Better in Colour

Teigh is one of the ‘Thankful Villages’ identified by the writer Arthur Mee after the Great War. They lost no one who went to fight. There’s a memorial to those lucky men near the church. Teigh wasn’t a big place even then, and is smaller now, but even so, there were only fifty-two other villages in England and Wales who shared their good fortune. In Northamptonshire the only other examples are East Carlton and Woodend, also both tiny.

I leave the car by Holy Trinity and walk up the road to Edmondthorpe. To my great joy I find the church of St. Michael’s open: it’s in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. Almost disbelievingly I move the door on its hinges and thank God out loud that I can step into a place of worship for the first time after four and a half months and bless the few people who live in the village. True, there’s red and white tape to stop me getting into the chancel, but that’s because damage was done during a winter storm: it’s still drying out. I wander around, looking at the graceful three-tiered monument to Sir Roger Smith and his family, wondering at its dating of 1655 – but maybe this was a remote place back then, and perhaps such elaborations went unremarked by Cromwell’s zealots. I look up at the armorial by the south door, which carries the legend ‘Resurgam’ (‘I will rise’), and allow myself some hope for the Church’s future.

 

St. Michael's Edmondthorpe

Any pilgrimage is unpredictable. You might find faith, or lose it. You may end up reaching the destination you imagined, or blisters may require an entirely different one. In 2016 I started with the premise that for Anglicans as with Britain we’d be ‘Better Together’, and I still think that’s true and advisable, but here we are four years on, and for me the emphasis is changing a little. To that original strapline I now add ‘Better in Colour’.

One can sense an argument brewing. There will be those who say with some justification that the heart of the Christian faith is the Word. Nothing else matters. If we can read the Bible, and pray, and be preached to, what more do we need? The new situation is a good thing: it’s taking us ‘back to basics’, isn’t it?

But by its nature prayer’s hard work for most of us, and the more inwardly focused and individual, the harder it is. Scripture is puzzling, and apparently contradictory: we all pick on the bits we like, and gloss the rest. And preaching is arguably an anachronistic medium, and there are few good exponents, and far fewer than many preachers think there are.

So the obvious solution now is to go – and remain - online, isn’t it?  Except that making good television is an art, and as I’ve said before, even to make brilliant lo-fi telly takes exceptional talent and a good eye, and a lot of on-line ‘influencers’ are just sad. Who wants to look up someone else’s nostrils as they mutter platitudes about faith or anything else?  Newcomer enthusiasts including Christians can be tempted to think that while the professionals wear nice clothes and make-up, they can get away with a scruffy jumper, old jeans, and a five o’clock shadow for their televisual input.  Any recorded medium shows up inadequacies which aren’t so obvious live. For example, the technology is there for musical artists to tour by YouTube. Simply hire a studio, target a particular town, and charge for the virtual experience. But it’ll only work if you can really  play or really sing, because your faults are going to show horribly in such an exposed environment. Goodness knows, not all Glastonbury ‘highlights’ of yesteryear stand up to scrutiny when re-shown.

We Anglicans are in danger of returning to a grey, controlled and controlling Calvinism, nothing to engage the senses, no art, no music, no humour, no participative liturgy, no eucharist, no feel for the beauty of language, no church building, no appropriate dress, because only ‘truth’ matters, and in the minds of some, no lens other than their own and certainly no metaphor, can convey that truth.

So, here’s my new pitch. God gave us so many marvellous gifts and talents, and Jesus spoke of life in abundance, so for me, not to use everything at our disposal to praise God, and to attempt to understand what we’re supposed to be doing down here on Earth, is missing the point. Just because we’re struggling to find ways to express our faith and love at the moment, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to slip into contempt for what we did before, or allow room for the insidious suggestion that the use of beautiful music or art as aids to worship was really just idolatry. These things can become so, but just because there’s a statue of the Virgin in your church, it doesn’t mean the congregation has taken its eyes off Jesus and is worshipping the statue instead. Not even Luther thought that, though Zwingli might have done.

