This is the first of four talks I gave at the Seeing the Light retreat earlier this year at Shepherds Dene. Participants visited the Cuthbert sites and were encouraged to take photographs as a way of "seeing" and enabling reflection, with expert input from preist-photographer Steve Radley (https://www.radleyphotography.co.uk). He and I have set up a Facebook page Seeing the Light in Life where such meditative images can be shared, which you are welcome to ask to join (via the page).

Let me take you back in your mind’s eye to the middle of the seventh century and the time of St Cuthbert. Here he is in one of the wonderful pictures from an illuminated copy of his life in the British Museum, calming the fears of his companions as they sail the dangerous waters of the North Sea. I keep it as the lock screen picture on my phone and this lovely sculpture of it, as favourite present from Jean, is by my elbow in my study. I am rather good at turning the daily waves of life into rolling breakers, so pray for us St Cuthbert, now and in the day of our departing.

The British Isles then were still a patchwork of independent kingdoms, some going back to before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, some founded by them; and the northernmost of those new kingdoms is known to us now as Northumbria. which at its largest included much of the Scottish lowlands to the north and our Lancashire and Yorkshire to the south, including the old Cumbric kingdom of Elmet in our West Riding.

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