The Psalter of the Quatrains, Canto III - The Angels

Caedmon's Call

Imagine a hall in Northumbria, thirteen hundred years ago, and the harp going round the benches after supper — and one man rising in dread and slipping out into the dark, because in his whole long life he has never been able to sing. His name is Caedmon, and tonight, in a cattle-shed, God will give him the gift he has run from his entire life. In a deliberately quieter and more intimate episode, Dcn. Seraphim reads and talks through Bede's account of the first Christian poet of the English language, movement by movement — the herdsman who became a monk of Hilda's Whitby, and whose first sacred song, like the Irish Saltair we have been reading, opens at the beginning of created things. The episode closes with a full reading of Caedmon's Hymn in the original Old English and in translation: the headwaters of every English hymn and carol that ever lifted a heart to heaven. Music used: "Across The Fields Of Gold" Yagull Music - Sasha Branislav Markovic, Mayu Saeki

The Psalter of the Quatrains, Cantos VIII-XII - The Tree and the Cross

Dcn. Seraphim reads cantos eight through twelve of the Saltair na Rann in a single great sweep: the whole story of Adam and Eve, from the serpent in the garden to the skull beneath the Cross. The Devil, envious that this creature of clay is bound for the heaven he has lost, works the Fall; Adam and Eve do penance standing in the cold rivers; and the Devil comes a second time, disguised as an angel of light, to deceive them again — and then turns and laments what he has done in the haunting cry, "Dost thou remember, O Adam." We follow Cain and Abel and the gift of Seth, and the death of Adam, down to the moment the first man's skull is buried at Golgotha, where one day the Cross will stand in his very grave.

The Shepherd who Saw a Saint

A shepherd boy on a Northumbrian hillside looked up one night and saw the heavens open, and angels carrying a soul of fire into the light. The next morning he learns that Bishop Aidan died in that very hour, and from that moment the boy called Cuthbert gives his whole life to the God who took Aidan home. This is the story of the boy who became a monk at Melrose became the hermit who sailed to the demon-haunted rock of the Inner Farne to be alone with God. Dragged twice from his solitude to serve, he dies a bishop on his island of stones, arms stretched toward heaven. But the story doesn't end in the grave: eleven years later his coffin is opened, and his body is found incorrupt, and for eight hundred and fifty years, through Viking raids and the long medieval centuries, the body of Cuthbert does not decay. And then one day King Henry's men climb to his shrine with a sledgehammer... Music used: "Across The Fields Of Gold" Yagull Music - Sasha Branislav Markovic, Mayu Saeki

Mother of the English - St. Hilda of Whitby

Dcn. Seraphim tells the story of St. Hilda of Whitby: born into the royal house of Northumbria, baptized at Easter beside King Edwin by a missionary from Rome, called back from the very ship that would have carried her to a monastery in Gaul, and formed in the Irish discipline of Aidan. Hilda's own life is the meeting of two streams — Roman water at her baptism, Irish discipline in her vocation — and her great double monastery at Whitby becomes a school that sends five bishops out into a unified English Church. When the most famous synod in English history gathers in her house in 664, the popular story says it was the moment a free Celtic Christianity was crushed beneath the heel of Rome. Drawing on Bede, Dcn. Seraphim tells what actually happened: not a rupture, but the slow beginning of a reconciliation that would take a hundred and fifty years...

The Psalter of the Quatrains, Cantos IV-VII - Between the Devil and Paradise

Dcn. Seraphim reads us cantos 4-7 of the Psalter of the Quatrains, and we learn the strange and wonderful Irish version (by way of Syria) of the creation of man, the fall of the Devil when he refuses to venerate him, and the nature and secret meaning of the earthly paradise. Music used: "Across The Fields Of Gold" Yagull Music - Sasha Branislav Markovic, Mayu Saeki