The Pastoral Wisdom of Brother Cadfael

What Ellis Peters’ medieval monk can teach clergy today

When I was teaching pastoral studies in theological colleges, I made my ordinands read the classics: Gregory the Great on the pastoral office, John Mirk on the duties of a parish priest, George Herbert’s country parson — an entirely worthy canon. But the books I really wanted to assign them to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest were the Brother Cadfael mysteries of Ellis Peters. Frankly, I think you can learn most of what you need to know about being a good pastor from them.

Cadfael, as many readers will know, is a Benedictine monk at Shrewsbury Abbey in the twelfth century, living through the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Maud, when it was said that “Christ and his saints slept.” Before entering the monastery, he was a Crusader, a sailor, and a lover. He came to monastic life late. He cultivates medicinal herbs. And he solves murders. Many people know him now through Derek Jacobi’s splendid television portrayal.

The mysteries are delightful in their own right. But that’s not why I wished my students would read them. Over the years I’ve come to suspect that Cadfael has taught me at least as much about the care of souls than a fair number of books on ministry that take themselves much more seriously.

1. He’s present without making a performance of it

The herb garden is where everything begins.

Cadfael is nearly always there: trimming, drying, grinding, tending. People drift in like nervous novices, frightened young women, men carrying burdens they can’t face. Cadfael doesn’t spring into action. He doesn’t arrange his face into an expression of pastoral concern. He keeps working.

And somehow, because he keeps working, people start talking. Often he gives them something to do. Hold this. Sort those leaves. Help me with this root. The task itself becomes a form of hospitality.

I sometimes think we’ve persuaded ourselves that pastoral care begins when we consciously switch into pastoral mode. Cadfael is rarely like that. Instead, people find him going about his business. His pastoral care begins with being somewhere, and being there often enough that people learn they can find him. He inhabits a place. People know where he is and that, no matter how busy he is, he’ll listen.

There’s a difference between availability and presence. Availability implies waiting around to be needed. Presence means being somewhere in particular, engaged in something worthwhile, in a way that’s reliable enough that others can approach when they’re ready.

Any priest who’s had their most important conversations while stacking chairs or washing up after a parish lunch already understands this truth.

2. He helps people grow without turning them into projects

One of the occupational hazards of ministry, at least in my experience, is the temptation to manage people. You notice potential. You formulate a plan. You begin nudging. Before long, another human being has become your improvement scheme. Cadfael never falls into this trap, and it’s worth asking why — because the answer, I think, is growing in his garden every day.

A herbalist knows you can’t hurry a plant or improve it by anxious intervention. What you can do is prepare good soil, remove what’s choking it, ensure it has what it needs, and then — this is the hard part — leave it alone. The gardener’s job is to create the conditions, not manage the outcome. Cadfael brings exactly this patience to people.

Consider Brother Mark, who arrives in the herb garden at eighteen, uncertain of himself and his future. Cadfael sees capacities in him long before Mark sees them himself, but doesn’t launch a development programme or refer him to the director of vocations. He works beside him, trusts him, gives him responsibilities that stretch him without breaking him. When Mark eventually leaves to serve at the leper hospital of St Giles and pursue priestly formation, Cadfael describes him as “my right hand and a piece of my heart.” He didn’t manufacture Mark’s vocation. He cultivated it.

Then there’s Avice of Thornbury, who arrives as a postulant in The Leper of Saint Giles with a past Brother Jerome would have found richly disqualifying — she’s been, for many years, the mistress of a wealthy lord. Cadfael looks at her and sees something Jerome would never have thought to look for: formidable ability, good sense, and keen observation. He reflects, with characteristic dryness, that with her energy and gifts she’ll probably end up an abbess. She reappears in later books as Sister Magdalen, thoroughly and authentically herself, a figure of genuine authority in her community. He didn’t improve her. He simply saw her accurately, which turned out to be enough.

And his pastoral wisdom bears fruit in turn. In The Rose Rent, the now Sister Magdalen dissuades Judith — a widow contemplating the religious life largely to escape unwanted suitors — from taking the veil for the wrong reasons. A vocation, she tells her, should be a movement towards something, not a flight from something. It’s the most precise kind of spiritual direction: neither discouraging nor endorsing, but insisting on self-honesty. She doesn’t tell Judith what to do. She simply refuses to let her deceive herself about why she’s doing it.

It’s hard not to see Cadfael’s influence at work here. The same woman whose gifts he recognised beneath an unfashionable history now offers that same attentive clarity to someone else. She doesn’t manage Judith’s future any more than Cadfael managed hers. She simply helps her see clearly. The gardener’s patience has been woven into her own. That distinction — between the pastor who manages and the pastor who clarifies — is, I think, at the heart of pastoral ministry.

3. He sees clearly, and loves what he sees clearly

The Cadfael mysteries often turn on a moment when the tidy, convenient account that everyone with authority has already accepted turns out to be wrong. Cadfael doesn’t resist these accounts because he’s suspicious of institutions. He resists them because he keeps looking at what’s actually there rather than what he’s been told to expect.

