St E and Me (Part I)

When you’ve known someone for a long time, it can be difficult to remember the exact details of when you met. That’s the way it is with St. Eanswythe and me.

My family and I were received into Holy Orthodoxy in the last decade of the last century. At the time, we were living in Wichita Falls, Texas. That was before the internet and before you could order stuff from around the world and have it on your doorstep the next morning, so there weren’t a whole lot of Orthodox resources available for folks just south of the Red River.

However, at some point, some nice person gave me a small packet of baseball-card size paper icons. And, in that packet, there was this image:

St. Eanswythe of Folkestone. Image credit: OCA

I do not recall what happened to the other paper icons, but I kept the image of St. Eanswythe, and, eventually, it ended up in the icon corner of my home office. I had an old bulletin board, and I used it to display St. Eanswythe’s icon along with the images of other Celtic and Anglo-Saxon saints: Cuthbert, Patrick, Columba, Brigid, and Chad.

Icon of All Saints who shone forth in the lands of Britain and Ireland. Photo credit: OrthoChristian.com

That was the extent of our relationship for quite a while. When we moved to Cedar Park, Texas, I took my display of Western saints with me, but, in 2010, after our parish had completed the construction of our Fellowship Hall, I realized that, as we moved ahead towards our new temple, our community would have to approach that massive project in a way that was deeply and distinctly spiritual.

Not that I had any particular idea as to what that meant. Nevertheless, at some point, I realized that what we really needed was a spiritual project manager, a saint to oversee the effort. Now by that time, I had been praying in front of the icon of St. Eanswythe for well over a decade. In that particular image, she’s holding a temple in her arms. So I decided to find out what that means.

It turns out St. Eanswythe was one of the first female monastics in England. She lived in the seventh century (she even knew my patron saint, Aidan of Lindisfarne!); she was a princess; she entered the monastic life around the age of sixteen and she died in her mid-twenties. However, what really caught my attention is the story of the beam.

Apparently, the earliest version of this story is found in a thirteenth century account of her life: Even after St. Eanswythe entered the monastic life, she was pursued by various suitors. One in particular was a pagan prince (some sources report he was from Northumbria, in Northern England; some sources indicate that he was from the Continent). This guy was particularly persistent, and he happened to be at the monastery when the chapel for the community was being built.

As part of that construction effort, the central beam for the chapel was delivered, and it was discovered to be too short by several feet. So, St. Eanswythe told her pagan admirer that if he could lengthen the beam by his prayers then she would forsake the monastic life and become his wife. The pagan prince’s prayers were to no avail, but the prayers of St Eanswythe and her sisters brought the beam to its required length.

It did not take me long to figure out that this was the holy woman we needed to guide and direct our building project: someone who is tough and practical and who knows how to take care of business. (In fact, after years of working with St Eanswythe, we have a saying in our parish: “Don’t mess with the princess”. More on that later.)

Not long after I came to that conclusion, I realized that, if St. Eanswythe was going to be the patroness of our Building Program, then we would need an icon of her, as well as a hymn that we could use to ask for her intercessions. So, I got in touch with Vladimir Grygorenko, the world-famous iconographer who painted all the images on our iconostasis, and I asked him to provide us with a smaller icon of St. Eanswythe. Within a couple of months, he sent us this image:

Ever since then, we have displayed that icon on a stand in our nave.

As for the hymn, I wrote the words for it when I was attending that year’s Diocesan Clergy Brotherhood Retreat. I worked on the hymn during several of the retreat sessions (the speaker was a bit dull that year), and, towards the end of the week, I shared it with our bishop, His Grace, BASIL. Bishop BASIL blessed us to use the hymn right away, and, ever since then, at just about every single Sunday Divine Liturgy, we use it along with the other hymns that are sung right after the Little Entrance.

Here’s a recording of the hymn, as sung by our choir. The music is by Benedict Sheehan.

So we’ve been praying to St Eanswythe and reverencing her icon for almost fifteen years now. But that’s just the beginning of the story….