Commontide
For Desiring God
O God, grant that we may desire you, and desiring you seek you, and seeking you find you, and finding you be satisfied in you for ever. Amen.
Liturgical Color: White/Gold
Proper 2 (May 15-21)
O Lord, you never fail to support and govern those whom you bring up in your steadfast love and fear: Keep us, we pray, under your continual protection and providence, and give us a perpetual fear and love of your holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Most liturgical texts are from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America.
The New Coverdale Psalter, © 2019 by the Anglican Church in North America. Used by permission.
Priest, Monk of Jarrow, and Doctor of the Church
Ecumenical Commemoration
Bede was a monk of the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria, given to the house at seven and buried there at sixty-two. He wrote commentaries on Scripture, treatises on the reckoning of time, two Lives of Cuthbert, and the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which remains the primary source for the conversion of England. He died on the evening of 25 May 735, having just finished dictating an Old English translation of the Gospel of John. Leo XIII named him a Doctor of the Church in 1899, the only Englishman among them.
Bede was born around 673 in Northumbria. At seven he was entrusted to the care of Abbot Benedict Biscop at the monastery of Wearmouth, later transferring to the sister house at Jarrow under Abbot Ceolfrith. He was ordained deacon at nineteen and priest at thirty — both unusually early, suggesting exceptional ability and character.
Bede never traveled far from Jarrow. His world was the monastic library that Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrith had assembled through multiple journeys to Rome — one of the finest collections in Western Europe. From this library Bede produced a corpus of work that shaped medieval learning across the entire Latin West.
His biblical commentaries, covering much of both Testaments, were widely copied and influenced exegesis for centuries. His De Temporum Ratione (725) established the system of dating events from the Incarnation (AD/BC) that became universal in Western chronology. His hagiographic works included Lives of Cuthbert (verse and prose) and a history of the abbots of Wearmouth-Jarrow.
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731), completed four years before his death, is his masterpiece. It tells the story of Christianity in Britain from the Roman period to Bede's own time with a method remarkable for its era: Bede names his sources, distinguishes levels of testimony, acknowledges uncertainty, and attempts to reconcile conflicting accounts. The work established the model for English historical writing and remains the indispensable source for the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England.
Bede's final days are described in a moving letter by his student Cuthbert (not to be confused with the bishop-saint). Bede spent his last weeks translating the Gospel of John into English and dictating a collection of excerpts from Isidore of Seville. He died on the evening of May 25, 735 — Ascension Eve — singing the Gloria Patri.
Cuthbert's Letter describes Bede's final days with unusual circumstantial detail: Bede working urgently to complete his John translation, distributing small personal gifts (pepper, napkins, incense) to his fellow monks, and dying while singing the Gloria Patri on Ascension Eve. The account has the ring of genuine eyewitness memory rather than hagiographic convention.
Bede's famous Death Song — 'Before that inevitable journey, no one becomes wiser in thought than he needs to be' — is preserved in the Letter and is one of the earliest surviving pieces of Old English poetry. Its attribution to Bede on his deathbed is about as well attested as any early medieval quotation can be.
The title 'Venerable' was applied to Bede from at least the ninth century. A popular medieval legend attributed it to an angel completing an epitaph that a monk had left unfinished — 'Hic sunt in fossa Bedae... ossa' ('Here in this grave are the bones of Bede...') was completed overnight to 'Bedae Venerabilis ossa.' This is pure legend with no early attestation.