There by the banks of the Wear, Godric recounts his history, beginning with his near-death experience in the sea as a young man, and his encounter with an apparition of St. Cuthbert on the Isle of Farne.
Reginald’s delight at these innocent origins is soon dampened, however, as the old hermit remembers his subsequent career as a peddler of counterfeit relics, and his life of crime as a pirate and defrauder of pilgrims, with his partner Roger Mouse onboard the Saint Espirit.
Through pilgrimage, repentance, and struggle, Godric acquires the mantle of ‘Saint’, before finally retreating to his hermitage. There, beset by temptation and uplifted by mystical experiences, the old man discovers the bittersweet truth of the life of faith, and the numbing penitential powers of the icy waters of the river.
Godric was a finalist for the 1881 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
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Frederick Buechner, author of more than thirty works of fiction and nonfiction, is an ordained Presbyterian minister. He has been a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and was honoured by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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