31st August. Feast of St. Aidan and all the Lindisfarne saints

Aidan arrived from Iona in the 7th century and built the famous monastery on Lindisfarne. It is hard for us to imagine the sort of world people were living in then. Wild and uncertain. He gathered monks around him and began his missionary work in Northumbria and Cumbria. Scholarship and writing grew in the community and it started to have the name it has today. In a couple of centuries it would be destroyed by the Vikings and there was always a threat to their lives. What is impressive is, though they built well, they never worried too much about the buildings. What was important was the mission and whatever enabled that. In today’s church we need to foster some of that approach. What is important is prayer and the mission, not the buildings. If we get too attached to the buildings at the cost of the mission, when we know what that is, then we have probably lost our way.