This image is a recreation, not a photograph
I received a letter today from my former wife, sharing some of her beloved orchestral and choral music, which chanced to come from Durham Cathedral. The BBC often uses it as a concert venue. The building is verily, in my opinion, the most glorious of all cathedrals.
It’s not the most beautiful, the oldest, the richest, the most celebrated, the best stained glass or the best statuary. It is simply POWERFUL, almost overwhelmingly so.
As a designated world heritage site, it seems a lot of other people have felt its power too. Celebrity historian Neil Oliver describes it as a stone mountain raised by men. It was the chief domain of the Prince Bishops of Northumberland, real warrior clerics, not stay-at-home troublemakers like that wealthy Italian potentate of you know where! Moreover, it was a film location for the Harry Potter movies. That’s fame!
Durham Cathedral, the knave looking towards the altar
My fondness for this sacred site is enhanced by the fact that it contains the last mortal remains of my favorite saint: St. Cuthbert (born around 632-died 687). I have been at pains, often, to tell the world I am not a practicing Christian. There are certain religious tenets which I cannot abide and to accept them would be gross hypocrisy. But that doesn’t mean I can’t cherish a saint, surely?
Cuthbert was beyond doubt a lovely man. He was fond of animals and reputedly spoke with them. He had visions, which undoubtedly were grander than mine. He did some time as a soldier, but finally became bishop of the monastery on Lindisfarne—the Holy Isle.
Cuthbert has been described as “perhaps the most popular saint in Britain prior to the death of Thomas Becket in 1170.” [Marner, Dominic (2000). St. Cuthbert: His Life and Cult in Medieval Durham. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-3518-9]
The earliest biographies concentrate on the many miracles that accompanied even his early life, but he was evidently indefatigable as a travelling priest spreading the Christian message to remote villages of the North of England, and also well able to impress royalty and nobility. Notwithstanding, his style of life was austere, and when he could, he lived the life of a hermit, though still receiving many visitors. [Wikipedia]
Perhaps the most inspiring part of his history is that his body and catafalque was paraded on tour for many years (several centuries eventually, before it finally came to rest). Eleven years after he was interred, the coffin was opened and his body was found to be incorrupted (did not rot). This happens occasionally, especially with saintly people. Paramahamsa Yogananda (1893 – 1952), the Indian mystic, also did not decompose for weeks and we have a Los Angeles mortician’s testimony to support that.
A simple stone slab, engraved with CUTHBERTUS marks the site of his body
My Encounter With Cuthbert
My first wife had left years before and I was lonely and sad. That is, until a beautiful young Belgian woman half my age—let’s call her Telly—came into my life. We became lovers and she woke me again, to the joys of laughter, music and poetry, after years of numbness and despair. Without her soft feminine insights I doubt I would be back teaching and healing as I am today.
So it was that I was sitting with her in the cathedral, maybe two metres from Cuthbert’s tomb, which is behind the main altar. I appealed to the saint for guidance, and a strange thing suddenly unfolded. I started weeping uncontrollably; indeed, I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. I recall the streams of nasal mucus (snot) dripping like ropes right down to the floor. It was embarrassing…
Telly put her arm around me and sat patiently, without speaking. She realized that whatever was convulsing me was too deep to discuss. Instead she tried to shield me from the stares of startled onlookers.
Then it came to me. A part of my first wife’s soul was still with me! It (she) spoke to me at that moment! This “part” hadn’t really wanted to leave and so did not, but stayed with me incognito, in a manner of speaking. It’s a phenomenon I have met often as a counselor and in my Supernoetics®; the shamans know it as “soul gifting”. There’s a related phenomenon called “soul stealing”, in which a “part” or parts of a person’s self gets torn away as another departs.
It’s in our language, if you listen carefully: “Part of me will never leave him,” or “She stole my heart away”, “I’ll never be whole again…” You know the sort of thing. BUT IT’S TRUE! When you probe, these scriptural phenomena do exist.
The point is that the powerful healing and re-integration I went through beside Cuthbert opened my heart to the fact that a part of my first wife, at least, had not wanted to engage in the subterfuge and vanish, leaving me lost and broken-hearted. It was such a joy to find that out!*
From that moment all bitterness departed. It took her (the ex-) several more years to reharmonize, because we were living totally separate lives. But since she finally did, we have met and become fast friends and share a lot of mutual feelings about music, gardening and literature.
I visit her on occasion when I am in the UK and she has been to stay with Vivien and me in Las Vegas and twice here at our French home.
Cuthbert prays on an island in a turbulent sea (detail of Tom Denny’s modern Transfiguration window, Durham Cathedral). “That I might bless the Lord who has power over all: Heaven with its pure host of angels, earth, ebb, flood-tide.”
The Astonishing Ray Of Light
But actually, that Cuthbert story is not what I started out wanting to share. It’s something (to me) way more awesome. It too took place in Durham Cathedral years before the event I just described and the reason it came to mind and led to me writing this is that my first wife reminded me of it in the letter referred to above. She was there and saw it happen. She is (or was, anyway) my most severe critic, so you may take it as read that it’s true!
It was an overcast, rather grey, winter’s day. There had been no sunshine all morning, nor was there likely to be any. But that didn’t matter; we visited the cathedral anyway. There is plenty to see apart from Cuthbert’s tomb: the magnificent engraved pillars; beautiful, modern stained glass; and the tomb of a monk of Jarrow known as the Venerable Bede. Bede (birth unknown-died 735 AD) was a scribe and a great historian, who wrote the “Ecclesiastical History of the English People”, a source vital to the history of the conversion to Christianity of the Anglo-Saxon tribes. He was one of England’s greatest literary figures, reporting essentially on the birth of the English nation!
So there we were in the knave, just the two of us, on a gloomy November day, when suddenly the most astonishing thing happened: a hole in the clouds appeared miles away in the sky, which lined up a shaft of sunlight with a tiny window high up in the walls of the cathedral—maybe 150 ft up and at most 4 ft wide; I mean tiny. And that aligned in turn EXACTLY with my head!
A stream of golden light poured in via those two portals, which lined up with each other (what are the chances of that, for a start?), and shone directly on my head, suffusing it with a wonderful golden glow. It wasn’t like a halo; more like a showbiz arc lamp! It was amazing and I was transfixed; I couldn’t bring myself to move. It felt glorious. The whole thing lasted only a few minutes, then the gap in the clouds moved slightly, just enough to take me out of the ray of light! Snap, it was gone.
Wow! What do you do with an experience like that? What did it mean? It was like God telling me “You’re special. I’ve got plans for you.” But I argued with myself not to be arrogant and whatever it meant, it was probably not that I was going to be great someday. After all, it could have been an extraordinary coincidence. But then I don’t really believe in coincidences. Things which happen together, however unlikely, do so for a reason, even if we can’t discern what it is.
For billions of years the Cosmos has been rolling along in its path, event after galactic event, all leading inexorably and determinately to that moment and the exact alignment of the Sun, clouds, window and my head. So if I assume it was God calling, the message started out long, long, long ago!
Now, over thirty years later, here I am writing “Scriptures in The Making”, I have a New Scriptures Colony and daily, almost, I feel inspired to write like this! It must mean SOMETHING!
And before you ask, NO, there was no further sunlight that day. It was a unique moment.
*The correct procedure in events like this is to gently shepherd the part “back home”, where it belongs.
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Creator of Scriptures in The Making
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