The Wild Saints of Lindisfarne: Kenotic Contemplation
Contemplation is very much about allowing the world to be itself in your presence
—and allowing yourself to be changed by your presence to it.
- Rowan Williams
Contemplation is very much about allowing the world to be itself in your presence
—and allowing yourself to be changed by your presence to it.
- Rowan Williams
A book in progress by jd hixson
There is no road to Lindisfarne.
There is a causeway, but twice a day the sea takes it away.
To go there, you must wait. You must learn the tide.
You must cross by trust.
This is a land shaped by surrender—by salt, silence, and returning water. It is a place where lives once formed not around mastery, but around release. Here, the wild saints did not impose themselves upon the land. They emptied themselves into it. Their holiness lay not in what they controlled, but in what they relinquished.
This book is an attempt to walk with them—not only through the stories they left behind, but through the very landscape that shaped them. It is a meditation on kenotic contemplation—a way of seeing, listening, and dwelling that allows the world to be what it is without needing to possess it.
To contemplate, in this tradition, is not to escape the world but to enter it more deeply—without defense. Rowan Williams writes:
“Contemplation is very much about allowing the world to be itself in your presence—and allowing yourself to be changed by your presence to it.”
(Silence and Honey Cakes, p. 4)
This book asks: what if the lives of the saints were less about moral achievement than about a kind of self-forgetting attention? What if holiness is not grasped but received? What if the land itself is a participant in that contemplative unfolding?
The Shape of the Book
The book unfolds in three movements, each exploring a mode of kenotic contemplation—through person, through place, and through time.
Prologue – The Listening IslandLindisfarne introduced not as a backdrop but as a protagonist: a place of threshold, echo, and invitation.
Part I: Wild Saints – Forms of Inner Poverty
Part II: The Land’s Self-Offering
Part III: Memory Without Possession
Conclusion: The Kenotic ImaginationRowan Williams writes that true contemplation is “the refusal to turn the world into a mirror of yourself.” This final section reflects on imagination as a kenotic act—how we hold place, story, and self not as instruments, but as gifts. A vision of living that makes room for the other without the need to master it.
I will be trekking St Cuthbert’s Way next year, walking from Melrose to Lindisfarne, as part of this unfolding project—gathering soil, story, and silence. The journey is both research and kenotic practice: a deliberate act of walking without control, listening without conclusion, and letting the land shape the work.
Contemplation. Emptiness. Silence. Surrender.
There is no road to Lindisfarne.
There is a causeway, but twice a day the sea takes it away.
To go there, you must wait. You must learn the tide.
You must cross by trust.
This is a land shaped by surrender—by salt, silence, and returning water. It is a place where lives once formed not around mastery, but around release. Here, the wild saints did not impose themselves upon the land. They emptied themselves into it. Their holiness lay not in what they controlled, but in what they relinquished.
This book is an attempt to walk with them—not only through the stories they left behind, but through the very landscape that shaped them. It is a meditation on kenotic contemplation—a way of seeing, listening, and dwelling that allows the world to be what it is without needing to possess it.
To contemplate, in this tradition, is not to escape the world but to enter it more deeply—without defense. Rowan Williams writes:
“Contemplation is very much about allowing the world to be itself in your presence—and allowing yourself to be changed by your presence to it.”
(Silence and Honey Cakes, p. 4)
This book asks: what if the lives of the saints were less about moral achievement than about a kind of self-forgetting attention? What if holiness is not grasped but received? What if the land itself is a participant in that contemplative unfolding?
The Shape of the Book
The book unfolds in three movements, each exploring a mode of kenotic contemplation—through person, through place, and through time.
Prologue – The Listening IslandLindisfarne introduced not as a backdrop but as a protagonist: a place of threshold, echo, and invitation.
Part I: Wild Saints – Forms of Inner Poverty
- Cuthbert – One Who Listens
Drawing on Bede and the Anonymous Life, this chapter explores Cuthbert’s movement toward solitude, his relationship with birds and weather, and his contemplative authority—born not from mastery, but from surrender to place. - Aidan – The Walking Presence
Aidan’s refusal of enclosure; his gentle itinerancy and transparent leadership. A saint whose holiness emerged from lightness of step and constancy of listening. - Oswald – The Generous Sovereign
A king who saw power as an offering. Oswald’s kenosis is royal: his life embodies governance through relinquishment, his faith formed in exile and enacted through radical hospitality.
Part II: The Land’s Self-Offering
- The Island as Icon of Emptying
Lindisfarne’s intertidal nature becomes a spiritual metaphor: the land that gives and withholds. What does it mean to live like an island—porous, ungraspable, open to return? - Tide, Light, and the Migratory Mind
A natural theology of weather, birds, and seasonal rhythm. This chapter explores how ecological cycles echo the contemplative path: reception without clinging, return without possession.
Part III: Memory Without Possession
- The Presence of Ruins
What remains after desecration? This chapter reflects on the Viking raids, the broken abbey, and the spiritual potency of absence. Memory becomes a contemplative act when it no longer needs to restore or explain. - Pilgrimage as Practice
A meditation on walking as kenosis. Modern pilgrims—myself included—do not walk to claim, but to be changed. This is contemplation in motion: to walk without urgency, to arrive without owning.
Conclusion: The Kenotic ImaginationRowan Williams writes that true contemplation is “the refusal to turn the world into a mirror of yourself.” This final section reflects on imagination as a kenotic act—how we hold place, story, and self not as instruments, but as gifts. A vision of living that makes room for the other without the need to master it.
I will be trekking St Cuthbert’s Way next year, walking from Melrose to Lindisfarne, as part of this unfolding project—gathering soil, story, and silence. The journey is both research and kenotic practice: a deliberate act of walking without control, listening without conclusion, and letting the land shape the work.
Contemplation. Emptiness. Silence. Surrender.