The conversation should be about possibility and creativity, and not about technologically up to date ways of being dull.

Black and white photography was once all there was, and it did the job, sometimes brilliantly, until colour came along. Now there’s a choice, and if people with a great eye sometimes use b&w they do it for a reason or an effect, not because they have to. There’s nothing innately virtuous about the one thing rather than the other.

And let’s not kid ourselves that the new media may protect us from heresy, or somehow reset the dials on a faith that was in danger of going off the rails up until last New Year. American experience with faith mediated through television should alert us to the fact that exactly the opposite is true. The world on-line is wild and often wicked. Cultishness breeds there, and those viruses are no easier to eradicate than Covid. It is also by its nature excluding ( ‘I like my music…’: ‘See it your way’), whereas Anglicans and indeed all Christians are called to be inclusive and to draw attention to the universal. The medium is indeed the message, and so we have to learn to subvert the medium, or even avoid it, if it’s becoming counter-productive. Each parish has to find its own ways of maintaining its faith in the fresh air, while keeping a foot in the TV studio. Don’t let them tell you you’re a Luddite or a technophobe, Pike. It’s about asking the question: ‘What’s the appropriate technology here?’

I move on over the fields and further up the road to Wymondham, and I’m in Leicestershire now, but Rutland manners persist. At the little crossroads, the Rutland Flyer bus gives way to a family group of horse-riders who walk on over to the bridleway in stately fashion. Polite waves and declinations of the head all round. I follow the lane round to St. Peter’s church past a single pretty cow and its even more winsome (week old?) calf. As I sit in the porch I think with love and regret of a past Rector of our own church whose family life became complicated and was brought to the salivating attention of the national press, who then vastly compounded the distress and damage. As he moved away, there was a vacancy in the parish, the first of three I’ve lived through. They can be times of growth or enfeeblement, and the current environment will make life difficult for good decision-making and process.

You’d think Stilton Cheese originated in Stilton, wouldn’t you? But no, it started in Wymondham with a cheese-maker called Frances Pawlett in the eighteenth century and continued to be made here until the Second War. Frances sold her product on to a gent called Cooper Thornhill who kept an inn on the Great North Road at Stilton, and that’s how the cheese got its name. Frances became a wealthy woman from her endeavours.

I wander back to the other end of Edmondthorpe, beyond the Hall, and pick up a long south-easterly trending path which has the tower of SS Peter & Paul in Market Overton in its sights. From the name of the village I know it will be sizeable, or else it wouldn’t have had a market, and that it’ll be atop a hill (or it wouldn’t be ‘Over’).

If your search engine is anything like mine, it’ll show Market Overton’s  Free Church as the first reference if you put in the village name plus ‘church’. How do we feel about competition between churches? Jean Reid was a good colleague when I helped run a recording studio as part of a conglomerate of small media businesses. She once said to me (I was in a worried frame of mind…) that there was enough business to go round. All that was necessary was to do a good job, and the order books would look after themselves. I’ve returned to that advice frequently over the subsequent thirty-five years, but I still question how it looks to the wider world. Is it simply what the public expects – that there should be a plethora of churches to choose from? Or does it undermine our claims? In visiting Rock Hill in South Carolina a few years ago, I remember arriving at the Episcopal church early on a Sunday morning, to hear the worship band in the black Pentecostal church across the road thundering away. It felt competitive, but of course it also represented a societal racial divide with long historical roots in the South. There was ‘choice’, strictly speaking, but there was also peer group and community pressure.

 

Where?

