Dewi Sant and the Archbishop of Wales
Enid Morgan
On February 26th I listened to Archbishop Bishop Rowan preach about power, in the presence of the First Secretary of the National Assembly, Rhodri Morgan, his predecessor Alun Michael, and the Secretary of State for Wales Paul Murphy. The Archbishop's theme was the desire for power and the fear of power. It was a situation of many ironies! For the struggle to get an Archbishop for Wales was about power and it went on for a thousand years. It was argued for by Bernard , first Norman Bishop of St David's, who was certainly grinding his own axe. Gerald the Welshman argued the case and so did Owain Glyndwr. But by the time Wales got her Archbishop, the age of European Christendom was fading. But there we were, at the church of Wooloo listening to words of great wisdom, a Christian contribution to public discourse being spoken with great clarity by a new Archbishop of Wales.
Woolloo - what a horrid distortion of Gwynllyw! Gwynllyw Filwr, a blessed leader who was a soldier, the soldier, pirate king, who wrecked ships and got himself a wife by abducting her. He fought in the tribal politics of this damp little part of the Roman Empire which the imperial armies had just quit. But Gwynllyw was converted to Christ, brought up his family in the Christian faith ( Saint Cadog was his son) and built a church on what is now Stow Hill in Newport. He is said never to have stolen thereafter - clearly a turn-around, and unusual in a king! He helped provide a new way of living, an alternative life style for the Cymry. The Cymry, those who live together in this place, later named by their conquerors, Wealh - the foreigners. Law and order were collapsing , the power hunters plotting.
It was a time of collapsing systems, the old imperial certainties of Rome had long vanished; tribalism was resurgent; the tribal leaders and the politicians, the power hunters were out there, law and order collapsing. The old Celtic gods had shrivelled, the Romans had believed in signing on any old god that matched their own, however loosely. And in this confused violent period a new odd set of religious leaders were emerging. They did not come with armies as later missionaries did. They did not travel on the coat tails of empire like the eighteenth and nineteenth missionary societies did in India, America and Africa. They did not come on the railways of the capitalists to destroy cultures. Certainly, they challenged the culture of their time, they witnessed to a different set of values, they rejected the domination system of violence, they lived by humility and simplicity and were ferocious in their holiness.
Dewi was the most loved of these saints. It is ironic that for nearly 1000 years, Dewi's name was used in a struggle about power for the church in Wales. Dewi, his spiritual authority, his holiness, was the best argument we had for an autonomous church with its own archbishop. Our Dewi's as good a saint as any one you've got!
Didn't he and Illtyd and Teilo go together to Jerusalem? Didn't the patriarch there bless the three of them and give them symbols of authority? And look at the miracles they performed. These elements in the Life of Dewi, the Buchedd written many hundreds of years after his death by Rhigyfarch of Llanbadarn, were the basis of the arguments of Gerald the Welshman, of Owen Glyndwr. But when we got our first archbishop eighty years or so ago, it wasn't ironically enough as a sign of the triumph of Dewi. Rather it was that Christians who had found a different, more ethnic way of being church acquired enough political clout to say they would no longer accept an English church and an English archbishop. Holiness had nothing whatever to do with it!
But does any of this matter now? After all a patron saint in most circles seems to be rather like having a mascot. Something that will serve when the rugby team is doing badly; when it won't quite do to wave a red dragon or to parade the regimental billy goat. And why should people not use Dewi as a little dose of national prozac to boost the feel good factor? That seems to be what lots of people use religion for these days! Around us are the people of crystals, and auras and psychic massage. On a visit to Bardsey, a few years ago, Bardsey resting place so they say of 20,000 Welsh saints, I came across a chap humping a huge back-pack so heavy that I assumed it was full of geological samples. 'Oh, no' he answered when I made some passing remark as we humped our bags on to the boat, 'it's full of crystals and a Tibetan prayer bowl!' The bones of the saints as a focus of holiness are not enough!
