Cuthbert and the Otters

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It is the middle of the night, and it is very cold.

A beach in the north of England, in winter. No moon to speak of. The tide is a long way out and coming back in, and the sea makes the sound it makes at that hour, a slow, patient hush, as if it were telling the shore to go to sleep.

And a man is walking into it.

Not swimming. Not rescuing anybody. He is just walking down the sand in his woollen habit, and he does not stop at the water's edge. He goes in up to his knees. Up to his waist. Up to his chest, and the water is so cold that, if you were standing on the dry sand watching, your own teeth would start to hurt.

Up on the dune, behind a clump of grass, a very young monk is holding his breath and thinking, quite clearly, I should not have come.

He is right. He should not have. But he is here now, and what he sees next is going to change how he thinks about almost everything, and he is going to be asked to keep quiet about it for a very long time.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is the old tale of Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, as it was written down by the monks who knew him and by the great historian Bede, who was a boy when Cuthbert died, and a few of the small conversations are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let me take you to Northumbria.

If you have a map of Britain in your head, go up the east side, past the flat country, past the great old river mouths, until the land begins to rise and roughen, and the coast turns into long pale beaches, and black rocks, and castles that look as if someone had grown them there. Keep going until you are almost at Scotland. That is Northumbria, or it was. In the time of our story, the six hundreds, it was a kingdom of its own, running from the River Humber in the south, up to the Firth of Forth in the north, and it was one of the most important places in Europe, though the people who lived there had no idea.

It was windy. I should say that at once. It is the first thing everybody says about Northumbria, including the saints. It was windy, and it was green, and it was a country of sheep and cattle and very large skies. The people were English, or Angles, as the old writers say, who had come across the North Sea a couple of centuries before. Their neighbours were the Britons to the west, and the Picts and the Irish to the north, and the kings of all these peoples spent most of their time borrowing one another's cattle and not giving them back.

The Christian faith had come to the Northumbrians twice, and I mean that quite literally. First a mission came from Rome, by way of Canterbury, with Saint Paulinus, in the early six hundreds. Then, after a war and a time of great trouble, a king named Oswald came home from exile in Scotland, where he had been taught the faith by the monks of the island of Iona. Oswald asked Iona for a bishop and monks of his own. They sent Saint Aidan, a gentle Irishman who was a better listener than he was a preacher, and Aidan chose, for his headquarters, a little island off the Northumbrian coast, which was called Lindisfarne, and which we now call Holy Island.

Hold on to that island. We will be going there.

It is a very particular sort of island. Twice a day, the sea comes in, and the island is an island. Twice a day, the sea goes out, and a causeway of wet sand appears, and you may walk or drive across to it, if you have checked the tide tables, and if you are not a person who believes tide tables are for other people. Every year somebody has to be rescued from the middle of that causeway, sitting on the roof of a car, looking embarrassed. This has been going on for about thirteen hundred years, and I think we can say that the saints would have been sympathetic.

Now. Into this windy, green, borrowed-cattle country, somewhere around the year six hundred and thirty-four, a boy was born who would grow up to be the most loved saint in the north of England. His name was Cuthbert.

We do not know much about his family. The earliest lives say nothing about his parents, which is the kind of thing you notice. We know that he grew up in the Lowlands of what is now southern Scotland, then part of Northumbria, in a countryside of little farms and sheep. And we know, because the stories are very clear on this point, that he was a boy who could not sit still.

He liked wrestling. He liked running and jumping and throwing things. He was the sort of child who, if there were a wall, wished to be on top of it. Bede tells us that he outdid all the other children of his age at games, and was always the last to want to stop, and that when the others were worn out, he would look around, a little hopeful, and say something like: is that it?

There is a famous story from those years, and it is the first thing you should know about him, because it will turn out to matter. One day, when Cuthbert was about eight, he was playing a game with some other children. They were all tumbling about and showing off, as children do, and Cuthbert was in the middle of it, doing something athletic and probably unwise. And a very small child, only three years old, who had been watching all this, suddenly spoke up, in a grave and ringing voice, and said: Cuthbert, stop this. It is not right for you.

