I AM a great admirer of the decorative motif sometimes known simply as interlacing, but, more usually, and more poetically, as Celtic knotwork. You see it supremely in the intricate carpet pages and borders of the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels: the one, an Irish treasure, probably created on the Scottish island of Iona, and the other, the fruit of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, and representing a miraculous fusion of the Celtic and English cultures, all the more miraculous because these peoples had once been at war with each other.

Why is this interlacing motif so attractive? What does it mean? Seen up close, the interlacings and intercrossings are so intricate — one might even say, intimate — that they speak of our own deep-woven interconnectedness; yet they almost threaten to lose us in a maze from which we will never emerge.

But, change perspective a little, zoom out, as it were, and suddenly the whole apparent tangle gives rise to a beautiful overarching pattern, a lucid image, often an image of the radiant cross of Christ.

And so it is, of course, in the teasing interlacing, sometimes maze-like puzzle of our tangled — or, as the quantum physicists say, our entangled — lives. It is so hard, at the micro level, even to follow one thread, let alone to perceive the pattern, the bigger picture. But the pattern is still there, and, on a retreat, in a moment of prayer, we suddenly see it, and the interlacings of our own lives with the lives of others all add up to, all contribute to, something beautiful and full of redemptive meaning.

While we were on Lindisfarne this week, I bought something that was quite literally “Celtic knotwork”, or interlacing. It is a beautiful cross made from a single piece of brown rope, doubled, interlaced, intercrossed, losing and finding itself until, in the end, as at the beginning, the end and the beginning meet.

I intend to take this cross with me from Lindisfarne to Iona, retracing an end back to its beginning; for it was from Iona that St Aidan, the founder of the monastery on Lindisfarne, came: an Irish bishop called to share the gospel with the English by St Oswald, an English king who had himself come to faith on Iona. Lindisfarne became the spiritual heart of Northumbria’s golden age; it was the community that formed and was formed by St Cuthbert, and whose glory was recorded by Bede, a glory that allows this little patch of the north-east to be called “The cradle of English Christianity”, but then, even cradles were woven of plaited rushes.

We are staying in Bamburgh, originally St Oswald’s royal keep. The parish church, founded by St Aidan, and where he died, has a remarkable reredos, which expresses another aspect of divine interlacing, divine knotwork. As the church’s explanatory card says, it celebrates “people whose interconnected lives over a single century marked the flowering of Christianity in the north and beyond”. The reredos bears the images of 16 saints, from Paulinus, Aidan, and Oswald to Hilda, Cuthbert, and Bede, all of whom were part of a pattern — not so much a one-line apostolic succession as a complex criss-crossing of meeting and influence, whereby we and our ancestors came to Christ.