I make two diversions. The first is a slog up a busy road to Thistleton, whose settlement is rather isolated as far as paths and tracks are concerned because of the sizeable gorilla presence of RAF Cottesmore. The church of St. Nicholas is swathed in scaffolding. I sit on a wall next to its stiffly constructed apse and ponder. The line of the road to the south, which actually is bisected by the one-time airfield, and its OS naming to the north as ‘Fosse Lane’ makes me think the Romans woz ‘ere. I pick up Fosse Lane heading for the ‘Thistleton Gap’ which pretty much marks the boundary between Rutland, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire (Thistleton and Market Overton are Rutland’s most northerly settlements). In 1811 a crowd of 20,000 turned up at the Thistleton Gap to see the national heavyweight title contested between Tom Cribb and American Tom Molineaux. According to Wikipedia the venue had the advantage of allowing the crowds to disperse quickly and easily in the event of the rozzers turning up – the fight was illegal. Cribb won.

Back in Market Overton after a long energy-sapping tramp over tufty grass along dangerously corrugated tracks – easy to break an ankle here, even with boots, I make a second deviation on my way back to Teigh via the hamlet of Barrow. You can guess how it got its name. The chapel of ease which once sat here is gone now, but it was built close to the site of the burial mound which must be there somewhere behind the farms, though I can’t see it. As always, I’m moved and comforted by the knowledge of faith’s continuity while there are people to have it. I can rant in these pages for all I’m worth, but whatever will be, will be, and doubtless those who come after us will pose the same questions we do, and will leave marks on the landscape to show their beliefs in ways similar to those we have left. Which doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to be the very best we can.

Pigs in a poke:  22 km. 6 hrs. 4 stiles. 12 gates. 7 bridges. Sun, occasional cloud, and a lively breeze.

Seen in St. Michael’s Edmondthorpe:

Defeated?

A sonnet to empty churches:

Come on. You lot have survived worse things;

Black Death, Plague and two World Wars

The Reformation (Cromwell clipped the wings

Of angels in the roof); and there are scars

On ancient faces, marble noses cropped

And poppy heads beheaded like the King;

And modern vandals too. But you’ve not stopped

Your ageless plain ability to sing

Of something quite indifferent to the now;

Built with a trusting love and potent faith

You stand there still in testament to how

Beauty is not a wafted, fleeting wraith,

A ghost which chance can whimsically destroy;

You can be filled, if not by faith, with joy.

                                    Anon.

                                    June 2020

Give us this day our daily pie...

I’m just eight miles from Melton Mowbray, which always makes me think of the BBC’s cricket correspondent and one-time England fast bowler, Jonathan Agnew, who’s always been an enthusiastic advocate for all things Leicestershire: he learnt his rather accomplished radio chops there. The town is of course most famous for its pies, which from Christmas will presumably be no longer subject to predations from European imitators. Or will it be more vulnerable?

Thatching in Langham

As I drive into Langham and park in a shady spot, I give way to a tanned, swarthy young man who’s leading a pretty grey pony up the street. While I’m booting up from the Audi’s tailgate, I hear soothing, cooing noises softly behind me, and there’s the Lawrentian lad again, pony in hand. “She’s only young,” he says, “And still a bit wary of the back of vehicles…” I say what a handsome animal the little horse is. He looks pleased. As far as I can see, his companion is perfectly calm.

I have difficulty deconstructing this. I suppose I’m thinking ‘Black Beauty’, inventing a narrative of abuse and misfortune. But I still can’t see why the rear of an Audi estate would cause difficulty, unless it’s just straightforward unfamiliarity or a dislike of the colour. Perhaps metallic blue just isn’t in the natural repertoire of a horse’s experience. As I’ve remarked before: there’s just so much one doesn’t know.

On the verge at Whissendine

I’m walking to Whissendine - an attractive name, conjuring images of a summer breeze susurrating through willows beside a dibble-dabbling brook etc. etc. To get there I walk beside arable fields onto a low airy ridge with views across to a traditional windmill, whose sails are turning in wind that’s a few notches up from susurrating. In fact the gusts are quite annoying, blowing the brim of my Goretex hat down across my eyes and spoiling the view. The Met said nothing about wind today. I guess the mill’s situated at the far end of Whissendine’s straggly settlement: the village is larger than I’d thought - over a thousand inhabitants. In Rutland terms ( ‘magnum in parvo’) that’s almost a city. At the time of writing I can’t find a derivation for the village name, but I can tell you it’s the title of a song by English ultra art-rock band Crippled Black Phoenix, the description of whose music and alumni reads like an out-take from Spinal Tap Revisited. The windmill is possibly the tallest stone windmill in the country.

