Aidan, Bede, Cuthbert

In this rousing book, David Adam celebrates the lives and interweaving stories of Aidan, Bede and Cuthbert. Recalling, in a personal introduction, his ordination to the pastoral ministry in Durham Cathedral (the burial place of Bede and Cuthbert) and his thirteen years as Vicar of the Holy Island of Lindisfarne (where Aidan lived), the author communicates clearly his appreciation of these three great saints. They have much to teach us, he believes, about vision – about expanding our spiritual awareness and deepening our love for God. St Aidan was Irish by birth and was a monk at Iona long before being selected as the first Bishop of Lindisfarne in 635. In time became pastor to all of Northumbria. St Bede the Venerable was born in 673 near Sunderland, and was a monk at Jarrow on the Tyne. He is revered for his scholarly output of commentaries on the Scriptures and his famous Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which is such an important source of our knowledge of the development of Christianity in Britain St Cuthbert, when he was sixteen, received a vision of the soul of St Aidan being carried to heaven by angels. This vision may have convinced him to enter holy orders at Melrose where he became Prior. Later, having lived for some time as a hermit on the island of Farne, he was later reluctantly persuaded to became Bishop of Lindisfarne in 685.