Think of Brother Meriet in The Devil’s Novice. He arrives as a novice and is quickly written off as disturbed, perhaps even possessed: violent nightmares, an assault on Brother Jerome, and a murder nearby that needs a culprit. Jerome, with his unerring gift for arriving at the worst possible conclusion, is ready to condemn him. So is everyone else. Cadfael isn’t. He keeps looking. What he eventually discovers isn’t malice but sacrifice. Meriet has hidden himself in the monastery to protect someone he loves. His turmoil is not the symptom of guilt but the cost of loyalty.

People in our churches arrive pre-labelled — by their families, by their reputations, by the stories they tell about themselves and the stories others tell about them. Congregations do it. If I’m honest, clergy do it too. The lazy thing is to accept the label rather than see the face. Cadfael looks at people with the same attention he gives to a plant that might be medicinal or poisonous. He keeps looking until he understands what he’s looking at.

But seeing clearly is only half the task. The harder question is what you do once you’ve seen.

There’s a kind of pastoral sentimentality that imagines care consists in refusing to judge. Cadfael has no interest in that. His gift is not that he sees only the good in people. It’s that he sees the whole person and remains capable of love.

Consider Liliwin in The Sanctuary Sparrow, a wandering juggler accused of robbery and assault, the least credible person in Shrewsbury by every social measure. Cadfael is prepared to believe him because what he observes doesn't fit the picture everyone else has accepted. During his sanctuary at the abbey, Liliwin and Rannilt, a serving maid, fall in love and behave with rather less regard for ecclesiastical propriety than Brother Jerome would have preferred. Cadfael notices. He simply understands what he’s looking at: two frightened young people reaching for affection in difficult circumstances. He doesn’t panic, moralise, or mistake human frailty for a capital crime.

Yet he doesn’t flinch from evil either. In The Raven in the Foregate, Father Ailnoth arrives with impeccable credentials and a reputation for holiness, but proves disastrous as a pastor. He can identify sin but has no idea how to care for sinners. He mistakes the enforcement of order for the cure of souls.

Cadfael sees what others miss. Ailnoth moves through the parish hunting out faults and assigning punishments, but seems incapable of distinguishing between wilfulness and weakness, rebellion and vulnerability. Most devastatingly, he refuses absolution to Eluned, a young woman of limited understanding who comes to him in genuine penitence after being exploited by a local man. Unable to bear the burden he places on her, she later drowns herself. Again and again, Ailnoth treats human beings as cases rather than people.

What makes Ailnoth so instructive is that he isn’t a villain. He is sincere, devout, and by every institutional measure entirely qualified. His failure is pastoral rather than moral. He knows how to condemn sin; he doesn’t know how to accompany a sinner. Cadfael sees the distinction immediately, because he has spent a lifetime learning to look at the person.

This is what the tradition calls discernment: the ability to see both the image of God in a person and the reality of harm in what he or she has done. It’s harder than either softness or severity because it requires truthfulness and love at the same time. Cadfael stands in that tension without finding it unbearable. He can therefore name wrongdoing honestly without reducing people to it.

4. He doesn’t spend his life bellyaching

Shrewsbury Abbey has its share of institutional problems, and Cadfael’s under no illusions about them. Prior Robert is vain, politically calculating, and reliably wrong about people. Brother Jerome is officious, self-righteous, and constitutionally incapable of mercy. The structures of the monastery are imperfect, sometimes obstructive, occasionally unjust. Cadfael sees all this clearly. What he doesn’t do is spend his energy trying to reform it, still less grumbling about it to his brothers.

This may be the Cadfael lesson I find myself needing most often. We live in an age of institutional disillusionment. Many people can catalogue every flaw in their church, government, or workplace. Often they’re entirely correct.

Cadfael, infuriatingly, simply gets on with things. When the institution fails, he acts, decisively but without fanfare, to put things right as far as he can. He protects the vulnerable. He uncovers the truth. He remedies what’s immediately before him. Then he returns to his garden.

He doesn’t waste his time and energy on things he cannot fix.

He cares deeply about justice. But he has grasped something that most of us find hard to learn: that chronic complaining isn’t the same as fidelity, that grumbling in the cloister changes nothing, and that the energy spent cataloguing the organisation’s deficiencies is energy not spent on the person in real need.

Cadfael’s focus remains stubbornly local and concrete. The person in front of him matters more than the organisational pathology around him. That’s not passivity. It’s pastoral discipline.

A brief word about herbs

I said earlier that I’m not suggesting clergy become herbalists like Cadfael. On reflection, I’m not entirely sure that’s true. The person who knows what’s good for what, who can offer the right thing in the right amount, who doesn’t make a fuss and doesn’t pass judgment, and can be reliably found pottering around his or her garden, is already practising a form of pastoral care.

Ellis Peters, whose real name was Edith Pargeter, was a writer of uncommon wisdom. I’ve come to think she knew exactly what she was doing when she put her kindly monk in a herb garden in twelfth-century Shropshire and had people keep wandering in with their troubles. We may never face situations like those Cadfael confronts (and, frankly, rural ministry involves much less sleuthing than the literature suggests), but we’ll often meet the same people.

Most of the care I’ve received in life certainly hasn’t arrived with fanfare. It has usually come from people who had established a steady presence in a community long before I needed them: people who knew what they were about, who were getting on with the work in front of them, and whose door was open when the moment came. Care of that kind isn’t improvised. It grows. It takes root. It’s cultivated over years. And it’s offered without fuss.

May we all tend something so faithfully.