Recently Year 5 and 6 wrote social media posts for Anglo Saxon characters and it appears that our Principal’s blog has been hacked into by a bygone blogger by the name of Bede.
“Assemblies at Emmanuel have been far too modern and I felt it was time to put a stop to it. So I’ve been flying into the portacabin each Thursday morning to tell the children stories of the church in England during Anglo Saxon times.
Some of you might wonder why I look rather like a puffin. This is because a puffin’s Latin name is ‘fratercula arctica’ which means ‘Little Friar of the North’ and Bede, my namesake, was a monk in the north of England, near Sunderland today. He entered the monastery aged 7 and remained there for the rest of his life.
In order to tell my stories, I needed help from other soft creatures and so I called in the services of a crocodile named Gregory. Some of you will know that it was Gregory who, when seeing some Anglo Saxon slaves at the market in Rome asked whether they were Christian or not. When finding out that they were still in darkness he took hope in their name: ‘That is appropriate for they have angelic faces and it is right that they should become fellow heirs with the angels in heaven’.
Gregory begged the pope at the time to be able to go himself, but instead was prevented and so, when he became pope, he entrusted the task to Augustine. You’d think the prospect of coming to England would be appealing, but Augustine and his men desperately wanted to go back. They were appalled at the idea of going to a ‘barbarous, fierce and pagan nation of whose language they were ignorant’. Augustine begged Gregory to let them turn back, but Gregory sent an encouraging letter to motivate them to press on.
So Augustine and 40 others arrived in Kent and sent ambassadors to King Ethelbert. The king allowed them to stay on the island of Thanet and visited them to hear what they had to say. He agreed to provide them with what they needed and provided them with a home in Canterbury, the chief city of his realm.”
One of the reasons we love history is that through learning it, we might see how it continues to shape the present. There was a lovely ‘aha’ moment when the children realised why Canterbury was such a significant place for the church in England. There was a humbling moment when we saw that once people had been scared to come to this country; we are not by nature civilised. And there is the encouragement that God’s grace reaches back through generations, and that God has faithfully kept a candle burning so that his people are never utterly abandoned.
Gregory’s greatness lay not in what he achieved, but in what he empowered others to achieve. Gregory was a man of vision but he laid down his desire to execute his vision personally, trusting the part in the story which God had assigned to him. The gifts of quiet encouragement, gentle rebuke, thoughtful resourcing, secret prayer, are not ones which are often highlighted, but perhaps they are the ones which reflect most closely the grace of God, which humbly invites us and equips us to take part in his greater story.
