This pilgrimage starts from home -literally by walking out of our front door, but then properly from our beloved St. Peter's just four hundred steps away through Weston Favell village. It's been our spiritual home for at least thirty years since two year old Matt expressed interest in the church crèche, but for nearly a decade before that we'd been occasional worshippers, taking an antidote to less comforting ecclesiastical surroundings.
It remains a comfortable place, with a history that intrigues. It was briefly significant in the 18th century because of James Hervey. Hervey's Cottage still stands to the south-west of the church. He moved there briefly while the next-door Rectory was being refurbished. Like all homes, this one has seen its share of turbulence over the years. There've been times of life-affirming joy and times of profound sadness even in the arc of our own Weston Favell experience. Home inevitably means differences of opinion, sometimes sharp and deeply felt. It entails accommodation to the needs of others too. We see this objectively in our church international. We feel it in our guts at the local level. Sometimes homes break up when the differences become irreconcilable. We hope and pray it will never happen to us. We apply willpower and seek God's grace to try to ensure it doesn't.
The traveller traditionally sets out from home with a spring in her step (Laurie Lee on a midsummer morning!) savouring the freshness of the morning air, relishing the excitement of a journey into the unknown, even if that 'unknown' is relatively safe, as one assumes rural Northamptonshire to be. That said, on a solo country walk a couple of years ago in deepest Hertfordshire, I stepped ( I thought about saying 'bounded', but that would be a gross exaggeration!) over a stile and put one boot straight down a deep rabbit hole on the far side. In a moment I realised how close I'd come to breaking an ankle in a place where rescue would have been irksome and awkward.
These days, it's hard to start a walk without thinking of those who make quite different journeys on foot, seeking safety and refuge from a home or country where life has become intolerable or threatened. I don't know what we can or should do about this: the internet has changed the rules in terms of policy towards displaced people as it has about much else. These despairing millions cast a pall of obscuring smoke across my own walk. One thing we know: by the time I fetch up in Peterborough, if I ever do, new streams of refugees will still be loading their most valued portables into bags, carts and pick-ups and heading off into an uncertain future with a heavy heart.
St. Peter and his keys: interior: Church of St. Peter: Weston Favell
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