Ravens

And relics

On a hot Tokyo pavement, just outside the supermarket where we buy our meat shrink-wrapped, I saw a raven pecking at the fresher flesh of a fallen fellow bird. As I got near, it flew up to perch on the shop sign, a morsel of sun-fried meat and feather hanging from its maw, and twitched its head suspiciously, as though I might try to steal its treat.

Ravens and crows share one name here: karasu. They are rife in Tokyo this time of year. Unkindnesses descend on tourists from the trees of Meiji Jingu. Lone scouts steal wire coat-hangers from my laundry rail to fortify their nests. They wage war from these makeshift turrets on farmers’ small holdings at the city’s edge. Some say the ravens remember faces that would rather be forgot. They bear grudges as easily as coat hangers and carrion.

The corvid race is older than Noah. We all know of the dove he sent to find dry land, and the olive frond the white bird bore. But before the dove, he sent a raven. The life-giver, white herald of the fruit that yields oil for heat and light and balm, sign of the Spirit who will hover over Jordan, we remember fondly. As for his black brother, corpse-eater, fruitless feaster on the dust to which we will return: from him we turn our mind’s eye, and leave him to fly off out of Genesis into other realms of story.

What is his relation to the three-legged raven of the East, the one the Japanese call Yatagarasu, whom Amaterasu sent to guide Emperor Jimmu in his time of need? To the ravens whom the native Americans take for guides from this world to the world of spirit? Or to his kin who flew to Yggdrasil to take tidings to the hanging Odin? Whether he was himself Hugin or Munin, their sire or their scion, our stories do not tell. Yet there is something to be gleaned from the fable of the dust-eating birds serving as eyes and mind to the Viking god transfixed on the Tree of Life. It is the shadow of a truer tale. Like that other dust-eater, the Serpent, the raven plays a mercurial role in the tales of old. He may lack the innocence of the dove, but the wisdom of the serpent he shares. The carrion bird is a skilled navigator through the realms of the dead.

In such guise the raven’s sons would fly back after many generations to Hebrew lore, sent by God to feed the Tishbite prophet Elias at the Wadi Cherith. For the Hebrew just as for the Norseman, Saxon, or Sioux, ravens mark the passage between two worlds. Envoys of the spirit realm, they nourished one who lived himself in a borderland between the quick and dead, a prophet in the wilderness, a dweller among angels and demons. The corpse-eaters brought Elias the stuff of life, and he brought life to the dead, raising a widow’s son. A friend of ravens, he would himself not suffer death, but rise directly to the realm of spirit, unconsumed by the consuming fire.

After hundreds of years, near the known world’s westernmost edge, the raven’s sons would bind the worlds of Noah and of Odin. For on my native isle, where the skies are often dark as ravens, there was born of the line of Odin one Oswald, another ravenfriend, to be Northumbria’s king. Exiled by a pagan usurper, he was raised many years by the Scots and Pictish monks of Dal Riata, hardened by the desert Rule that had blown to Iona from Egypt’s sands. As fluent in their Celtic tongues as his English own, young Oswald watched the erstwhile kingdom of his father descend into pagan idolatry. When the time came for the young king to take back his realm, he set a cross before his soldiers, knelt and bid them do the same. Like Constantine before him, by this sign Oswald won.

Oswald’s Christian rule was blessed with charity and goodwill. He called the monk Aidan from Iona to set up house on Lindisfarne, the Holy Isle. When one Whitsun Oswald gave a silver platter to the poor who starved outside his hall, Aidan blessed the hand that showed such mercy. And when, at last, he was slain in battle and butchered by the pagan Penda, who hoped to deprive him of a Christian burial, that hand was borne by one of the faithful ravens he had befriended to a tree that would lend his name to the town that grew around it: Oswald’s tree made Oswestry. Pilgrims dug up the soil blessed by his dripping blood so deep that a well sprung beneath the boughs. It is there still today. So by the raven’s work, the dead limb of a saint brought forth healing water and an enduring font of prayer.

Emboldened by his sibling’s faith, Oswald’s brother Oswiu led a daring expedition into Penda’s lands to recover the scattered body parts. Thanks to Oswiu’s bravery and the raven’s deed, Oswald’s arm survived in Peterborough Cathedral until the vandalism of the Reformation, and his head remains in Durham to this day.

Such tales are strange to modern ears and strain belief. Moderns have been taught by the architects of the Reformation and their secular Enlightenment successors to treat mediaevals’ faith as fable, their creed as credulity, their relics as rubbish ripe for ridicule. But might we be not more cautious in attributing such stupidity to our seniors, given the manifest stupidity of our own age?

The logic of the relic and its carrion conveyor is sound. For if the Resurrection is of the body, then what could be more holy than the body part of a saint, undoubtedly destined for that sweet end? One thing only: the precious Body of Christ Himself. Yet their bodies are already participants in His Body, and in a way more advanced and intense than those of us who live still here below. Hence it is quite reasonable, if one believe in the physical resurrection, to believe in the spiritual power of a saint’s immortal remains. It may have no power in itself, but is a vessel of the power of Christ in whom it is destined to be restored.

Thus it makes sense, too, that its bearer from the battlefield on which Oswald lost his limbs but gained eternal life should be a carrion bird, a death-feaster, one of those ambiguous and clever beasts whom ancients the world over know as intermediaries between the earthly and the spiritual realm. And while the dove is the more obvious, one might say more cataphatic symbol of Christ, with its purity, its brightness, its multivalent olive-branch, the apophatic darkness of the raven whispers of Our Lord too: for when death tried to swallow Him, like the raven, He rather swallowed death, and it is only by descending into the dark deeps of His tomb that we may emerge, by His guidance, into light and life eternal.

We need not be pure as doves to receive the grace and strength that God bestows. For all its ill repute, the raven has his place, too. May he be our friend.