May 26, 2006
Yesterday
St Bede, the Venerable, an ecclesiastical heavyweight in his own right, customarily enjoys May 25 for us to remember him. Not this year. He simply had to move over and make room for Ascension’s thunder, which, in the manner and wont of liturgical heavies plain muscled him out so that he’s disappeared from my kalendar altogether, but not from my memory or my spiritual family tree.
Bede’s life spanned the late 7th through the early 8th centuries. He was a Biblical scholar and was known as the Father of English History. Most of his works have long Latin titles I would probably misspell and certainly mispronounce, so you’ll not even have to try.
Interestingly, his works on English history owe their value primarily to such rare practice as his collecting information from those most likely to know, to his meticulous separation of historical fact from fiction and hearsay, and to his compelling vividness of description. Such accuracy and integrity apparently has never much leant itself to present-day scholarship, nor been of any use toward inspiring the more popular mass media demands (cf. da Vinci’s sudden fame as a mystery writer).
Even in a church sometimes longer on titles than on substance, not many get to be called “venerable,” save perhaps one of those lesser satrap Anglican archdeacons or like when the Romans accord someone the lowest of three degrees of sanctity, whatever they are. Personally, I think my old friend and sometime mentor P D Quirk secretly desired such a designation in the pantheism of puffery. After all, “canon” is pretty commonplace and often subject to all sorts of dark humor. Perhaps it might comfort Quirk to know that Bede, himself, received his esteemed title only posthumously and then almost a century following his demise.
Coincidental to all this foolishness, yesterday’s May 25 is also CP’s and my wedding anniversary, the gathering felicitous years of which fast approach something like venerable, themselves. Fred Buechner says that “matrimony is called holy because this brave and fateful promise of a man and a woman to love and honor and serve each other through thick and thin looks beyond itself to more fateful promises still and speaks mightily of what human life at its most human and its most alive and most holy must always be” [Listening to Your Life, p 141]. I should like to think he’d say the same about why any truly committed partnership can be called holy. I certainly can.