SEMPER FIDELIS

 

The machines in the Stamford car park won’t take credit cards – apparently it’s a facility which isn’t available at this present time, so with a bad grace I surrender some of my precious stash of coins. It’s one of those things about my personal behaviour which has changed during the pandemic:  I no longer get or use cash unless I absolutely have to, and mildly resent that those who said ‘proper’ money was on its way out are being proved right. Last Sunday at the Cathedral I made an instant donation though their card-swipe – so easy, so painless, but a little less invested in ceremony. In future will we Christians retain coins and notes as a symbolic gesture of giving, like a self-conscious bow to the altar, or is that just an old way of thinking? Or perhaps a card-reader will need to be placed on the chancel steps, so that the connection between our faith and our wallet is made more obvious. We will walk up to it, pause, turn, extract our plastic with due solemnity and a declination of the head, swipe, step back and move on up.

I ascend the slope of Wothorpe Road but where that old route out of Stamford continues on to the village, veer up beside the hedge line to the lane known as First Drift which exits on the Old Great North Road by the wall of the Burghley Estate.  I presume that ‘Wothorpe’ might mean ‘farm on the promontory/hill’, and indeed at two hundred and sixty six feet, the settlement represents the highest point in the Soke of Peterborough. Wikipedia says rather tartly: ‘Although unmarked, the summit is of interest to participants in hill-bagging who visit these high points of the historic counties of England’. There was once a Benedictine monastery there. Those monks always had a feel for healthy living.

Four ladies are preparing for the first hole of the Burghley golf course, light sweaters in pastel colours, jolly checked slacks and sun visors. They may not need the latter; it’s one of those odd English summer days, dull and damp feeling but clammily warm. Ahead of them a foursome of chaps are cheerfully hacking their way round the course with a marked absence of skill. I keep an eye on them for fear of one of their balls issuing in an unlikely and dangerous direction. I remember very well the film footage of one time US Vice-President Spiro Agnew felling an incautious spectator with a tee shot which flew at terrifying velocity forty-five degrees from its anticipated direction. The unremarkable track beside the first hole is in fact Ermine Street, which just here takes a dink in its general northwards progress from London to Lincoln and York, perhaps mindful of the higher ground and a good crossing of the Welland just where upstream navigation becomes more difficult. Around me is country estate parkland of the sort that mildly resembles savannah, the grass long, browning and wispy. There are sheep here, and signs of cattle, and at one point I must be passing the line of the famous Horse Trials course because to my immediate right is one of the fences.  I’ve never been to one of these events, and as always with sport, television flattens the actuality – which in some ways is a good thing because being there in person is always so much better. The fence is an awe-inspiring sight. Wow! Deep respect Princess Anne!  The first element is a relatively straightforward row of brush, but beyond it is a deep ditch with stone at its bottom, and this is followed by a much higher, more rigid looking construction of brush and pole. The gap between the two parts of the fence over the ditch is substantial. It must take some bravery to commit your favourite horse to such a jump.

                                       It looks a whole lot more friendly here than it really is...

Eventually I emerge at a road junction where I’m momentarily confused. The priority of the lanes doesn’t quite reflect what I see on the map. I trust the cartographers and walking on enter Barnack along Wittering Road beside the Hills and Holes.  This is now a country park full of flowers and butterflies, but from Roman times was an important quarrying site. Barnack stone (Oolitic Lincolnshire limestone) adorns the great cathedrals of Peterborough and Ely, and when the Fenland monasteries who’d bickered over rights to the stone were dissolved, the dressed blocks from their dorters and minsters were removed to grace the ranges of new Cambridge colleges.

In view of the high status of this industry, it’s unsurprising that St John the Baptist’s church is spacious and ancient. Its marvellously solid, square Saxon tower is topped by a Norman spire that IMO looks slightly incongruous: the invaders might have done better to leave the building as it was. Was it simply greater visibility that encouraged them to go on building upwards or just cultural imperialism. See, we’re better than them!  Well, no, not necessarily.