Now, the old lives tell us that the three-year-old said this with the seriousness of a bishop. And Cuthbert, who was eight and had not been told off by a toddler before, stopped. He went away, thoughtful, and the story says he was sorry, and that the sorrow stayed with him, and that it was the beginning of a change in how he lived.

I'd like to be honest with you about this story. It is one of the legends, and a charming one, and the monks who wrote it down took it as a sign. We cannot know what happened on that field. What I can say is that even the sceptics who read Bede notice that this is a story about a boy being told, by someone smaller and less impressive than himself, to take things seriously, and that the boy listened. That is a rare thing. Most of us have been told by someone small, and have not listened at all.

So that is Cuthbert at eight. What happened next?

He grew. He took a job as a shepherd. This is a very good job for a thinking boy, because there is nothing to do for hours but sit on a hill and look at the sky, and the sheep are, broadly, not demanding. And one night, in the year six hundred and fifty-one, when he was about seventeen, he was sitting up with the flock on the hills above a river called the Leader Water, and he saw something.

The old lives say that he saw a light. They say the dark sky opened, and that bright figures came down out of it, and went back up again, bearing something between them, as if carrying a precious thing home. The next morning, he found out that, in that very night, Bishop Aidan had died at Bamburgh, on the coast, a long day's ride away. Aidan, the gentle Irishman, the founder of Lindisfarne, had died leaning against a post of the church wall, as the story goes, and the shepherd boy on the hill had seen his soul go home.

I tell it the way the old story tells it, which means: I am telling you what the monks said. They said the boy saw angels carrying a holy soul. That is the kind of thing they believed, and it is the kind of thing that a quiet boy on a hill, at night, might have seen, or might have been given to see. I leave it to you. But I can tell you what Cuthbert did next, and this part is not in doubt. He said, I think I will become a monk.

There was a monastery on the River Tweed, in a bend of the river, called Melrose. It was a small house, even by the standards of those days, a cluster of wooden huts and a church with a thatched roof, and it was part of that same Irish tradition that Aidan had brought. When Cuthbert rode up to its gate, he was young and rather tall and had no idea what he was doing, and he rode up on a horse that belonged to someone else, and he had a spear in his hand. This last is an interesting detail. Young men of those days carried spears, in the way young men now carry mobile phones, and the lives remember that Cuthbert arrived at the door of a monastery holding one. He handed it over, along with the horse, which I think is a good way to begin.

And there, standing in the doorway, was the prior of the house. His name was Boisil.

Now, Boisil is one of my favourite people in this whole story, and I am sorry that he only gets a small part. The old lives call him a man of great sweetness, and a prophet. What that meant in practice was that Boisil looked at people and saw them clearly. And on the day that Cuthbert rode up, Boisil was standing at the door, and he took one look at the tall, awkward, serious young man on the borrowed horse, and he said to the brothers around him, in the hearing of everyone: Behold a servant of the Lord.

Imagine being Cuthbert. You have been in the building for forty seconds. Nobody knows your surname. And the head of the house has just announced you to a crowd.

I think he may have wished for the spear back.

But he was taken in. And Boisil, who had a gift for teaching as well as for seeing, became his master. They studied together. They worked in the fields together, and they sat up with the sick, and they read the Scriptures in the long evenings, and Cuthbert learned how to read them not like an examination, but like a letter.

There is a lovely story about this. Some years later, when the plague was in the land, as it was in those years, Boisil caught it. He knew he was going to die. And the old story says he turned to Cuthbert and said, in effect: I have one week left. What shall we read together? And Cuthbert, who was a practical person, said: what is the shortest thing we could read, that would do the most good in seven days?