But perhaps Dewi could help in our age of pick and mix religion. What was distinctive about him that could help us? The material that we have about him was written centuries later, to a fairly stock pattern of what saints were expected to be like. The Lives of the Saints are not much good to those who want only facts. But the loved memory of Dewi ensured that two hundred years after his death his name was in the lists of saints treasured by the church. In another 200 years his name enters the realms of literature in the poem called Armes Prydein. This prophetic poem was written to encourage the Welsh to join in an alliance with the Celts of what is now Scotland against Athelstan king of the English. They are urged to raise 'lluman glān Dewi' against the enemy. So is Dewi used down the centuries, - a focus for identity, a flag it has to be said frequently of convenience. But he is also part of the national foundational myth, in this age in which our identity, our defensiveness, our vulnerability, our capacity to resist was formed.
On a visit to the Olympic peninsula in Washington state, West of Seattle in the US, I visited the temperate rain forests where the moss and the epiphytes hang in the air and the ancient forest breathes around you. And suddenly you see a perfectly straight row of trees. Sometime in the past a huge giant had fallen in a storm and over the years the moss had grown over it, and into the moss the seeds had fallen and sprouted. The little seedlings had competed and produced a new row of giants. The original fallen tree is sometimes called a 'nurse log' and from which the new generation of giants grow. Dewi and his contemporaries were a giant nurse log of our culture.
Why has sainthood anything whatever to do with all this? The mediaeval mind understood it in a very materialistic sort of way. For them a saint was holy; holiness was an attribute of God. A saint therefore was a person with access to the divine and to eternity. And holiness was not just a matter of morality. Saints were not just terribly good people who set an example for us all. Rather they were people who because they were clearly God's people, had access to an alternative source of power. Dewi had a holiness which defended him from the poison of man who hated him. His holiness kept the swarm of bees in Pembrokeshire rather than see them carted off to Ireland. Dewi's holiness meant that he had power to heal the blind, raise the dead, and indeed raise the very ground beneath his feet. In that very materialistic way was the clarity and truth of Dewi at the Synod at Llanddewi Brefi remembered.
So in the mediaeval ages that idea of the material power of holiness clung to the body of the saint. Their bones and nails and hair became a way for later generations too to have access to the divine. It is said that Edward I was thrilled to get the head of Llywelyn the last prince of Wales put on a spike outside the tower of London. He was even more pleased to get a relic, a piece of wood, believed to be from the true cross owned by Llywelyn. St George's Chapel in Windsor was built to house that relic called Y Groes Naid. That little bit of wood linked Edward with the death of Christ himself. And to be linked with the death of Christ in that material way assured him spiritual power. Relics were part of the currency of power.
How quaint you may think, how primitive, how irrelevant to our enlightened generation.
For the memory of Dewi our patron, our saint, is a link not just with a historical period, but with an intensely believed understanding of the relationship between God and the peoples of the earth. In all generations the real saints offer a relationship with a God of love, a God who identifies totally with his creation, who became human, who declared what God was like in a baby, in a political prisoner tortured to death. We do not know enough about our own saints to write what we would call half decent biographies. All that we have are folk memories and traditions and attitudes which witness to what they were like. And it wasn't that being a Christian was safe and easy and comfortable, rather it was a prophetic, dangerous, and suspect thing to be. It involved ditching the primacy of tribal loyalties, it involved turning backs on political patterns of domination. It was a time when, as in our time, people were looking for faith to sustain, to heal, and to take away the shame of being human. So Dewi can still be for us what he was for his own generation, a point of access to holiness, to dignity and meaning that doesn't depend on the sword, on the power of money, on the sleight of hand and tongue of politicians. Saints are people who give us access to eternal value, to eternal meaning, to eternal love. A religious icon gives you a window into the eternal, into the realm of God. Just as an icon in the computer sense - is used to get access into a whole new programme! So today we may look at Dewi, to see through the passing fads, obsessions and silliness of our own particular time, to discern what is of real meaning, and significance and lasting joy. His last words "Byddwch, lawen a chedwch ych ffydd a'ch cred, a gwnewch y pethau bychain a glywsoch ac a welsoch gennyf fi……" (*) have a gentleness and reality and roots which draw us back, not to a romantic never-never land, but to the holiness to which we might aspire to today.
If we remember him thus, if by celebrating Dewi, we celebrate not only our own identity, but the source of our identity, then we will surely know that joy which Dewi knew and wished to bequeath to his friends. And to love one of our own, in the communion of saints is not a bad introduction to heaven!
(The Revd Enid R. Morgan is Director of the Board of Mission of the Church in Wales)
(* Be joyful and keep your faith and your belief and do the little things you heard and saw through me……..)