Category Five

At the end of this episodic summer, the farmers have dived through a window of dry opportunity and suddenly the harvest is done. Where I walk today the fields have all been cut, but the stubble stands as proud as on the cheeks of any reality TV star, awaiting the plough.

 On the other side of the Atlantic, the Bahamas have been flattened by a Category Five hurricane, a meteorological rarity that’s becoming almost an autumn commonplace. What adds to its destructive power is that Hurricane Dorian has become stuck between two areas of high pressure, and, travelling at just one mile an hour, is expending its awesome power in the one place, like an earthly version of Jupiter’s ‘Great Red Spot’. It will probably head towards the US East Coast. Trump is so worried for his Mar-a-Lago resort that he’s cancelled foreign travel and sent deputies instead.

 After all my talk of circles in the previous post, today’s walk is a game of two straight, there-and-back halves, visiting places in the diocese that have become hard to reach because of geography or my poor planning.

 On a brisk, fresh day with autumn in the air, the sky Canaletto bright, I leave the car in the lane which is all that there is of the hamlet of Pilton, and head out on a hay-strewn, bone-dry path towards Stoke Doyle.  The path appears to be heading directly for Stoke’s little Georgian church, before it veers away through pasture to join the road. From a mile’s distance there’s an odd trompe d’oeil where a modern barn in the foreground seems to form the church’s nave beside the real tower. Once on the Oundle road, I pass the beautifully restored Mill House, a field of shorn alpacas and the Shuckburgh Arms (closed on Mondays!) and turn right down the lane to St. Rumbald’s.

 In a faint echo of the Brexit debate, you have a choice of belief in respect of the church’s dedication. First: the English candidate. It’s true that the county seems to have been a cult centre for the veneration of ‘Rumwold’ who in this diocese may be encountered variously in Strixton, near Wollaston, where the little chapel is dedicated to him, and in King’s Sutton where the saint was buried. Are you sitting comfortably? Rumwold was the miraculously gifted child of Ealhfrith and Cyneburh. Ealhfrith was the son of Oswiu, King of Northumbria at roughly the time of the Synod of Whitby (A.D. 664). Cyneburh was daughter of Penda, the Mercian King, so this was an important diplomatic marriage in the centuries before England finally began to coalesce under Alfred. The story goes that Cyneburh converted Ealhfrith, holding herself pure until he became Christian. When he said yes, so did she. Alas, Rumwold survived just three days before his death, but that was enough for him too to profess his faith as a Christian and preach a sermon. The Venerable Bede hints that the missionary St. Wilfrid spread his cult as he travelled. It was a time of miracles and marvels. Politics and religion coincided. A feast used to be celebrated in Stoke Doyle for Rumwold/Rumbald on the Sunday after All Saints Day.

Second: the international version. St. Rumbold was an Irish or Scottish evangelist, commissioned in Rome, who during the Dark Ages spread the Gospel in what is now Belgium until he was murdered by two men whom he told off for financial malpractice. The Cathedral in Mechelen is dedicated to him, and his relics are deposited there. If you want to celebrate him June 24th is the day. In a local postscript, to this day there’s a family in our parish by the name of ‘Rumbold’.

The interior of Stoke Doyle’s church is delightfully plain, dignified and unfussy. The current church replaced its dilapidated Gothic predecessor in 1727, showing a determination to do something new and different. The Georgian fashion was for clear windows, letting light into the mysteries of religion, celebrating God’s lordship over the natural; science and faith as one. It holds one important treasure in the side chapel, now a vestry. The son of Sir Edward Ward, one time ‘Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer’ ( a posh judge) lived in the local Manor House after his father, and financed St. Rumbald’s rebuilding. The price he exacted was to have his father’s noble form rendered in marble by a brilliant young Flemish sculptor, Jan Michiel Rijsbrack, who was later responsible for the tomb of Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey.  It is a lovely thing - even I who have little feeling for sculpture can see that – but I find it difficult to read. Is the noble Baron on his death bed? Or, a la Stanley Spencer, is he caught in the act of resurrection? Or is his attitude simply one of a habitual, careless disposition of justice from his couch? It is at any rate, a touching testament of a son’s love for his dad, accompanied by a lengthy inscribed tribute.

 

I’m lurking just inside the church door when in come Liz and her niece Sophie bearing flowers, and I unwittingly make them jump. Liz is in charge of Stoke Doyle’s contribution to the diocesan ‘Ride and Stride’ which will happen in a fortnight’s time. This excellent annual event raises money by sponsorship to be split between Historic Churches and local needs. When I tell Liz I’m from Weston Favell, she asks me if I know John White, and of course I do. He and Jane are stalwarts of our congregation, and for many years co-ordinated St. Peter’s part in ‘Ride and Stride’. Liz observes that St. Rumbald’s has a good acoustic, and it’s true. Sound waves can bounce off all sides of the little Georgian box: it would be a good place to come and sing Evensong one day. A pretty little organ too.

Just as time moves more swiftly the older one gets, so a return journey seems to pass more quickly, a sort of instant habituation to a landscape such that the brain bothers to take in less, or maybe is still struggling to process the information recently absorbed.

                                                              Gretton Baptist Church

Back at the car, I look at the map, and work out the quickest route by road to the second Walk Of The Day which will take me from Rockingham to Gretton and back. It takes a surprisingly long time to navigate Corby’s peripherique and the afternoon’s well started by the time I park outside the pub at the foot of Rockingham’s hill.

