(1 Thessalonians 1.2-12)
Rev Sue Hanna
Thank you so much for inviting me here this morning. It is a joy to share with you my insights into the life of St Ninian. I am very aware that for this community, the life of St Ninian is a path that is very well worn, so I hope I can bring a perspective that might be fresh, if not already very familiar!
My interest in St Ninian is in part coincidental. My family name Hanna comes from an undistinguished lowlands clan that claims an ancestral seat at Sorbie, located less than 10 kms north of the Whithorn region where St Ninian based his mission. I’ve known about St Ninian for about two decades, and being a country girl, I admit to having a sense of neighbourly ownership towards him, that he’s “one of ours”. Four years ago, I travelled to Galloway to explore my family heritage and a local clan member kindly spent an afternoon with me showing me the local historic sites of interest, including Sorbie Tower and a few of the sites connected to St Ninian. I decided to return to the region two months later for the clan’s annual gathering, which meant I could also visit the Whithorn museum then open for the summer and walk the 5km round trip to St Ninian’s cave.
Much of what we know about St Ninian’s life is conjecture, the biographical detail I have gleaned comes from Mosa Anderson’s book St. Ninian; Light of the Celtic North.
We can say that he was born at an interesting time in the life of the Christian Church.
The Edict of Milan that ended the persecution of Christians, was signed roughly fifty years before his birth. St Ninian belonged to a new generation for whom Christian worship was officially tolerated, and for whom the question of what it meant to live an authentic Christian life was leading to all kinds of new experiments!
Already a new generation of young people had begun to adopt ascetic monasticism as a model for their lives. A century earlier, a young St Anthony had read Christ’s words “if you want to be perfect, sell your treasures, give your wealth to the poor, come and follow me, and you will have treasures in heaven” and took them to heart. He had recently inherited the family estate, which he duly sold; put his young sister in a convent, and spent the rest of his days in the Egyptian desert living as an ascetic monk. At the time of St Ninian’s birth in 360, about half a million people were living in the Egyptian desert pursuing the monastic experiment! Around that same time, St Martin of Tours founded his community in Ligugé, France, which would later become a huge influence for St Ninian.
St Ninian was born in Cumberland, one of the farthest corners of the Roman Empire. He was born into privilege, as both a Roman citizen & the son of a local chief, who was a highly regarded Christian man. Ninian would have received an education and the big picture view of how his community worked and was governed, which would become useful for his life’s work. Life under the Romans was relatively prosperous & stable, which proved to be both a blessing and a curse.
In 367, Ninian’s community was uprooted by an orchestrated invasion from the pagan tribes living beyond the Empire’s borders. The attack came across Hadrian’s Wall with tribes drawn from the Scoti, Picts, Saxons and Attacotti, sacking villages as far south as London. As a young boy, Ninian would have witnessed the raids on his town, with a rampant destruction of buildings and senseless slaughter of the weak and elderly. Ninian would then have lived as a refugee in the mountains with his family for the two years it took for the Romans to push back and regain control of the territory. At the time, Ninian would have been seven or eight years old.
This attack may well have cemented within the young Ninian a commitment to his faith, a desire to live the opposite of what he had experienced at the hands of the pagans. During my 2016 travels, I spent a week in Norway, where I had some really interesting conversations about the Vikings. Although I learned about Vikings in school, I don’t recall learning the reason the Vikings stopped being Vikings, was Jesus! After conversion in the eleventh century and they could no longer reconcile violent raids as a way of life, so they stopped! It is highly likely that St Ninian would have meditated on this dynamic during his youth 700 years earlier!
In his late teens St Ninian travelled to Rome, the Emperor Valentinian had begun to support the education of young provincial leaders there. During his time in Rome, Ninian would have been exposed to some significant turning points in the life of the Church in its movement from the margins to widespread acceptance. In 380, the Edict of De Fide Catholica declared Christianity as the state religion! By 382 St Jerome had arrived in Rome to translate the Greek text into the Latin vernacular.
As the church occupied a newly central position in the Empire, the appointment of Siricius as the Bishop of Rome in 384 spelled the end of Ninian’s time in Rome. By this time Ninian had been ordained a priest and had won the general esteem of the Roman community. Siricius appointed Ninian to be a Bishop to return to his homeland, with the charge to become an apostle to the pagan tribes that lived beyond the Empire’s borders.
