THE SPARROW OF SAN PAULINO

 

Saint Paulinus of York was a devout and rule-abiding monk from St Chad's Abbey but he had a doubt when he sang the psalter. That verse of Ecclesiastes that prays a year of God is equivalent to a millennium of men. He couldn't fit his head. One morning he heard the song of a sparrow and went after him on his way to the forest. The gurriatillo intoned loudly the psalm of God's time that lasts a thousand years of man. Saint Paulinus thought that God is timeless. He lacks time because he is infinite and temporality is finitude, completion. The sparrow took flight from him, intoning his sentence with more vigor since the quima of a yew tree. Paulinus of York followed him in his singing evolutions all morning and all afternoon. At sunset the enchanting bird disappeared and he prepared to return to the monastery. To his surprise he found that the monastery he had known to have stood on a mountain was now in a valley surrounding the banks of the River Ouse. He knocked on the door but the doorman didn't want to open it. He asked to introduce himself to the abbot of St Chad but he did not recognize him, they spoke in another language, they wore another habit. The divine office was no longer sung in the Latin that he knew when professing in the rule but in another unknown language. He had changed the rite and prayed vernacular. A thousand years had passed. Saint Paulinus then fell on his knees before the abbot recognizing his error when he once sang the divine office, he was convinced that what the Bible taught was true. The days of the Lord go another way. God makes other accounts. He apologized to the community for his mistake, even though the sin he committed was in good faith, and the prior absolved him. A thousand years had passed and after a few days while in prayer he gave his soul to God. The good Cistercians of the convent of St. Chad say that some mornings the sparrow of Saint Paulinus flies through the cloister singing the old Latin maxim: Dies Dei non est dies hominum (God's time does not resemble man's time)

 

Tuesday, October 04, 2022