141/365 Venerable Bede

Random thoughts:

Today is the feast day of Venerable Bede, one of those saints of the Church who don't go by Saint. He's technically St. Bede, as far as I know (I mean, I first looked at a monastery in Illinois for an oblate program, and it was St. Bede's) but goes by Venerable. Pope Leo XIII named him so in 1899. He lived in the 8th century and is the only Englishman (by birth) known as a doctor of the church.

St. Bede's Monastery is on a flat featureless plain known as Central Illinois.

But the Venerable Bede was not flat and featureless. He wrote extensively--one of those hypergraphic monks who gave us all the information we have on a specific time and place, in this case, the Church of medieval Britain through 729. He was an oblate in the old meaning of the term--a child dropped off at the monastery to be raised by the monks, perhaps eventually taking vows. He did, and was ordained at age 30. He survived the plague when it ran through his monastery--he and the abbot were the only two to make it.

We don't know much about him. In two passages he mentions being married, and this puzzles scholars--could he be speaking metaphorically, or did he really mean he had a wife? It's not like he mentions her by name and gives her family history, and frankly, he was big on the history. But how much metaphor is appropriate? Don't you know you're writing for the future, for generations who aren't going to understand poetic license unless it can be txtd 2 frnds?

He was a Benedictine, of course, in the early centuries after the writing of the Rule, back when there were monasteries in England that weren't sacked and burned down and forced to fall into the swamp. He followed the same rule the sisters at Clyde do today. The same one I do my best to live and breathe within.

His name is rare for his time period. It probably comes from an old English word, bed, with a long e, meaning prayer.

My name means fiery arrow. Prayer is good, too, though.