Skip to main content

St Chad

All my life
the wind has spoken to me.

 The confusion of noise,
the clash of branches,
the crash of thunder
have said to my soul: Beware!
Are you ready?

 Behold, the Lord comes.
He is coming with judgement,
He is coming with majesty,
He is coming in power.
Are you ready?

And all my life
I have not been ready.
I have fallen to my knees
and pleaded for mercy
and heard only the blowing of the wind.

 But today
the angels have sung to me.

 The purity of tone,
the beauty of melody,
the complexity of harmony
have said to my soul: Peace!
You are ready.

 Behold, the Lord comes.
He is coming with love,
He is coming with joy,
He is coming with reward.
You are ready.

 And today
I am ready.
I have fallen to my knees
and accepted Jesus' mercy
and heard only the song of the angels.




Recently we visited Lichfield Cathedral, which is associated with St Chad.  Chad, or Ceadda, became bishop of Lichfield in the 7th century, when it was part of the ancient kingdom of Mercia, and played a major part in converting the Mercians from paganism to Christianity.

Most of what we know of Chad comes from the writings of Bede, who tells two stories about him.  The first is that, whenever there was a strong gust of wind, he would drop whatever he was doing and pray to God.  If the wind continued, or a storm blew up, his prayers for mercy became more and more earnest; and this he attributed to the reminder of Judgement Day that the wind provided.

The second concerns his death; that seven days before he died, a sweet singing was heard by Chad and a man named Owini.  Moving across the sky, the singing filled the building where Chad was, before returning by the route it had come.  The song, he said, was from angelic spirits, come to call him to his heavenly reward.


St Chad died on the second of March, which is now his feast day.  The Church of England's prayer on this day is:

Almighty God,
from the first fruits of the English nation who turned to Christ,
you called your servant Chad
to be an evangelist and bishop of his own people:
give us grace so to follow his peaceable nature,
humble spirit and prayerful life,
that we may truly commend to others
the faith which we ourselves profess;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
from Common Worship: Daily Prayer
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...
Post a Comment
Read more

Erewash Valley Trail: Ilkeston

You could spend a lot of time following old canals and railways in the Erewash Valley. This walk included parts of the Erewash Canal, the Nottingham Canal, the Nutbrook Canal, and the Stanton branch line, and I could have continued further along any one of those, if I'd had the time. I started in Kirk Hallam, which is mostly a post-war housing estate with a distinctive outline on the map: the main road to Ilkeston through the middle, and a loop road encircling the village. It looks like the London Underground logo. I parked at the lake at the top of the loop. There was a sculpture commemorating the nearby Stanton Ironworks - the ground remembers the roar of the blast  read the inscription around the base - and the remains of a lock on the Nutbrook Canal. Heading towards Ilkeston, I crossed a former golf course, now a nature reserve called Pewit Coronation Meadows, passed a large sports centre, and was soon in the town centre. There was a general impression of red-brickiness, with l...
Post a Comment
Read more

Austin part 2

Well, I wrote about Bats, Bluebonnets and Breakfast Tacos in a previous post, but that only seemed to cover about half of what we actually did in Austin (were we really there only for a weekend?). And we had several more great photos that Graham has been bugging me to post on my blog, so prepare yourselves for an extravaganza of colour, light and image! Austin is known as a great place for live music, which presumably explains the psychadelic guitars left lying around the streets. Here's Graham with a couple of his dream instruments. We visited the Texas State Capitol, built on a grand scale from tons of pink granite and limestone. The state capit o l, you understand, is located in the state capit a l. Don't get confused. Americans definitely tend towards the domes-and-pillars school of architecture for their governmental buildings. I had a feeling this was true, so did a quick search for corroborating evidence and discovered this great site by a ph...
Post a Comment
Read more