Ninian didn’t head straight home however. His interest in the monastic life meant he stopped at two communities, no doubt to learn what he could. First stop was to visit Bishop Ambrose, who had lived at Basil of Caesarea’s famous monastery, on which the new community in Milan was modelled.
At the second community Ninian met what you might describe as a kindred spirit & spiritual master in St Martin of Tours. Ninian came to regard St Martin’s Ligugé monastery as the motherhouse for the community he established at Whithorn.
In life, we all at some point need to confront the monsters under our bed and to face our demons. I do suspect that for St Ninian, those demons were the pagan Celts! They certainly had been his childhood nightmare! He must have had a deep sense of trepidation & doubt in returning to his homeland, knowing the ferocity of the pagan Celts he would face as a missionary. In St Martin, I suspect he found a role model who was already at work, winning the local pagans over to the way of Christ. He must have felt a huge sense of relief to see at the Ligugé community that what he was setting out to do, was possible! Martin’s life of prayer and asceticism, his gifts for healing and practical love, became the model that Ninian replicated at his community in Whithorn. It is little wonder that Ninian named so many chapels in honour of St Martin.
(In preparing this sermon, I realised I had also visited the site of St Martin’s monastery at Liguge, where there is now a Benedictine Abbey. Two years ago, I was visiting the WCCM community at Bonnevaux & an oblate invited me an All Souls service at the Abbey! My French is very basic so the significance of the site was lost on me until this week’s research!)
On St Ninian’s return home, he spent time putting the Cumberland region in order. The Celtic social structure was oligarchical – ruled by local chiefs and he worked with that pattern. He met with the chiefs requesting land to establish monastic communities, which was granted likely with the expectation of education for the youth.
The mission to the Picts began in Ninian’s early 30s, around the 390s, when he travelled across the Solway Firth to Whithorn, to build the Candida Casa, the white house. Candida Casa became the base of a monastic community & a centre of learning for centuries to come. From this base, smaller monastic cells were established throughout the Galloway region, spreading the support base for the Christian way of life.
One of Ninian’s innovations was to include women in the life of his community. In Rome Ninian had seen female monastic houses that led with practical support of the poor and in the Celtic tradition women were considered equal to men. So Ninian established monastic houses at Whithorn for women wanting to join the mission.
Monks committed to a life of work, study and prayer, living in small solitary beehive huts, and shared a communal refectory for meals. These monasteries were not an end in themselves, but offered practical support to those who needed it. This gentle model of reaching out in neighbourly love succeeded in converting the Picts, where the Roman Empire had failed. Ninian’s model of monastic prayer, scholarly learning and practical love spread throughout the Southern part of Scotland and established a pattern of life that became the model for Celtic monasticism.
As we consider the life of Saint Ninian, our modern mind could easily just venerate the individual, focusing on the wonderful stories of his spiritual superpowers and the miracles attributed to him. Aeldred of Rievaux wrote St Ninian’s hagiography to inspire individuals to reform the monastic life 800 years after Ninian’s death, which take us in that direction. During the middle ages, St Ninian shrine became a site of pilgrimage for people seeking healing.
Today’s reading from Thessalonians however, might give us a clearer idea of how Ninian’s missionary life might have looked. In this letter, Paul describes how he did and did not behave in order to be Christ to the Thessalonians, as he sought to convert them. He did not try to deceive or trick, flatter or praise. But he did behave, as he describes, as gentle as a nursing mother, hard at work so not to financially burden the community, and living a pure, upright and blameless life. Paul knew that actions spoke louder than words, that it was less about what he said, and more of how he lived, that would win people to Christ.
Perhaps that is why we do not have any written words from the hand of St Ninian, he was more a man of action working to build a Christian community on that new frontier. What we can see in him was the capacity to inspire and gather a group of men and women who were willing to step out in faith and commit their lives to this new model of monastic community. They were prepared to live with a practical simplicity through which they might bring the light of Christ to their community through acts of compassion and mercy. And it was in this spirit that the Christian faith found a foothold in Scotland & became a base on which the Celtic Church spread in that region.
Additional notes:
(After his death in 432, a shrine was established at Whithorn which became associated with healing powers. This shrine became a site of pilgrimage throughout the middle ages, however was destroyed during the reformation. What remains at Whithorn today is the remains of a chapel that was built for pilgrims in the 13th C at the sea port St Ninian is understood to have landed on when he first arrived in Scotland. The remains of the Whithorn Cathedral and priory are opposite a small museum that houses some local artefacts. St Ninian’s Cave is still a site of pilgrimage).