the sanctorale, or the calendar of saints during the liturgical year, today is the Feast of St. Bede.
According to our Lesser Feasts & Fasts (2024), Bede arrived at a monastery in Jarrow (nearby modern Durham, northeast England) for his education at the age of 7. He loved to study the scriptures and any texts he could get his hands on.
With the collapse of the western Roman empire in the late 5th and early 6th centuries, monastic institutions became repositories for safeguarding written texts, and copying them in their scriptoriums.
Bede rapidly rose to the occasion and became a scholar of immense import. He became, perhaps, the closest ancient scholar to a modern historian that we might see in late antiquity—wherein he would cite sources he used while putting together chronological histories of the English Peoples, and a history of Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow.
According to Lesser Feasts and Fasts he died on the eve of the Ascension in 735, and his body now rests in the Lady Chapel in the Durham cathedral. “He remains beloved by the Christian community and Durham, and by pilgrims from around the world” to this day.
As I consider the importance of St. Bede in our faithful celebrations today, I am thinking about how one of the most lasting impacts we often have in this life is our writings. These bits and pieces of personality, labor, and love are left behind after we die.
The First Epistle to Timothy, written by St. Paul, is such a text. I doubt Paul was aware that this text, so inspired by the Holy Spirit, would become canonized as Scripture under the faithful discernment of the Church. Or maybe he did know this. Who’s to say!
Either way, both Sts. Paul & Bede left behind very important writings (Paul’s, of course, becoming Scripture for us!). They illumine the machinations and motions of faithful peoples in times long past. They give us a glimpse of the profound depth of faith that people had oh so long ago.
What will we leave behind for those who come after us? How will they come to know Christ more fully in what we write?
May blessed Bede pray for us to the Lord our God, and inspire us to lives of faith!
Yours in Christ,
—Fr Alex
