Hebrews 12: 18-28 Matthew 21: 12-16
In the Chapel of the Nine Altars here in Durham Cathedral is the altar dedicated to St Margaret of Scotland. We gather there on her feast day on 16 November to give thanks for her faith – her piety and her charity.
We believe that she herself gathered on or near the same spot where we are gathered today to celebrate the anniversary of the Foundation of this Cathedral Church. She was present with her husband King Malcolm of Scotland – he who triumphed over Macbeth in that bloody episode of Scotland’s history – when the foundation stone was laid of this great shrine church on 11 August 1093.
One wonders what went through her mind that day.
As for any royal visit, she will have been well briefed: this was to be the third church erected over the relics of St Cuthbert by his community who had kept him safe from both Viking and Norman invasion for over 300 years. She would meet Prior Turgot the visionary head of the fledgling monastery at Durham whose brainchild the new cathedral was. She knew him well because he was a close friend and her spiritual adviser. She would meet Bishop William de St Calais, the Bishop of Durham who about 10 years before had replaced the canons of Durham with monks from nearby Jarrow. Like her, he balanced worldly wisdom with divine conscience.
She was surrounded by friends and on that warm but blustery August day there was a real sense that Cuthbert and his community were here to stay – just a couple of years shy of a century since they had arrived on the peninsula in that pronounced bend of the River Wear.
Surely she will have met the Norman French architect – that enigmatic figure about whom we know nothing at all other than what we can read through his legacy. One can imagine him standing close to his patrons Turgot and William keen to be presented to the royal personages, grasping carefully in his hands some of the drawings that might give Their Majesties some sense of what would arise over the course of the next 40 years.
But what was going through Margaret’s mind?
Like a more recent monarch, Margaret knew that Jesus was her pattern and her redeemer. Elizabeth II said that Jesus guided her life and that Jesus helps us to see that there is great value in doing small acts of kindness with great love. Margaret’s philanthropy was a living out of that same truth and she will have looked to the Benedictine community which would inhabit this new monastic shrine church whose foundation stone her husband was laying that day to be not just hearers of the word but doers also.
She must have hoped that the monks of Durham would pray seven whole days not one in seven; that they would open the doors of their new temple wide for pilgrims to come to St Cuthbert’s shrine and hear the stories of the northern saints. After all, the Venerable Bede was here too and St Oswald, that other Christian monarch, and St Ebba, Cuthbert’s friend, and St Boisil, his tutor. And she must have hoped that the Durham monks would proclaim the mighty acts of God in Christ to the holy yet earthy people of the North East of England.
But how much further might she have looked in her mind’s eye? To her death only three months later? To the story of her life which Turgot would write? To the placing of her pocket gospel book in the Bodleian Library in Oxford? To the dedication of an altar in her name in this same Durham Cathedral 912 years after her royal visit? To the Cathedral’s Vision and Strategy for 2033, championing the same prayer, pilgrimage and proclamation which Margaret prayed for that August day?
Probably not. And we should never allow the benefit of hindsight to make us too romantic but that pious woman – ‘the pearl of Scotland’ as she has been dubbed – will have knelt somewhere – possibly near where you are sitting now – and she will have said her prayers to Jesus, her maker and redeemer. Perhaps like the children in the temple in today’s gospel she will have cried out, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’ as, in the words of the Letter to the Hebrews, she offered God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe.
As we do today – and every day – here in Durham Cathedral.
One final word about the shadowy figure of the architect. No altar for him – not even a memorial stone! But that’s all one because that other great church architect, Christopher Wren, got it right when he refused a memorial in St Paul’s Cathedral and instead wrote his own epitaph: If you are looking for a memorial, just look around you.