I WAS in Durham last week, and took the opportunity to revisit the cathedral. I love this great fortress of a church. I have preached there twice, and, in 2016, presented a Christmas broadcast with the choir. On this occasion, after paying my respects to St Cuthbert and the Miners’ Memorial, I visited my favourite spot: the tomb of Bede in the Galilee chapel at the west end.

In his Ecclesiastical History, Bede wrote of “the English” for the first time. The Roman monk Gregory was apparently so charmed by the appearance of a group of fair-haired young captives from Britain in the slave market that he said that, as they already looked like angels, they should become joint heirs with the angels in heaven. This is the origin of the story of Gregory’s producing the pun “Non Angli sed Angeli” (“Not Angles but Angels” — or, as 1066 and All That wickedly parodied it, “Not Angels but Anglicans”). Whatever the origins of the story, it was Gregory, as Pope, who sent Augustine to convert this British tribe to Christianity.

For Bede, the conversion of the English, by Augustine in the south and then by Aidan and Cuthbert, was an act of divine providence. In the dark and often violent world that he described, the gospel of Jesus Christ was our only certainty. His ultimate hope is beautifully expressed in a carved quotation from his Apocalypse above his tomb, which was installed in 1970: “Christ is the Morning Star who when the night of this world is past brings to his saints the promise of the light of life and opens everlasting day.”

In preparation for ordination, I spent two terms at Cranmer Hall, in Durham. I loved my brief time there, arriving in January to a winter much darker than I was used to in the south. I was grateful for the brilliance of the changing light around the cathedral from morning to evening. I had a placement at the psychiatric hospital, and met men and women whose lives had been shattered by the unemployment that came with the closures of the mines.

I have returned home, wondering whether the great cathedral stands for a different kind of “Englishness”, and even a different sort of Christianity from that of the south: a Christianity based on communal solidarity, the acceptance and endurance of suffering, and an instinctiveness kindness that is not always so marked south of the Humber.

Since 2000, next to Bede’s tomb, you can see Josef Pyrz’s carving Annunciation 2, which depicts a Mary with an African face and a body ridged as with the angels’ wings, a perfect balance of tension and serenity. For those who are all too wearied by the changes and chances of this fleeting world, Durham Cathedral remains a sign and symbol of Christian resilience.