The Circle Game

                                                         A straight interlude: Barnwell

Circles are mysterious, paradoxical, elusive in their perfect ideal self, ubiquitous, even a little sinister. You don’t think so? Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game is such a sad, sad, knowing song for a (way back then) woman barely out of her teens. We’re captive on a carousel of time. Childhood will never come back. Even if we believe in reincarnation, she hints, everything is forgetting, as we go round and round in the Circle Game. Mark Gertler’s 1916 painting The Merry Go Round is for me an uber-powerful artistic statement, an inspiration (perhaps!) for Littlewood’s Oh What A Lovely War. Even Pooh and Piglet, walking in the snow, are in their world of anguished circle bemusement. The Woozles - which might be ‘hostile animals’ - are in reality only themselves. They’re being misled by their own footsteps as they circle the Hundred Acre Wood.

 If you identify as a Christian, do you identify with this too…that our life is wholly caught up in the unending hoops of our own inadequacy?  The sin that we would not…that’s what we do, over and over again by the day, the week, even from one minute to another. We so want to be better, but whoops, here we are, back where we started. Again.  And our understanding that this is so, and our belief in redemption from this unfortunate situation, defines us in contrast to those who identify as non-Christian. The ancient Greeks knew and wrote in Tragedy about the recapitulation of violence from one generation to another, but they had no solution, except a pious hope that man might learn by suffering.

 I guess that’s the appeal of exploring the labyrinth – though corn mazes seem to have gone out of fashion. We make our salvation-frustration a little more concrete by entering.

 

I’m Vince Cross and I’m walking to every Anglican church in the Diocese of Peterborough from my home church in Weston Favell, by a Rule which says every walk should strive to be circular, and each successive walk should touch the circumference of a previous one. I’m more than three years into the project, and after eight-seven walks and about a thousand miles, I’m more than two-thirds of the way to my finishing point at the Cathedral. You can read about what's happened so far in this blog. The incumbent of each parish I visit gets a card through the post to say I’ve been, and that I’ve prayed for them and the people who live there. Here are the routes of my more recent days out…

 Walk 77:         Wilbarston – Pipewell – Cottingham – East Carlton – Wilbarston.  16.5 km.

 Walk 78:         Kentish interlude.

 Walk 79:         Geddington – Brigstock – Stanion – Geddington.  18 km.

 Walk 80:         Brigstock – Sudborough – Wadenhoe – Lyveden – Brigstock. 19 km.

 Walk 81:         Brigstock – Weldon – Benefield – Brigstock.  24 km.

 Walk 82:         Great Oakley – Corby St. John’s – Corby town centre – Corby St. Columba –
                          Corby SS Peter and Andrew – Great Oakley. 15.5 km.

 Walk 83:         Cottingham – Rockingham – Caldecott – Great Easton – Bringhurst - Cottingham.    

                          14.5 km.  Weston under Welland.  2.25 km.

 Walk 84:         Titchmarsh – Clopton – Barnwell All Saints – Barnwell St. Andrew – Pilton – Achurch – Titchmarsh. 24.5 km.

 Walk 85:         Barnwell – Thurning – Luddington – Hemington – Polebrook – Barnwell. 19.5 km.

 Walk 86:         Polebrook – Lutton – Warmington – Ashton – Polebrook. 17.5 km.  

 Walk 87:         Ashton – Tansor – Cotterstock – Glapthorn – Oundle – Ashton. 15 km. 

 

Maybe physics has yet more to teach us about the circle.

And may God give us all his peace and sense of satisfied completion as we near the end of our
earthly Walk. Amen.