Hurray!  The White Lion’s open again, so it’s Curry Nights and Quiz Evenings all round. Hurray! So’s the church, a couple of times a week. Boo! The Craft and Produce Show has had to be cancelled, but… Hurray! The bell-ringers are back in socially distanced business. And with the encouragement of Rev. Deborah, there’s going to be community bunting all over town. Whissendine sounds fun.

Off Station Road, I pick up the track which angles towards the hamlet of Teigh. Is this to be pronounced ‘Tie’ as it would be in Kent, or ‘Tea’ as in ‘Leigh on Sea (Essex)? Or even, just possibly, Tay?  A few hundred metres from Whissendine there are many lumps and bumps in the fields, including the remaining square earthworks of a sizeable moated manor house. At some gates, a fastidious homeowner requests that passing walkers disinfect the handles after closing, and then I come to a railway crossing on the diagonal just as an EWS freight train thunders through, looming above me while I wait, fingers in ears. It’s a striking feature of this particular railway line (Stamford to Oakham) that there are many unmanned ground-level crossings. I’m used to Northamptonshire ways, where such things are rare because the principal railways are high-speed and well-trafficked. The bridleway is summer-overgrown for a little while and then a path diverges through a hedge, cutting a clear swathe through a field of immature wheat towards the tower of Teigh’s church.

Holy Trinity Teigh’s past incumbents include some colourful figures. Going back to the fourteenth century, let’s consider Richard Folville, who with others of his family formed part of the ‘Folville Gang’. Depending on your point of view, the gang were either simply a bunch of murderous ruffians or Robin Hood-style vigilantes righting wrongs in a time of lawlessness and in the absence of any appropriate justice system. They were certainly participants in the endless political intrigue during Edward III’s reign, more generally against the King than on his side, and perhaps implicated in Isabella’s doomed attempt at invasion. Rev. Richard was cornered in All Saints by a King’s Peace in 1340/1 after a fight in which there’d been at least one fatality, and having been lured outside on some pretext of talks about talks or a pardon (the gang had been let off several times previously) he was summarily decapitated. As I eat my sarnies on a bench in front of a tranquil scene of perfect rurality, this gives pause for thought. Violence, like archaeology, is ubiquitous.

Then there’s the Rev. Henry Stanley Tibbs. In 1940 he was interned in Liverpool Prison because it was imaginatively alleged by a fellow-priest that he was a fascist who’d once hidden two members of the Gestapo in the rectory, and was preaching treachery to his congregation, lauding the virtues of the banished Edward VIII and the German war leadership, and decrying Churchill as a drug addict and dictator. Tibbs was part Irish, which in those fevered times might alone have encouraged suspicion among a rural community, and he was a little inclined to shoot his mouth off, but the truth seems to have been that this quirk had made enemies of some colleagues and local residents. In short, he was stitched up and although quite quickly exonerated, died in Teigh three years later, a broken man. In fairness, he did admit that he’d once been a member of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists though only because he’d favoured their agricultural policies. Under the influence of a rather toff-ish chap called Jorian Jenks (sounds like an ultra art-rock band member to me!) these included some farming ideas whose time has now come, and some which might yet be fulfilled. There was a decent dose of ecological common sense, and also the notion that Britain should be agriculturally self-sufficient. Of course, Jenks being a Balliol man, this also included a misty-eyed nostalgia for the Roman poet Virgil’s jottings about the countryside.  

