The Great Rood Screen

In a Roman slave market around the year 575, a monk stops before a stall of fair-haired boys from a far northern island and asks where they are from. Told they are Angles, and pagans, he answers that they have the faces of angels and ought to be coheirs with the angels in heaven — and he never forgets them. His name is Gregory, and when he becomes Pope he sends a reluctant monk named Augustine wit...

Imagine a hall in Northumbria, thirteen hundred years ago, and the harp going round the benches after supper — and one man rising in dread and slipping out into the dark, because in his whole long life he has never been able to sing. His name is Caedmon, and tonight, in a cattle-shed, God will give him the gift he has run from his entire life. In a deliberately quieter and more intimate episode, D...

Dcn. Seraphim reads cantos eight through twelve of the Saltair na Rann in a single great sweep: the whole story of Adam and Eve, from the serpent in the garden to the skull beneath the Cross. The Devil, envious that this creature of clay is bound for the heaven he has lost, works the Fall; Adam and Eve do penance standing in the cold rivers; and the Devil comes a second time, disguised as an angel...

A shepherd boy on a Northumbrian hillside looked up one night and saw the heavens open, and angels carrying a soul of fire into the light. The next morning he learns that Bishop Aidan died in that very hour, and from that moment the boy called Cuthbert gives his whole life to the God who took Aidan home. This is the story of the boy who became a monk at Melrose became the hermit who sailed to the...

Dcn. Seraphim tells the story of St. Hilda of Whitby: born into the royal house of Northumbria, baptized at Easter beside King Edwin by a missionary from Rome, called back from the very ship that would have carried her to a monastery in Gaul, and formed in the Irish discipline of Aidan. Hilda's own life is the meeting of two streams — Roman water at her baptism, Irish discipline in her vocation —...

Dcn. Seraphim reads us cantos 4-7 of the Psalter of the Quatrains, and we learn the strange and wonderful Irish version (by way of Syria) of the creation of man, the fall of the Devil when he refuses to venerate him, and the nature and secret meaning of the earthly paradise. Music used: "Across The Fields Of Gold" Yagull Music - Sasha Branislav Markovic, Mayu Saeki

You met Oswald in the Aidan episode — the king who knelt in the dirt and translated the gospel for his people, who broke a silver dish on Easter and gave the pieces to the poor. Now we tell the story from his side: Exile on Iona. The Battle of Heavenfield. A death on a battlefield with a prayer on his lips. But this episode goes somewhere no one expects: after Oswald dies, his story keeps going —...

Dcn. Seraphim is joined by Fr. Jacob Siemens, a priest in Cardiff, Wales under the Archdiocese of Orthodox Churches of Russian Tradition in Western Europe (MP). Fr. Jacob, an expert on the early Welsh church as well as the life and ministry of St. Theodore of Tarsus, talks to us about the Celtic Church, its myths and misconceptions, and tells us about the important missionary work going on there t...

The Venerable Bede knew Aidan's disciples personally — and he wrote about Aidan with a warmth he showed almost no one else, even though they disagreed on the Easter question. In this episode, Dcn. Seraphim tells the story of the monk from Iona who became the Apostle of Northumbria, not through force or spectacle, but through a gentle, walking, giving-everything-away kind of holiness. Link to The O...

Dcn. Seraphim reads us the third Canto of the Saltair na Rann, which describes the heavenly orders -- the nine ranks of the angels and the tenth rank as redeemed humanity takes their place in the cosmic dance. Watch the first episode on the Psalter to learn the history of these psalms and why they are important to ancient Celtic Christianity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRR4m9Zh4cY&t=32s Music...

Dcn. Seraphim tells us the story of St. Ninian, Apostle to the Picts, Scotland's first recorded saint and a great healer and wonderworker. In doing so, he draws on an epic poem written about the saint's life and miracles which has never before been translated into English. Walk with Dcn. Seraphim to Ninian's "wondrous cave of darkness," where he sought solitude amid his episcopal labors, and exper...

Dcn. Seraphim tells us the story of Saint Columba of Iona — the aristocrat-monk whose name means "dove" but whose life was shaped as much by penance as by prayer. Born of royal blood in Donegal, foretold by saints from the age of Patrick onward, Columba trains under Finnian at Clonard before a catastrophic quarrel over a copied psalter leads to the Battle of Cooldrevny and his exile from Ireland....

Dcn. Seraphim reads us the second Canto of the Saltair na Rann, which describes the glories of heaven, melding Celtic otherworld traditions with a vision of Paradise straight out of the Apocalypse of St. John.

Dcn. Seraphim tells us the life and miracles of Saint Brigid of Kildare — the only woman among Ireland's three patron saints, and perhaps the most beloved and mysterious of the three. Born around 451 to a pagan chieftain and a Christian bondwoman, Brigid enters the world between two religions and two social classes, marked from birth by a pillar of fire. Drawing on the earliest Latin Lives and the...

For St. Patrick's Day, Dcn. Seraphim presents his own translation of a remarkable and little-known medieval Latin text: the Skellig Michael legend from the Regensburg Schottenlegende. In it, the saints of Ireland come to Patrick with a plea — the forests and caves and solitudes where they long to pray are crawling with venomous creatures and demons, and they cannot find peace. What follows is an a...

Dcn. Seraphim introduces us to the Saltair na Rann, the great tenth-century Old Irish poem that retells the whole of salvation history — from the first day of creation to the last judgment — in 150 cantos mirroring the 150 Psalms. Deacon Seraphim reads his own translation of Canto I, the magnificent canticle of creation, in which an anonymous Irish poet synthesizes the Genesis account with the cos...

Today, Dcn. Seraphim tells the story of Saint Finnian of Clonard — the "Teacher of the Saints of Ireland" — who traveled to Wales to study under the heirs of the British monastic tradition, then returns to found the great school at Clonard on the River Boyne. His students, known as the Twelve Apostles of Ireland, spread across the island founding monasteries: Ciaran at Clonmacnoise, Brendan the Na...

Dcn. Seraphim tells us the story of Saint Patrick in his own words: a Romano-British boy is seized by Irish raiders and sold into slavery, where he discovers God on the cold hills of Ulster. After his escape, he hears the voice of the Irish calling him back to the land of his captivity. Drawing on Patrick's Confessio and Letter to Coroticus, Dcn. Seraphim explores the mystery of his return and the...

After Rome's withdrawal from Britain, the faith survives and flourishes in Wales. Dcn. Seraphim tells the stories of Saint Dyfrig (Dubricius), the wonder-working bishop of Ergyng; Saint Illtyd, the soldier-turned-monk who founded the great school at Llantwit Major; and Saint Samson of Dol, the restless pilgrim who carried British Christianity from Wales through Cornwall to Brittany — the first gre...

Dcn. Seraphim begins The Great Rood Screen Podcast with the legend of Joseph of Arimathea's arrival at Glastonbury, the miraculous Holy Thorn, and the founding of the first Christian church in Britain. He then discusses the podcast's mission and its name, drawn from Tolkien's vision of medieval literature as a "great rood screen" revealing the Holy of Holies. Finally, Dcn. Seraphim concludes with...