Boisil had a little book with him. It was the Gospel of John, divided into seven parts, one for each day. He looked at it and he said, that will do. And for a week, the dying prior and the young monk sat side by side, reading the Gospel of John, one part a day, and talking about it. Boisil took his time, and Cuthbert took it all in, and on the seventh day they finished, and Boisil died, with the Gospel read through.

Bede wrote this down some sixty years later, and he put it very plainly. I think he knew that there was nothing he could add.

I'll tell you what I think. I think the whole of Cuthbert is in that week. The reading, the patience, the gentleness of an old man handing a young man the whole Gospel in seven days because he had run out of time to hand him anything else. When you meet Cuthbert in the stories that follow, remember that week. It is what he is made of.

Boisil, by the way, is a saint in his own right, and a very much loved one in Scotland. He gave his name to the village of Saint Boswells, near Melrose, which is the sort of memorial I would be very happy to have myself, so long as nobody asks me to spell it.

So Cuthbert grew up. He became prior of Melrose himself, after Boisil. And here comes the part of his life that I want to dwell on, because it is the part nobody expects. He was a wanderer. He travelled.

You must picture it. In those days, there were very few roads and almost no towns, and the people of the hills lived in scattered farms and little hamlets, many of which had had a visit from a priest once in the last ten years. Cuthbert went out to them. He would be away for a week, two weeks, sometimes a month. He walked, or rode, into places so remote that the people there did not know what a monk was, and he stayed in their houses, and he ate what they ate, and he told them about Christ. And the old lives say that he was good at it, and I think I can see why.

He was big and weatherbeaten and cheerful. He listened more than he talked. He did not mind a leaking roof or a cold supper. He sat by the fire and let the children climb on him. And when somebody wanted to confess something shameful, he did not look shocked, because he had been a shepherd, and he knew exactly how people could go astray.

There is one story from those journeys that I must tell, because it is the best story of a saint being fed by a bird that I know, and it is not about otters, so I shall make it quick.

One day he was travelling by the River Tyne, with a boy who was his companion, and they had set out with nothing to eat. They had no bread, no cheese, nothing at all. The boy was getting hungry. And Cuthbert, who had a way of smiling at a problem, looked up and saw an eagle high above them, and said: that bird has been fed by God, and perhaps it will feed us too. Which is a rather bold way to plan lunch.

They walked on. And a while later, they came to the river bank, and there sat the eagle, with a big fish it had caught, the sort of fish that makes a person look twice. Cuthbert said to the boy: go, take it from the eagle, and bring it here. The boy did. And Cuthbert said, and here is the part I love: but give the eagle a share. You have taken its dinner, and it is only fair.

So they cut off a piece of the fish and gave it back to the eagle. Then they took the rest to a house nearby and cooked it, and fed themselves and their hosts.

I don't know whether it happened exactly like that. It is one of those stories, from the anonymous life, that the monks of Lindisfarne told about their favourite and wrote down in good faith. But it is the sort of thing you would say about a man like him, a man who was kind to the eagle even while he was eating its fish. And you will see, in a minute, why I tell it first.

We come now to the coast.

At some point while he was prior of Lindisfarne, Cuthbert paid a visit to a double monastery, a house of both nuns and monks, on a headland called Coldingham, near the border with Scotland. The abbess there was a woman called Æbbe, a princess by birth, and a sister of two kings, and a person of great strength. She was a friend of his, and she had asked him to come, and he went, and he stayed some days. It was a good-sized house, on a high, wild, wind-blown cliff, with the sea crashing at the bottom of it.

Now, this next part is the story I promised you, and I would like to go slowly.

Cuthbert, as everyone knew, kept the hours of prayer like the rest of the house. But at Coldingham, it began to be noticed by one young monk that Cuthbert was not in his bed at night. The young monk, whom Bede does not name, and whom I shall therefore not name either, had been watching him for a while. And he was a curious sort of young man. Not wicked, you understand. Only curious in the way some people are, who see a locked door and feel it as a personal remark.