The interior of Holy Trinity now is apparently much as it was in Tibbs’ day, or indeed as it was in 1782, when the current edition was built. I wish I could get in to have a look, particularly because it contains a screen rescued from St. John’s College, Cambridge, where I spent my student days. It’s getting harder to ‘feel’ this pilgrimage without access to any of the churches I visit. As with the notion of sharing a eucharist, never were Joni Mitchell’s words more sadly true: ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone…’

I’m learning a little more about prayer; that shutting my eyes and folding my hands as I was taught to do in Sunday School isn’t really the point ( ‘And it’s taken you 69 years to work that out?’ ); that there can be a ‘thin-ness’ about all personal reflection if one works at it, and that the greater puzzle is why so often the veil comes down and God is shut out from one’s various everyday processes of thought. This is perhaps one way of looking at the idea of ‘original sin’.

I pick up the pace down the twisty and busy road towards Ashwell, frequently having to step onto the verge to accommodate the passing traffic. Some cars wave a thank you, some don’t. Some peer curiously at me, as they might an ornithological rarity. Cyclists are now legion, fashionably got up, and even if they’re behaving stupidly must be honoured and humoured (the other day I saw a lone bicycle struggling with a steep incline out of Uppingham towards the village of Preston and holding back a long queue of tankers, HGVs and cars. Beside him/her was an empty footpath which could have been used). Walkers of my sort are a peculiarity. We have no snazzy clothing. There’s no macho kudos for doing what we do. We’re an anachronism: too slow and unadventurous. Strictly Old Folks.

Road-walking, though requiring vigilance, is nevertheless a time to concentrate the mind on other stuff. I think about the next TEN ON SUNDAY (please find at www.vincecross.co.uk ). It’s going to be an excursion into the fatherhood of God, mediated through various iterations of the Lord’s Prayer. I’m midway through recording a five-part version by the Tudor composer John Sheppard, and finding it very difficult – a step up from some of the more familiar Tudor music, both in required singing technique, and concept. I’d never have attempted to work my way through it, were it not for the Virus, lockdown and all the rest.

Boris promises us ‘significant normality’ by November. I have no idea what this means. There isn’t much doubt in my mind that the Virus will re-surge in the later autumn, and in any case the number of cases (though not the mortality rate, which continues to fall) has flattened out in the UK as it has everywhere else. Even that has to be qualified: the infection rate in Spain is beginning to rise again quite rapidly, in a way which would alarm me if I were there. Even if Boris means that there can be no second ‘lockdown’ because the economic consequences are unthinkable, and therefore the pubs can stay lit all winter so that people can drink themselves silly, this will not be ‘significantly normal’. The cost will be a rise in cases similar to that being experienced in the US, the NHS will be under unprecedented strain, other sick people won’t get treated, millions of shut-in seniors will either be told to, or will themselves decide not to, venture out more than absolutely necessary, and our churches will either stay shut or offer something which only faintly resembles the worship we knew a year ago. And what will be the value of that?

Loaves and fishes:  15km. 4.5 hrs. Sun and cloud. 22 deg. C.  Two stiles. Eleven gates. Five bridges.  Three churches.  Five other walkers passed. A perfectly pleasant walk, but a trifle on the dull side to be honest – too much treading tarmac.

Father in heaven

I know about endurance on the roads;

How, with miles in the feet,

And ache in the legs

The mind becomes dull

The journey about putting down a single step

And then another

And then another

And counting off the objectives

One by one

While losing sight

Of beauty

Or lovely incident.

We are all tired now

Of enduring this trial

Grant us the gift

Of minds alert

To praise you

To rejoice

To celebrate your Lordship

Over all creation.

Virus n’all.

Amen.

Leader

Dylan’s ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ is on the car stereo as I drive into Oakham on a Monday morning. He’s an old man now, but how does he still manage to sound so cool? This is Dylan as Tom Waits, that drawly voice, even more hoarse with age, picking out the merest outlines of melodies implied by the lo-fi-ish, bluesey backing. He’s so steeped in Americana he knows how little you have to do. My initial take on the album differs from some of the critics. This is a finally dark album, retrospective and name-droppy in an almost parodical way (Simon and Garfunkel skewered him about this tendency even in the 1960s: cf. ‘A simple desultory Philippic’ on ‘Parsley Sage etc.’) And this is Dylan not far from death – at least in his own mind. I hope he hangs on for a cantankerous decade or two yet, especially now he’s found a band who can keep time –  or a producer who’s persuaded him musical synchronicity isn’t necessarily bad. I can’t hear much about faith in these new lyrics, but maybe I’ll find it on the next listen or two. Is this a theme he’s left behind, or has he found a resting place on his journey?

