Hilda’s Crozier

Today is set as a feast in honor of Hilda of Whitby.

She counts among my favorite Christian saints. Her feast is observed in the Roman, the Orthodox, and Anglican communions. She lived in the seventh century, and was the abbess of several monastic communities, most notably Whitby.

Hilda was a singular figure who led a mixed community of women and men. Among her charges was Caedmon, not originally a monk, but rather a shepherd whom she recognized as having a great gift, and with her support became the first poet in what would come to be called England. Five of her disciples would become bishops, two of them celebrated as saints.

It is assumed her community was organized in the Celtic style, and it could be argued her unusual prominence as a leader was partially due to standing in that tradition rather than the more misogynist Roman. And at the same time the Synod of Whitby, held under her auspicious, led the English church into the Roman use. I enjoy fantasizing of a Celtic church taking root in the British Isles as a sort of proto-Anglicanism, and with that a more open and generous church than what actually happened. However, living into the reality rather than the dream, even if the two cannot in fact be completely disentangled, I, like many, find it intriguing that a woman was such a central figure in the development of the Christian church in England.

Which brings us to the crozier, the shepherd’s staff.

Her image in iconography always has Hilda holding a crozier. That crozier is of course the symbol of episcopal authority, although it is also given to abbots, or at least, some. Certainly appropriate when we think of Hilda…