So one night, when everybody was supposed to be asleep, the young monk lay in his bed in the dark, listening. He heard a footstep. He heard the latch lift, very softly. He heard somebody go out. And he got up, as quietly as he could, and pulled his cloak round himself, and went out after him.

It was a cold night. I told you that. It had a particular sort of cold, the kind that comes up off the sea and finds the gap in your collar. The young monk followed the dark shape ahead of him down the path, past the guest house, past the wall, out through a gap in the hedge, and on down the cliff track toward the shore. He kept far enough behind not to be seen. He kept close enough not to lose him. And all the way he was telling himself that this was a reasonable thing to be doing.

Let us give him a thought or two, because we are in the habit of making fun of him, and he was only young.

He thought: perhaps he is going to meet someone. And then he thought: no, it is Cuthbert. And then he thought: perhaps he is going to pray in some secret place, and I shall see where it is, and I shall tell nobody. And then he thought, with the honesty that comes to people at two in the morning: I would of course tell somebody.

The track came down to the beach. The tide was out, and the sand was pale and ribbed, and the sea was a long way off, a thin line of white in the dark. And the dark shape ahead of him walked across the sand, straight toward the sea, and into it.

The young monk stopped. He crouched down behind the dune, in the cold grass, and he watched.

Cuthbert walked into the water until it was up to his chest. Some of the old lives say up to his neck, and I like that, because it sounds like what happens when a story is told too many times by the fire. But either way, it was deep, and it was the North Sea in winter, which is not a place anyone goes for fun. And there Cuthbert stood, in the dark, with the waves moving round him, and the monk could hear, faintly, over the water, a sound. It was not a shout. It was not a song. It was a man talking, quietly, steadily, to someone who was listening.

He was praying. He prayed in the sea all night.

Imagine the young monk. He had come out to catch a man at something, and he had found a man doing exactly what he had always said he did. There was no secret to uncover. The great secret was the one in plain view, the one that every monk in that house had been told about and nobody had properly believed. Cuthbert prayed, and he prayed as if it were the most natural thing in the world, which is to say, as if the sea were a chapel and the night were an hour that he did not intend to waste.

I do not think the monk understood all of this at once. I think he mostly felt cold and rather ashamed. But he stayed.

The night got older. The sky began, very faintly, to grey in the east. And Cuthbert came wading out of the water, slowly, a big dripping figure in the half-light, and went up the beach, and knelt on the sand to finish his prayers.

And then the young monk saw something that he would remember for the rest of his life.

Out of the shallows, two small dark shapes came bounding across the sand. They were low and quick and wet, and they moved the way no other animal moves, with a sort of ripple, a loping, boneless run. They were otters. Bede calls them sea creatures, as if he were not entirely sure what to name them, and the later tellings say otters, and I will say otters, because that is plainly what they were.

They came straight up to Cuthbert, where he knelt. They did not hesitate. They did not look about for danger. They lay down at his feet, and they began to rub his frozen feet with their fur, and to breathe on them, warm, steaming breath, the way you would warm a child's hands in winter. They rubbed and warmed and dried, up and down, first one foot and then the other, until the colour came back into them. They took, the old story says, great care.

When they had finished, Cuthbert blessed them. He laid his hand on them, the old lives say, in a simple way, as one might bless a friend. And the otters bowed, and turned, and ran back down the sand, and slipped into the sea, and were gone.

I think we should pause there a moment, because I want to say something about what you have just heard.

This is a legend. It is a lovely one. The first person to write it down was the anonymous monk of Lindisfarne, who wrote Cuthbert's life within a few years of his death, and then Bede, a generation later, retold it, and said where it came from. He says that he had it from a monk of the house at Coldingham, who was still alive when he wrote it down. In other words, Bede tells us that it was the young man himself who told it, in the end, and that Bede asked the right people and was given the answer.

So is it true? I cannot tell you. Nobody can. What I can tell you is what the story is for.