Oakham castle walls

Rutland still seems comme çi comme ça  about re-opening post-Covid, at least this early in the week. A previous watering-hole of choice in an Uppingham garden centre is shut until tomorrow. The car park behind Oakham Museum isn’t sure if it’s free today, and the little café I liked so much a few months back is also closed. But opposite the market square, Stray’s is open for coffee and straight-out-of-the-freezer choccy cake. The customer goes in one way and out the other, but the loos are open, and the tables separated. The staff handle the flow of traffic nicely.

I’ve fallen over a few times on the Big Walk, but only on one other occasion with serious risk of permanent damage. By the level crossing next to Oakham station is an attractively old-fashioned footbridge in rhubarb and custard. I pause at the top to watch and photograph a southbound freight train thunder underneath me. As I extract camera from pocket a chap asks, ‘There’s not a steamer coming through is there?’ I bluster, trying to deflect the implication I might be someone who cares about locomotive numbers. Distracted, as I begin to descend the stairs on the far side, I mis-step on the third or fourth rung, and pitch forward, rolling another two or three steps, only preventing myself from falling the whole and literal nine yards by grabbing desperately at the metal below the handrail to my left. Seriously, this might have been a hospital job or worse, and no one wants to be in hospital right now. A guy with a Scottish accent who’s standing at the foot asks anxiously if I’m OK, commenting that the steps are dangerous, which is generous of him. I inspect my bloody knees, apply Savlon, and go back to see if they are, but they aren’t, not really. I was just stupidly careless, and really should know better.

I follow the main road up to Barleythorpe, and then turn left on Manor Lane which zig zags before climbing to a ridge near Mill Hill at about 180 metres - near top whack for Rutland. Some joggers pass me, and then there’s John hobbling towards me down the hill with his well-behaved trio of dogs. John’s probably the wrong side of eighty, but a doughty sort of chap, because he only walks about as well as me after my fall down the stairs, there’s a steep gradient to the lane, and he’s parked his car at the bottom when he could equally well have driven another quarter of a mile and enjoyed an easy stroll along the top. We talk about maps, and John marvels at the way early map makers managed to make sense of the landscape. He enthuses about an early cartographer called George Carey, and I don’t think to say: ‘that’s funny, same name as the Archbishop…’. It’s only when I’m at home later and look up this interesting coincidence that I discover it’s Matthew Carey who published his ‘general atlas’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But the point’s well made – how much skill and sheer hard graft went into producing those beautiful early editions, and what a debt we owe to William Roy and the Ordnance Survey: something that would certainly deserve a place in my ‘top hundred things about Britain’.  John also tells me about his church life in Leicester, first at St. George’s and then the Cathedral. He recommends the little conserved chapel at Withcote near Launde, which I failed to get to on a very muddy day last autumn.

 

The view from the ridge is wonderfully airy, and I bounce along until the path drops round a copse. The settlement of Langham comes into sight. It straggles a bit, does Langham, but is very pretty and homely nonetheless. It comes as a slight shock to see the signpost say Nottingham is just twenty-five miles away…nearer than Northampton…and I laugh at my rump of ‘southernist’ chauvinism: we’re very nearly oop north! Simon Jenkins talks approvingly of the ‘stage-set’ presentation of the south side of SS Peter and Paul’s church from Church Street, and it’s true: the longwise view through the immaculate churchyard to the handsome south transept is lovely. I’m looking for the memorial stone to Laurence Martyn, the father of a friend, and eventually realise it must be in the separate burial ground which lies a quarter of a mile distant beside the way to Ashwell. I follow the signs to the little cemetery, find the flat stone and spend a moment clearing aside some of the grass. One can be moved even by the demise of people one never knew, feeling grief vicariously for those left behind, partners, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.

