In The Age of Terror

We live in the age of terror. Hijackings and bombings, beheadings, terror that rains from the sky.

There was another age of terror, when terror came ashore from the sea.  Villages put to the torch, churches plundered, a king exiled to a humble cottage in the swamp.  Like we are today, England was heir to the fruits of terror.

In that age, there was Alfred.  A fifth son and humble servant of God, who wanted to take orders, he was nevertheless called forward to save his country and the very foundation of civilization.   Warrior, general, scholar and king, he brought together the basic building blocks of civilization and preserved it all in the face of darkness and the terror from the seas. 

How did St. Alfred bring all this together, manage not only to save his world but to make it prosper?  The answer was simply that for Alfred, everything rested first on faith, and through faith, he made a world.

 In her review of Sr. Benedicta Ward's book on English spiritualism, Susan Eklund notes the following:

A terrifying judgment has begun. The final chapter likens the Danish and Norse raids with
the cross to be born by the English. The raids caused a great loss of faith. St. Alfred the Great saw Bede’s
warning about this and realized that the ‘fair-weather’ Christianity of the English was due to a lack of learning
and a lack of spiritual information in English. He turned his hand to the task while still in the field of
battle. “I began amidst the various and multifarious afflictions of this kingdom to translate into English the
book which in Latin is called Pastoral Care, in English ‘Shepherd Book’ . . .” – the contention being that the
redemption of the English will be found by the widespread use of the Shepherd Book. ...The only means of
the survival of English Christianity would be to accept the cross as the place of resurrection. That is the only
place God is in the midst of crisis. “We have now lost wealth as well as wisdom because we did not wish to
set our minds in the track.” (1)

In his wisdom, St. Alfred knew that the place to start to change the world was within oneself.  When one "cleaves only to God", as he often said, only then can miracles occur, can chaos be brought into order, can ignorance be brought into knowledge. 

Holy Alfred, pray for us that all may return to the earnest practice of their faith.  As we follow your example and cleave to God, so then can we create the kind of world that God wishes this  to be. 



(1)  HIGH KING OF HEAVEN: ASPECTS OF EARLY ENGLISH SPIRITUALITY by Benedicta Ward, SLG. Cistercian Publications, Kalamazoo, MI   1999. Book review by Susan Eklund in The ST MARK'S LION MAY 2003 VOLUME CXXVIII, NO. 5, online at http://www.westernorthodox.com/stmark/lion/lion2003-05.pdf