It is not a story about a man with a power over animals. The old lives are very careful about this, and so must we be. Cuthbert does not command the otters. He does not whistle for them. He does not know they are coming, as far as the story tells us. What happens is that a man spends a night in prayer, in cold water, with nothing in his mind but God, and in the morning, creation, which belongs to God in the first place, behaves toward him as it was always meant to behave toward a person who has come back to the garden. The otters are not a miracle he works. They are a sign of what the world is like when a human being is, for a little while, right with it.

That, at any rate, is how the monks understood it. And they had Scripture in mind. Remember Daniel, who spent a night among lions and was not hurt. Remember Elijah and his ravens. Remember the Garden, where the man named the animals and none of them ran. Bede and the other writers of the Lives knew these stories by heart, and they saw in Cuthbert a small, human, northern-sea echo of them. Everything good that happens in the story, God does. The saint prays.

And here is the funniest and the gentlest part. When the otters had gone, the young monk crept out from behind the dune. He did not mean to. He just found that his legs had decided something his head hadn't. He came across the sand, and he stood in front of Cuthbert, who was still kneeling, and the young monk went down on his own knees, all in a heap, in the wet sand. And he began to say that he was sorry.

He said he was sorry for following. He said he was sorry for lying in the grass. He said he was sorry for all of it, and a number of other things, in no particular order, because he had been awake all night and was a little out of his mind.

And Cuthbert, who by then was blue with cold, and whose feet had only just come back to life, looked at him, and he did not shout. He did not say a word about the lying in the grass. He said, the old story tells us, something so mild that it is almost funny. He said, in effect: what is the matter, brother? Is it that you are sorry? Well, then. Go back to bed. But there is one thing I ask of you. Tell nobody about this, not one word, until after I am dead.

I think we can imagine the young monk's face. He had been told by the greatest man he knew that he had seen something extraordinary, and in the same breath had been told that he could not tell a soul. It must have felt like being handed a very large, very fragile bowl and being told to carry it up a hill and not spill a drop.

He did. That's the thing. He kept it. For years.

Cuthbert, in the meantime, went in, and thawed out, and said the morning prayers with the rest of the house, as if nothing had happened. I like to think that, at breakfast, the young monk, with his porridge, looked at Cuthbert across the table, and Cuthbert looked back with the face of a man who had been up all night, and the young monk looked at his porridge again, and thought, very hard, about nothing.

And the bit I find most moving is this. The young monk did not spend the rest of his life dining out on it. He did not say, I know a thing. When the day finally came, many years later, that he was allowed to speak, Bede says that he told the story with great reverence and with some embarrassment, and always began, I hope, with the words: it was my own fault, I had no business to be there.

Which is exactly right. It was a moment that was not meant for him, and he saw it anyway, and he was forgiven, and he kept the secret. All three of those things are the story.

Now, I have been talking about otters for a long time, and I want to tell you the rest of the life, because there is a lot of it, and some of it is the funniest part.

After the plague, and the troubles, and the long dispute about the date of Easter that we will leave firmly in the cupboard where it belongs, Cuthbert was sent to Lindisfarne itself. He was made prior there, in charge of the monks, and he went. It was not a promotion he wanted. He was a man who loved the roads and the hill farms, and the brothers of Lindisfarne, who were Irish in custom and rather set in their ways, did not at first take to being managed by a man who had been to a lot of places and was perfectly polite about it.

The old lives tell us that there were arguments in the chapter. They tell us that some of the brothers were stubborn, and that Cuthbert simply let them say what they had to say, and when the meeting grew loud, he would get up quietly and walk out. And in the morning, he would come back, with the same face, and take up exactly the same point, and the thing would be settled in about a quarter of the time. Bede says he won them over by patience. I think he won them over because he was the only person in the room who was not trying to win.

He was prior of Lindisfarne for about twelve years. And through all that time, what he longed for was to be alone.