I’m not bound for Ashwell today, but am walking the long way round to Burley using bridle paths rather than yomping along the road. At a junction with a lane I see a young woman in a high-vis jacket putting up a sign, warning drivers of roadworks. I ask her if she’s digging a hole. She laughs and says no, she’s just cutting the grass between the bridle path and the highway. I say how impressed I am with the way Rutland maintains its verges: someone’s got their head screwed on properly in Oakham Town Hall. This pleases her, though she qualifies it by saying that some of the ‘ecology’ is from necessity, because of budget cuts. Her name’s Helen. She tells me they try very hard to work with anyone who has local knowledge in the service of preserving flora and fauna. For example, the books apparently say there are no dormice in Rutland, but the locals know there are. Metal on gates is an inhibitor to their passage, so Helen’s team try to put wrappings on the metal to encourage the mice to pass. I don’t say so, but find this extraordinarily affecting – an echo of the Biblical ‘sparrow’s fall’. 

As we chat, a weathered country person on a bike creaks past out of the bridleway from the direction I’m headed. Helen seems to know him. They swap nods. In a couple of hundred metres up the increasingly overgrown path, I come across a motley collection of caravans, some burned out or cannibalised, surrounded by a stretch of detritus.  A single cock crows from somewhere within the ramshackle agglomeration, but there’s no sign of human presence. Was the man on the bike the site’s sole resident? I think to myself that however appalled I am at the mess, surely no one would choose to live in such a rural slum, would they?

The Old Smithy: Burley

Burley House is the imposing pile I saw months ago across the valley from Ridlington, shining out to the south from its hill site. It has to be distinguished from ‘Burghley’ of course, where the horse trials take place, which is not so far away, and is even larger and more grand. I mooch up the tree-lined lane, past the re-purposed outbuildings and workers’ houses, now dwellings for an altogether richer clientele. Holy Cross church lies right beside the Big House, in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust since the late 1990s. A lady from one of the houses assures me I shall be able to get a key next week, and it’s worth a visit.

 

It’s a deep, enduring pleasure to walk the beautiful English countryside on a beautiful fresh, slightly autumnal July day: it makes the heart sing. But sometimes, standing in the middle of such privilege, old and new, the discrepancies between this and most people’s experience of life becomes overwhelming. There’s been much talk about ‘bubbles’ from the point of view of controlling the Virus. It’s a metaphor that works: we’re very comfortable living within our own frames of reference. And this is true for the Church too. I’m going to quote selectively from the Church Times leader for June 26^th. Its title was ‘What next’?

‘No Church true to the name was ever set up as a self-help club; but the travails of running an institution with staff and buildings seemed to be consuming most of the C of E’s energy before the pandemic…

‘The pandemic has acted on the Church like a disease, depriving it of the use of the faculty that had come to define it. But like a body forced to re-purpose itself after an amputation, it is discovering that other limbs, other brain cells, can do the same work, just in other ways…

‘Many clerics have discovered how hard it is to live without the status, visibility, and the trappings of leadership and/or service…

‘Lay people have shown themselves in many instances to be better equipped to do the work of the Church when reduced to one of its basics: supplying the needs of neighbours…

‘…it is in this sense that the Church must disappear. For too long it has restricted its idea of the work of God…to the activity of the self-confessed workers of God…the weight of these times is to be borne by all. The work of salvation can only be accomplished together.’

Dormice in Rutland:  17 km. 5hrs -ish. 20 deg C. Breezy and fresh feeling. Butterflies everywhere in the meadows, dancing.  2 stiles. 10 gates. 4 bridges.

Great Father of all

I fell over again today

And you saved me.

Your right hand lifted me up

Bruised and battered

And set me on a straight path.

You healed my wounds

And poured balm on my troubled soul.

I will tell of your goodness

To this new generation

That they may look beyond themselves

And trust in your unfailing love.

Amen.