NeuroDivine

A Reflection for St Matthew’s Day

Saints | St Matthew’s Day | Book of Kells | 21 September

A reflection in advance of St Matthew’s Day | 8 minutes 26 seconds

Angel-form with wings unfolding,
Matthew lifts the Gospel flame;
Kells’ bright pages swirl around him,
Spirals breathing out Christ’s name.

The Gospel according to Matthew begins with names. A long line of them. Abraham and Isaac, David and Solomon, kings and exiles, saints and sinners, remembered people and half-remembered people. Before Matthew tells us what Jesus does, he reminds us that Christ enters a human story already being written.

Perhaps that is why I find myself imagining Matthew through the language of an illuminated manuscript.

In the Book of Kells, the Gospel is not simply written down. It seems almost to grow across the page. Letters become colour. Lines become creatures and branches. Spirals disappear into one another and return somewhere unexpected. The Word is surrounded by an exuberance which seems to say that the Gospel cannot quite be contained by ink and vellum.

We sometimes imagine faith as though God hands us a finished text and asks us merely to copy it faithfully. Yet our lives are much more like an illuminated page still being worked upon.

There are mistakes. There are crossings-out. There are places where the pattern seems to have disappeared altogether.

And still Christ writes.

So our hearts, like sacred vellum,
Stretch to bear the Spirit’s fire;
Christ, the Artist, writes within us
Dreams of justice, hope, desire.

Matthew gives us the Sermon on the Mount: those extraordinary words in which Jesus calls the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, the merciful and the peacemakers blessed.

They are not the people whom the world naturally illuminates in gold.

Yet these are precisely the lives Christ places at the centre of the page.

That is why, in the hymn, Matthew’s mountain eventually meets Irish landscape:

On the Braid, the Barrow, Lagan,
Patterns rise where wounds have been;
Christ the Healer threads our stories,
Binding loss with love again.

The Gospel is never merely something which happened somewhere else.

It takes root beside our own rivers. It runs through our own towns and fields. It encounters the wounds we actually carry, individually and together.

The Christian hope is not that those wounds are somehow rubbed out.

Illumination works differently.

The line which appears broken becomes part of a larger pattern.

The dark ink remains, but gold begins to gather around it.

And perhaps that is one of the gifts Matthew offers us. His Gospel continually points beyond the isolated moment towards the Kingdom of God: towards a pattern larger than the fragment we can presently see.

Our own lives may feel unfinished. They are unfinished. But unfinished does not mean abandoned. The hand of the Artist is still at work.

As we prepare for St Matthew’s Day, perhaps we might imagine ourselves for a moment as pages of living vellum: marked by what has happened to us, carrying places and people within us, bearing wounds as well as beauty.

And then allow this prayer to remain:

May our lives, like Celtic spirals,
Circle back to mercy’s call;
Till the Kingdom’s quiet radiance
Fills the earth and gathers all.

Angel-form with wings unfolding — the hymn text

Angel‑form with wings unfolding,
Matthew lifts the Gospel flame;
Kells’ bright pages swirl around him,
Spirals breathing out Christ’s name.
Interlacing beasts and branches
Guard the Word with watchful grace;
Fields of barley, hills of Antrim
Hold that light in every place.

2
Gold initials burst with colour,
Knots of life in woven line;
Every stroke a prayer in motion,
Every curve a sign divine.
So our hearts, like sacred vellum,
Stretch to bear the Spirit’s fire;
Christ, the Artist, writes within us
Dreams of justice, hope, desire.

3
Blessèd are the meek and mourning,
Blessèd those who seek God’s way;
Matthew’s mountain glows in pigments
Bright as dawn on Galway Bay.
On the Braid, the Barrow, Lagan,
Patterns rise where wounds have been;
Christ the Healer threads our stories,
Binding loss with love again.

4
Scribe of grace, whose ink still shimmers
Down the cent’ries’ turning page,
Guide us as we trace the Gospel
Through our land and through our age.
May our lives, like Celtic spirals,
Circle back to mercy’s call;
Till the Kingdom’s quiet radiance
Fills the earth and gathers all.

Hymn information

First line: Angel-form with wings unfolding
Text: Michael McFarland Campbell
Metre: DCM
Tune: Manor House
Theme: St Matthew’s Day, 21 September, The Book of Kells
NDH-0303

© Michael McFarland Campbell. 2026. 
Permission granted for local church or parish use with attribution. Not for commercial reproduction.