I know. This is a funny thing to say about a man who is so much loved by crowds. But Cuthbert was a man who needed silence the way other people need air. Out in the sea, a couple of miles from Lindisfarne, there is a small rocky island called Inner Farne. It is flat and treeless and about as big as a very large field, with no fresh water on it, and a lot of birds. It is beautiful, in a stark sort of way, and it is very hard to get to in bad weather. In the year six hundred and seventy-six, Cuthbert went there to live.

Alone. In a hut. On a rock. In the North Sea.

The old lives describe the hut. It was circular, they say, with walls so thick and so high that, from inside, he could see nothing but the sky. This was on purpose. He wished, they say, to keep his eyes, and therefore his thoughts, pointed upward. Which, as I have said before, I find both admirable and very, very difficult to imagine, as a person who can barely look at a sky without wondering what is for lunch.

And now you are asking: but what did he eat? There was no fresh water on the island. Nothing grew. Well, this is where the story gets cheerful again, because the old lives tell us that he prayed, and the ground gave him a spring. Fresh water, right there in his yard. Whether or not you take that as a miracle, it is the sort of thing that people in the seventh century certainly did. And he dug the ground and sowed wheat, and nothing came up. He sowed barley, late, almost as an afterthought, in the wrong season, and it grew. Bede says it grew in the barest of ground, and it was ripe, and he ate his own bread.

So he had water, and he had bread. He was settled. He was as happy as he had ever been. He sat in his hut and did what he had always wished to do.

And then the birds arrived.

I have been saving the ravens.

There were two of them, and they were thieves. They came to the island, and they looked at Cuthbert's little hut, and they looked at his thatched roof, and they said, as clearly as if they had spoken: this is a good place. Look at all this straw.

And they began to pull it off.

Bede tells this one with obvious relish. He says the ravens took straw from the roof of the guest house, which was a small building Cuthbert had put up near the landing place for the use of visiting brothers, and carried it off to build their nest. And they pulled out more of it. And more. Cuthbert, when he noticed, was patient. He stood and watched, I imagine, with the face of a man who has been very good for a very long time. And then he said to them, mildly, in the name of Jesus Christ, to stop. Or to go away, or to leave off. Something of that kind.

They did not stop. They went on, with the thick, comfortable, feathered obstinacy of birds who have found building material.

And then Cuthbert did the thing that made the monks laugh for a hundred years. He said it again, a little more firmly, in the name of Jesus Christ. And the ravens, as if they had suddenly noticed who they were speaking to, stopped, and flew away.

Three days later, one of them came back.

It came to Cuthbert, where he was digging in the field, and it stood in front of him, and it made a low sound, and spread its wings, and bowed its head, like a very large black schoolboy at the headmaster's door. And it had something in its beak. It put it down at Cuthbert's feet. It was a lump of lard. Pig's fat.

Cuthbert looked at it for some time.

And then, the old story says, he took the gift, and he forgave the raven, and the raven stayed. And he gave the lard to the brothers who came to the island, who, the story says, used it to grease their shoes for a whole year. I find this one of the most satisfying details in all of hagiography. It is the moment where the sublime meets the shoe polish. It is the saint, looking down at a lump of lard from a repentant bird, and a pious monk, a year later, looking at his greased boots, and saying, ah yes, from Cuthbert's raven. I want you to know that I have been trying to find a way to tell you something solemn about it, and I cannot, and I do not think I am supposed to.

Now, there is a thing I want you to hear in the middle of all this lightness, and it is this. The ravens did not obey a wizard. Cuthbert never tells them what to do in his own name. When he speaks to them, he speaks in the name of Christ, and the old story is very careful about that. The ravens go away because they are creatures, and they know their Maker's name when they hear it, and Cuthbert is simply a man standing at the right place saying the right words. It is a small picture of what Saint Paul writes about creation waiting for the children of God. A bird, a raven, hears a voice that speaks in the name of its Maker, and reacts the way a creature does when the master of the house comes in.

