Description
St Bede entered the monastery when he was about seven, to access the best available education of the time. Except for a few brief visits to other monasteries, he spent his entire life in his Monastery. This is not an extraordinary fact. To this day, many monks and nuns – from Athos to monasteries in the Holy Land, Egypt and many other countries – never leave their monasteries and never interact with the ‘outside’ world in any other way except through prayer. Yet this self-imposed distance, this physical separation does not generate a spiritual separation from the body of the Church. On the contrary, when their asceticism is offered with love, they become one with the world and they know it in ways that remain inaccessible for the rest of us.
St Bede spent his life in his Monastery, but wrote over sixty books on topics as varied as history, canon law, poetry, grammar and chronology. If one takes the time to listen with patience to all those whom God brings in our lives; if one is not obsessive with promoting one’s own opinions about things, but rather listens and discerns; if one is not overcome with the need to control others and impose one’s own righteousness upon them – if one simply allows others to exist freely around himself and opens oneself to them in love, then no physical distance can come between us.
Only lack of love can separate and break us.
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Hand-painted icon on natural wood, traditionally double reinforced on the back for longer life.
Painted with egg tempera.
Dimensions: 21 cm x 29 cm.
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Cost: 360 UK pounds, plus shipping costs.
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Commission going to Oxford, England.
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More information on the icon on the dedicated blog: http://icons.mullmonastery.com/st-bede-to-know-through-love/