 There’s a famous hymn tune named Rockingham, and we sang it at Evensong last night, though not to the words with which it’s most closely associated:  ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’. The composer is Edward Miller but I’d not previously noticed the slight equivocation in its attribution. Although some books suggest he wrote the tune, in A&M it says merely that he adapted it. But from what? And if so, who was the original composer?  It betrays no great signs of being traditional, although I suppose if I close my eyes and stick a finger in my ear, I can just about imagine a demotic version. Beethoven and Schubert were adept at ripping off folk melodies and taking them up-market, so why not E. Miller? He was a Yorkshireman but ended his days at Wheatley in Oxfordshire, not so very far away, so I’m making the assumption that he was thinking of this Rockingham, so attractively situated underneath the castle above the Welland valley, and not another somewhere in the Ridings.

 Yesterday we sang it to ‘My God, and is thy table spread’. David the Rector remarked that it felt all wrong, and that’s an opinion with which I reluctantly agree. Doddridge’s words are well meant, but somehow too anodyne for a tune we’re used to rendering with contrasting dynamics – double piano for ‘See from his head, his hands, his feet…’, double forte for ‘Were the whole realm of nature mine…’ My retort was that Doddridge to Rockingham was a thoroughly Northamptonshire experience.

Philip Doddridge was a remarkable man. He was caught up in the fervour of Revival inspired by Wesley and others, but had his own particular take on the matter. Was there any ‘side’ when Wesley described him as ‘the late, pious and learned Doctor Doddridge’? He was orphaned by the time he was in his early teens, but even then his education and upbringing outside the Anglican mainstream was leading him towards a ministry of challenge which he informed by attending a ‘Dissenting Academy’ in Kibworth. In time he formed his own Academy in Daventry, and as Doddridge’s fame grew, this mini-university migrated to Northampton. It’s said that his hymns (numbering in the hundreds) were developed to illustrate the sermons he preached. The Doddridge Memorial United Reformed Church is still a part of modern Northampton. Perhaps his most famous lyric is the Advent hymn: ‘Hark the glad sound, the Saviour comes…’ and a majority of Anglican congregations probably sing it each year, the rebel returning home. William Wilberforce and Joseph Priestley both owe something to his influence.

The path to Gretton is a joy. Underfoot there’s a bit of everything, grassy tracks, stony paths, a passage through a recently cut field where treading through the hay gives the sensation of a walk through freshly fallen snow. After I pass under the railway line going north from Corby (mostly freight, single track, unelectrified) there’s a steep climb up the scarp which gives the Jurassic Way its name, and then there I am in the handsome town/village of Gretton. There is the Baptist church, resolutely, defiantly, proclaiming its identity as a ‘House of God’ by its low square architecture. There is Lydia’s coffee shop, where I have a mug of Americano and a piece of Victoria Sandwich. And here is St. James’ generous, open church with its amusingly wonky east window, an adapted-catholic ambience with a little chapel space for private devotion, candles, crucifixes, a tree of remembrance.

 

 

The clouds are gathering as I return to Rockingham along the valley, a few barely discernible flecks of moisture wafted on the lively breeze. I haven’t written a great deal about the British political backdrop to my Walk over the last three years, since remarking in June 2016 that we were entering a tunnel of uncertain outcome: it’s not the purpose of this project.  But now we are in our own Category Five. As this week we enter this first stage of what we must now assume to be Britain’s divorce from Europe, whatever that means, I think I see a necessary adjustment coming for members of the Church of England…perhaps for all Christians living in the UK, or at least that rump of the UK that will remain when the hurricane has passed. As a Church we’ve gradually become used (over hundreds of years) to a particular relationship with our state and a negotiated, compromise notion of democracy (How should a Christian feel about democracy?) But if a faithless, humanist State continues to co-opt us as a Church to endorse a changed view of how society should be governed, either populist or non-democratic, what then? Consider the roles the Catholic Church played in Poland under Communist rule, for a while merely the province of old people, then resurgent after 1989, now accommodating to liberalism. Or think of the challenge the Anglican Church made to South African apartheid during the sixties, seventies and eighties? Who are we? Where should the Church sit in a society which doesn’t accept our values, either at ground level, or in its government – by any major political party?  Are we in the tent, or outside?

 

Birds on the wire: 
(Pilton to Stoke Doyle and back)  5 km. 1.5 hrs. 20 deg. C. Six stiles. Eight gates. 2 bridges. 

 (Rockingham to Gretton and back) 10km. 3 hrs. 4 stiles. Twenty gates. Eight bridges. Two churches: both open.

 Kites hunting. Squirrels snuffling. Wagtails wiggling.

Lord

Little and Large…

If we are a remnant
How should I think of that?
Are we a ragged thing
A popped balloon
A fragment
Of something that was once
Beautiful and beloved?

Or are we torch-bearers

Guarding a flame
Heroic
And the stuff of future legends?

Being me

Half empty, not half full
I see the downsides of both.
Either
(Or so I think)
We shall be demoralised
Or hubristic.

Teach us good Lord

To be the leaven
In a doughy world
So that we all rise
In Glory
To celebrate You
As we should
For all eternity.
Amen.

                                    One man and his dog: detail from old map: Stoke Doyle