And the other birds on Farne? There were eiders, big, handsome sea ducks with soft down. They nested right on the island, and they were so tame, later tradition says, that they would sit beside him as he walked. To this day the people of Northumberland call them Cuddy's ducks, Cuddy being the affectionate short form of his name. I have no way to prove that this goes straight back to Cuthbert himself, but it is a very old name, and a very fond one, and I think it says a good deal. A man who has been dead for thirteen hundred years still has a duck named after him. I don't know many politicians who can say the same.

You would think that was the end of the story. A hermit, a rock, some ducks. A quiet old age.

But the world does not leave saints alone. It is one of the great jokes of the whole business. The more a person tries to disappear, the more they are sought out.

People came to Farne. They rowed over from the mainland in all weathers, with their troubles, and Cuthbert, who had come out here to be alone, went to the little window of his hut and talked to them. He listened. He prayed with them. He sent them home. The kings and nobles of Northumbria came, and the poor came, and the sick came, and he saw them all, and then he went back to his prayers.

And in the year six hundred and eighty-five, the king, whose name was Ecgfrith, and the bishops of the kingdom wanted him for a bishop. They sent messengers. They sent letters. They sent, in the end, the king himself, in a boat, with a crowd of important people, who knelt on the rock and begged him to come.

Cuthbert did not want to go. The old lives say he wept. I think this is one of the most honest details in the story. He was a person who understood exactly what he was being asked to give up. The silence, the barley, the ravens, the wall that showed only sky. And in return he was being offered a diocese, and a seat at the council table, and a lot of horseback, and the care of people he did not know. But he went. That was the other half of his character. He went, because he had been asked, and because the thing that had held his heart all his life was not the rock but the God who had been on it.

He was made bishop in York, at Easter, in the year six hundred and eighty-five, and he took over the see of Lindisfarne, and he did the job, the old lives say, as he had done every job: by walking about. He visited every village. He ate in every kitchen. He confirmed the children, and he blessed the sick, and when a plague came round again, he went out to the stricken villages himself. He gave away nearly everything he had. He was, one of the early lives says, a bishop who looked like a shepherd.

It lasted two years. Not quite.

Towards the end of six hundred and eighty-six, he resigned the see, and went back to Farne. He knew, the old lives say, that he was dying. And it is lovely to see how he did it. He went back to his hut. He sat down. He prayed. A couple of brothers came across the water to look after him, because he had grown frail. And they were with him in the last days, when he lay in the hut, and the sea was loud against the rocks, and the tide came and went, as it always had.

The wind-down now. Slower, and quieter.

It was the twentieth of March, in the year six hundred and eighty-seven. A cold night, near the end of winter, just before the first green. A monk of Lindisfarne was standing on a high place on the island of Holy Island, looking across the water toward Farne. It was the middle of the night, and he was keeping watch, as he had been told to. And he was holding a torch.

That was the signal. The plan was that when Cuthbert died, a brother on Farne would light a lamp, and the monk on Lindisfarne, seeing it, would run into the church and tell the others. So he stood and looked at the dark. The sea was calm. There was no moon. And then, a long way off across the water, a small light moved. It was a lamp, held up in a window on Farne.

The monk on the hill lit his own torch, and ran down to the church, where the brothers were singing the night office, and he told them, and they were just coming to the end of a psalm, and and they finished the psalm they were singing. And then they understood.

Cuthbert had died. He had received the Body of Christ that evening, and lifted his eyes to heaven, and stretched out his hands, and so, in prayer, he died. He was about fifty-three years old. The last thing he had said to his brothers, the old story tells us, was a handful of plain, kind sentences. Be at peace with each other. Keep to the way of the Lord. Welcome the guests who come to you, as if each of them were Christ. And keep faith, he said, with the unity of the whole Church.

There was a funeral at Lindisfarne. His body was carried across the sea, in a boat, the way he had come, and was laid in the church there. And the brothers took the place of his home, and kept up the prayers, and that was that.

And then, as you may have guessed, it was not that. Because the monks of Lindisfarne never really let go of him.

