St Cuthbert's Way

 
It started with the bus dropping us off in the wrong place. 

To be fair, the driver dropped us off where I asked him to, but it was the wrong place.  Fortunately I had a map with me, and also a friend who could read a map.  We were walking St Cuthbert’s Way and we were starting about 6 miles along the first stage - for various reasons, we couldn’t start the walk until mid afternoon on the first day, so I’d picked a random point on the first stage to join the walk (we planned to go and do the miles we missed on the last day).  With a bit of pushing through undergrowth, and avoiding the field with the bull in it, we found our way to the path and started on our way.

St Cuthbert’s Way is named for the c7th Northumbrian saint Cuthbert.  It is a contemporary creation by Ron Shaw, bringing together his work in tourism development with his personal interest in Anglo Saxon Northumbria.  Shaw worked with partners north and south of the border (or east and west as it is in this part of the world) to establish the route, weaving together a mixture of ancient ways such as the old Roman road Dere Street, and more recently developed rights of way, to create the long distance footpath.

While not an ancient pilgrim route, St Cuthbert’s Way echoes the journey that Cuthbert made from his original monastery at Melrose to Lindisfarne, where he was called to serve first as Prior and then Bishop.  Cuthbert’s life was marked by the pull between the two callings on his life.  As a monk his ministry was not limited to the monasteries in which he served.  He would travel to the surrounding communities, bringing God’s word and the sacraments. And yet his desire was to live as a hermit and to devote his life to prayer and meditation, particularly on the psalms.  He did this for several years, first on the small tidal island at the foot of Lindisfarne, now known as St Cuthbert’s Isle, and later on the Farne Islands.  He was persuaded out of his hermitage to become Bishop of Lindisfarne, but he returned to his hermitage on Inner Farne shortly before his death.

Following his death, Cuthbert’s reputation grew and he was venerated locally as a saint, with people making pilgrimages to pray at his remains, first to Lindisfarne and then to Durham, where his remains were moved to following the Viking raids on Lindisfarne.  While pilgrimages to the great holy places like Jerusalem, Rome, or Santiago were beyond the means of most, local pilgrim shrines such as Lindisfarne and Durham became well trodden routes.  For Mediaeval churchgoers, the mass could be a distant ritual, practiced by priests behind the rood screen and proclaimed in a language they didn’t understand.  The shrines to the saints, by contrast, were a place that they could come right up to, and often touch, and pray in their own words, asking the saints to intercede for them for forgiveness, for healing, or giving thanks.  Each pilgrim could approach with their own intention, and leave with their own blessing.

I had a few different intentions in walking this pilgrimage.  The first, to be honest, was to see if I could do it.  I’m not as fit as I was, nor as fit as I want, and I want to change that.  Obviously the sensible thing to do would be to build up to a long distance walk, but I didn’t quite manage to get round to that, so I was starting from my baseline not-very-fitness.  Turns out I could manage the distance – as my mum always used to say, we’re from Irish bog trotting stock, and we can’t go fast but we can go far.  The bigger challenge wasn’t the distance so much as the height.  I hadn’t twigged that we’d do the equivalent of two Munros worth of height gain over the course of the walk, and on days two and three I struggled with each successive thwocking great hill that appeared on our way.  My friend would faithfully wait for me at the top of each climb, and when she asked how I was doing, she would get the same scowl and grunt as I tried to catch my breath.  But I did it – yay me!

The second intention was a question – what’s next?  It’s a question that has been quietly brewing in my mind for a few months.  This isn’t to say that I’m looking to make big changes.  Quite the opposite in fact – the past few years have been plenty full of change and I’m quite content to move forward through life at a walking pace, not in leaps and bounds.  I’m passionate about my work (80% of the time I love it, 20% I hate it, but I’m always passionate and I reckon that’s pretty good odds!)  I’m in a church I never would have chosen and am really enjoying learning in a new spiritual tradition.  I have family and friends who love me.  All in all, that’s a pretty strong basis for a good life.

But I’m also aware that I’m past half way through my life.  I’m probably not close to the end – if I live as long as my mum I’ve got thirty years left in me.  But if I live as long as my dad, I’ve got not quite two years left to go.  I can’t plan to either of these timescales obviously, but it has made me pause and think about the things I still want to do.  The list only seems to get longer as my life gets shorter, and if my experience so far is anything to go by, I’ll end up going in ways I wouldn’t have predicted.  So this is as good a time as any to take a breath and think about what I hope to do in the years to come, and to look at weaving these things into my life.

One of the things that I know I want to do more of in the years ahead is writing.  Which brings me to the third intention.  I have a list of folders on my laptop of writing projects that I want to do, and one of these is titled Pilgrimage.  I’m interested in the stories of the Mediaeval Scottish Saints, and in the people who made pilgrimages to their shrines, as well as in what pilgrimage means to people today.  I have made several pilgrimages in the past few years and it has become a significant part of my spiritual practice.  For me it is a practice which allows me both to step out of my own life for a few days – I deleted WhatsApp off my phone before I started my walk which was just bliss – and also enables me to connect, with the environment I am walking through, with the history of the places I’m walking through and the people who have walked these ways before, and with God.  And so this walk (and this blog) is the beginning of my writing on pilgrimage – look out (if you’re interested) in more to come in the coming months.

“The end is where we start from.”  So said TS Eliot in his Four Quartets.  And so it was on this pilgrimage.  Because of the way the tides worked, we couldn’t walk onto Lindisfarne on the traditional route taken by pilgrims over the sand, but had to walk on the causeway – safer from the incoming tide but less devotional as we stepped out of the way of the cars.  So as we left, we took the pilgrim route off the island, walking in the morning sun across the sand to the lives we’d set aside for a few days.  Perhaps this was fitting, walking the pilgrim route away from the retreat of Lindisfarne back to the everyday.

And on to what’s next.