Cloud of Witnesses: Pilgrim from Canterbury

In 2022 my wife and I moved to Chester from Canterbury to be nearer to our family in our later years. We had lived in Canterbury for more than fifty years, and the Cathedral there had played a large part in our lives. So when we came to the north-west I was naturally keen to get to know Chester Cathedral, and I found myself drawn particularly to the many and varied people who are depicted in the stained glass windows in the cloisters, the nave, the south transept, the chapter house, the refectory and elsewhere.

As I gazed up at these fenestrated men and women and realised that they were simultaneously gazing down at me, I was forcefully reminded of that arresting phrase from the New Testament book of Hebrews about the ‘great cloud of witnesses’ who had kept faith with the God of Israel in Old Testament times. And it struck me that, like those biblical characters of old, the colourful figures in the Chester windows had not only been steadfast witnesses to God in their own times, they were also witnesses to us and to our faith today. They had lived in the past, of course, but I sensed that, in a manner of speaking, they are also living in the present as they watch us going about our daily business. A modern-day ‘cloud of witnesses’, you might say, from whom we might draw inspiration in our own lives.

In all, there are just over a hundred of these witnesses scattered around the Cathedral, mainly in the cloisters but in other places as well. A lot of them were already familiar to me: biblical characters, famous saints, prominent archbishops and bishops, well-known historical figures, kings and queens and so on. But many were entirely unknown to me. I could not have told you anything about St Cyprian, St Perpetua, St Faith, St Remigius, St Ninian, St Seaxburgh, St Aldhelm, King Merewalh, St Kynesburgha, Archbishop Plegmund, King Athelstan, Earl Ranulf, Simon of Whitchurch, Ranulf Higden, John Bridgeman, Nicholas Ferrar, John Cosin, Thomas Wilson and many others. Who were these men and women, I wondered, and why are they in residence in the windows of Chester Cathedral? What, if anything, do their experiences from the past have to say to us today? Can we learn anything from their lives and deeds?

I began my investigation of these questions by compiling short biographies of every one of these hundred or so witnesses, setting their lives in the historical contexts of their time. As I worked on, I gradually realised that most of them were not randomly scattered through time but could be gathered together in distinctive groups defined by their places in history. They included, for example, biblical figures from the time of Jesus; church fathers who had shaped the early course of Christian doctrine; martyrs for the faith in the early years of the Roman empire; missionary saints who had brought Christianity to different parts of Britain; Anglo-Saxon kings and queens caught up in the beginnings of Christianity in Chester; northern saints of the 7^th century who had founded the great monasteries at Ripon, Durham and Whitby; influential leaders of the early medieval church in England; and 16^th and 17^th century Anglicans who gave English Christianity a sense of its own spirituality and a vocabulary with which to express it.

So I am now writing about each of these groups of glassy witnesses from the past who live on in the Chester windows, setting them in the social, political and ecclesiastical contexts of their day and trying to see whether they might have anything to say to our day and age. In future blogs I will introduce you to some of them, and I will recount their stories in the hope that there may be something in them that can help and inspire us in our own lives. Watch this space!

Copyright John Butler. Reproduced with permission.