The old story says that eleven years later, when they opened his grave to move his bones to a more honourable place, they found his body whole, and his limbs still bending, and his clothing fresh, as if he were asleep. The monks wrote this down at the time as a sign of God's favour, and I am telling you what they said. I am not asking you to take the details as a matter of faith, only to notice what the early lives wished us to notice, and that is that those who knew him could not quite believe he was gone.

That was the first translation of Cuthbert. There were many more. When the Vikings began to raid the coast, in the years seven hundred and ninety-three and after, the monks packed up their treasures, and their gospel book, and Cuthbert's coffin, and they left the island. And for some hundred and twenty years, the coffin of Cuthbert wandered about the north of England, carried on the shoulders of the community, a travelling shrine. It stayed a while in one place and a while in another. At last it came to rest at Durham, where a great cathedral grew up around it, and where it lies to this day, and the people of the north, who are not easily impressed, have never stopped coming.

If you go there, you will find a cathedral so large and so old that it makes you feel like a very small sheep. You will walk along the nave, past the tall round pillars, to the eastern end, and there, behind the high altar, you will find a simple stone slab, with one word on it. Cuthbertus.

That is all. No speeches. Just his name, and the quiet.

And out there, on the Northumbrian coast, a little way south of Holy Island, there is still a beach where the tide goes out and the sea goes quiet. If you stand at the edge of the sand on a winter night, a long way from anywhere, and you wait, you may hear something. It is probably the wind. It is probably a seal. But I have heard that sometimes, on certain nights, it is the sound of two small animals running across wet sand, in the dark, toward someone who is kneeling there.

I do not say it is true. I only say, listen.

The sea comes in. The sea goes out.

And somewhere, someone is praying, and the world is warm.

Some notes for the curious.

Saint Cuthbert was a real person, a monk, prior, hermit and bishop in the Northumbria of the seventh century, and he died on Inner Farne on the twentieth of March in the year six hundred and eighty-seven. He lived before the great division between East and West, and so he is a saint of both the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches, and the Orthodox in Britain keep his feast with the Catholics on the twentieth of March.

His life is unusually well documented for the time. The oldest account is the anonymous Life, written by a monk of Lindisfarne within about fifteen years of his death. Bede, who was a boy in the monastery when Cuthbert died, wrote a verse life, then a prose life around the year seven hundred and twenty-one, and told Cuthbert's story again in his Ecclesiastical History. Bede says plainly where he had each story from, and names the living witnesses where he can, which is one of the reasons historians trust him.

The otters are in Bede's prose life, and the anonymous life has an earlier version. The eagle and the fish are in the anonymous life. The ravens and the lard are in Bede. The seven days of the Gospel of John with Boisil, the vision of Aidan's soul, the spring on Farne and the barley are all in Bede or the anonymous life. All of these are told in the lives as events, and I have told them as the monks wrote them, which means that you should treat them as the early tradition, and decide for yourself what you make of them. The details about the body being found whole eleven years later come from the same early sources, and I have said so. The story of the small child who told Cuthbert to stop playing is also from Bede and the anonymous life. The conversations, thoughts and jokes of the young monk are ours. Bede does not name him, does not say how old he was, and tells us nothing about his thoughts on the dune.

What we invented tonight: nearly all the dialogue, the monk's inner voice, the breakfast with the porridge, the jokes, and the closing blessing. The old lives give only the barest account of what was said on the beach, and a good deal of what I have given you is the embroidery that a storyteller adds around a few firm threads.

If you would like to read more, Bertram Colgrave's translation, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, has both the anonymous life and Bede's prose life in clear English, and a collection called Saint Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to Anno Domini twelve hundred is the standard scholarly work.

That's the story of Saint Cuthbert for tonight. His feast is the twentieth of March, in both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

Here is a bedtime blessing of our own, not Cuthbert's, written in the spirit of the old northern prayers. May the Lord who made the sea and the shore, the otter and the raven and the eagle, keep you through the night. May the angels stand at the foot of your bed. And may you wake, rested and unafraid, to a morning that is already blessed.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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