St. Cuthbert

Peter Harper, Smoke Signals #14, April 1996

Well, St. Cuthbert's Day on March 20th has come and gone once more. I like old Cuthbert, although he is not particularly politically-correct. He had a great dislike (or was it fear?) of women and would allow none near him.  Even in death, he maintains the ban, and anyone who has visited Durham Cathedral can see inlaid in the floor the brass-line which restricts women to the last bay of the church near the back door. The ban applies even to Our Lady. Indeed, the Lady Chapel is at the West end near the door, instead of at its usual place behind the main altar. The problem is that St. Cuthbert's tomb is at the East end, and all attempts to build a Lady Chapel near it resulted in the structure falling down, Hardly a candidate for a patron to Christian Feminists!

But, he might be relevant in other ways; I would suggest that he would do admirably well as a patron for Deep Ecologists or Ecosophists, you know those greenest of the greens who preach the new religion of Ecology and who equate the life of a cockroach with that of a human. St. Cuthbert spent most of his life on the Outer Farne Islands near Holy Island of which he was the bishop. He much preferred the company of the seabirds to that of his fellow humans... So perhaps he has work to do in our present times.

A fellow-entomologist, Bernd Heinrich, who teaches at the University of Vermont, recently took a "Cuthbert" retreat. He spent a sabbatical year alone in an isolated Maine cabin with no water or electricity in the company of a raven. This intimate communion with the forest he later described in a book entitled "A Year in the Maine Woods" (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994). I dream of a similar retreat one day along a stream, spending a year with the mayflies and stoneflies... A note was added from the proof-reader: "When you are a widower."