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.
