Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. —James 3:1, NIV
I’ve been told things by teachers that just weren’t true. For instance, a beloved theater professor said to me (I have forgotten the context), “Some people are just shallow.” I believed this for a long time, until a housemate spoke up. “No they’re not!” he said.
“Nobody’s ‘just shallow.’ Everybody has existential angst; everybody thinks about the purpose of life, and why we’re all here. But along the way, life, in one way or another, tells them to hide their deep thoughts, out of insecurity or fear or whatever.” And the more I thought about it, the more I realized how right he was.
Many years later, during my decade-long stint as a university music instructor, I was crestfallen at the worst student-evaluation of teaching results I’d ever received. An older professor told me reassuringly that “just because they didn’t learn the material doesn’t mean you didn’t teach it.” I took comfort in that, until my wife spoke up, asking, “wasn’t figuring out what it takes to reach a given student population a vital part of a teacher’s job?”
In 625 King Edwin of Northumbria married a Christian princess named Ethelburgh whose father was the only Christian king in all of England at the time. Ethelburgh invited missionaries to evangelize the people of northern England in 627, and this included King Edwin who was baptized in York that same year. When Edwin and his eldest son died in battle five years later, Ethelburgh, their young children, and the Christian missionary who converted Edwin all fled to Kent. Severe suppression of Christians in northern England and their faith followed. A year later, Edwin’s nephew Oswald, who had been exiled to Saint Columba’s monastic island of Iona, regained his uncle’s kingdom and immediately began restoring the Church.
While it was common practice at the time to seek missionaries from Canterbury, Oswald’s time on Iona made him more inclined to inquire there. The first missioner monk to preach in Northumbria was named Corman, who, after making no progress, returned to Iona, full of complaints about his students, claiming the Northumbrians were “a savage and unteachable race.”
Like a true, diligent teacher, a junior monk named Aidan piped up: “Perhaps you were too harsh with them, and they might have responded better to a gentler approach.” This, as it turned out, was the most efficient way to find oneself leading a new mission to the “savage and unteachable” Northumbrians. Inspired by his home monastery, Aidan set up on the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne off the northeast coast of England rather than in York as had his predecessors.
Aidan and his fellow monks trained a number of young Englishmen in mission work. With King Oswald himself often acting as interpreter, they not only restored Christianity to Northumbria, but shared the Good News of Jesus Christ through the fruitful midlands and as far south as London. Aidan’s missionary work was characterized by his mildness and kindness. The Venerable Bede wrote of him in his History of the English Church and People, “He neither sought nor loved anything of this world, but delighted in distributing immediately to the poor whatever was given him by kings or rich men of the world. He traversed both town and country on foot, never on horseback, unless compelled by some urgent necessity. Wherever on his way he saw any, either rich or poor, he invited them, if pagans, to embrace the mystery of the faith; or if they were believers, he sought to strengthen them in their faith and stir them up by words and actions to alms and good works.”
No doubt in part to his nurturing leadership, some 65 years after Aidan’s death, the beautiful and celebrated Lindisfarne Gospel Book, a treasure of high art and scholarly learning, was created at Aidan’s monastery. The genius of the man himself was the contrast between his humility and kindness, and the stiff-necked arrogance that too often accompanies lofty scholarship and promulgators of the “fine arts.” Knowing the Northumbrians to be full human beings capable of deep thought and feeling if approached in the right way. Aidan left Iona to teach that “savage and unteachable” people, taking the time he needed to figure out how to reach that population.
Aidan died at the royal town of Bamborough, on August 31st, 651.
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