I’m thinking a lot about allegiances at the moment – and a recent Thought for the Day on Radio 4 picked up the same theme. As Christians we’ll always say God has the first call on our fealty, though from childhood many of us dread the thought that, as has happened to countless martyrs through the ages, we might ever have to make good on those promises, as Japanese Christians did even as late as the nineteenth century. But ‘downwards’ from those ultimate statements of investment, we owe allegiances to family, friends, town, county, principality, sports teams, workplaces, and so on, and there’ll be few of us who haven’t experienced some conflict of interest at some point. One of the most common for me has been a perceived need to compromise on my own cherished sense of who I am in the interests of those who might employ me, which is why most of my working life has been spent in self-employment – avoiding the issue, you might say. But at least I have been able (to some degree!) to choose my own ‘uniform’, working hours, and even who I work with.

One of the contradictions that’s becoming most obvious at a very local, Anglican level is whether village identity always trumps benefice identity. Is it right only to engage with what goes on at ‘my’ church, even if that’s just a single eucharist per month, or should my principal unit of interest be the benefice, so that I get in the car and travel to wherever worship is happening?  In our current case in Welland Fosse, that could be in one of five churches, but there are benefices with far more potential venues even than that.  Now I know that currently Zoom has changed the rules of the game to some degree, but we don’t yet know how that story is going to play out in five years’ time, and we must surely hope and pray that the average Christian’s focus isn’t permanently limited to fifty minutes on-line per week. What’s certain is that the Church of England’s finances won’t emerge from Covid enhanced. As with many other institutions life will be a bit of a struggle. Fewer clergy? Fewer churches? With every passing year the choices become increasingly stark.

So good people, how much does your own ‘village life’ (urban or rural) affect your view of your Christian calling and affections – your missionary responsibilities?  It is of course, often easier to separate the place you worship from the place you live. My good friend Gerald often said to me, encouraging me to let my up-tight English hair down as we were about to go on stage, ‘It’s OK, you don’t know anyone here’. A hub church can enable us to hide our perceived frailties rather well.  Whereas your next door neighbours hear you swear when the mower won’t start.  But hey, giving in to that pressure is just cowardice, right? For most of us at some point the accusation that we’re ‘whited sepulchres’ sticks. It’s part of being human.

Yesterday it rained all day, and the humid atmosphere means there’s been little evaporation so the bottom half of me is pretty soggy, including my boots. It’s the first time in a while I’ve worn anything but trainers, and the increased effort required from this minuscule addition of weight always surprises me. Today’s is a short walk, but already I feel I’m dragging my feet as I follow the B road up to the hamlet of Pilsgate, whence the parish has persuaded the Burghley Estate to provide a roadside path all the way round to the Estate’s main entrance. Even better, the new stone path’s been hidden behind a hedge, so one is insulated from the passing traffic as well as kept safe. Seems to me this is a simple but great initiative reflecting well on all concerned. I’d been wondering how this bit of the walk would work out if I had to mix it with the Stamford traffic.

The rest of the route back to the car is through the lower half of Burghley. Some outliers from the deer herd are grazing close to the fence, but of course, as soon as they sense the camera, they turn their backs and mooch away. Patience is a required virtue in wildlife photographers:  I wouldn’t be well-suited. There are a good number of visitors in the grounds. I don’t know how the owners feel about it, but most of the visitors are customers now, and since the Customer is King, the aristocrats owe allegiance to them. It wasn’t always so, as one is reminded in exiting the estate through a (very) back, tradesman’s door into Stamford’s streets.

Doffs of the hat:  13.5 km. 3.75 hours.  19 degrees C.  Cloudy throughout, and very humid.  Six stiles.  Eight gates. One bridge.  One church plus a fly-past of St. Martin’s Stamford (interesting website but boards across windows by porch).  Animal life: mostly domestic – sheep and deer. One glossily, definitively black raven, imperious in a field by the Estate.

 Lord God

To call you ‘Lord’ still makes sense to me,

Iconoclast though I am

With all that historical stuff that rattles around in my brain.

But I wonder

Does it register with someone under the age of 30?

Their heads seem to be somewhere else.

So much of popular culture seems so worldly

Or if not that

Post modern

See it my way

Make it up as you go along

Hippy-dippy crystal gazing.

 

I acknowledge again that I am a creature

And you are the creator.

And I slowly feel my way to what is appropriate

In view of that:

Profound gratefulness

Awe

Love

Wonder.

Thank you.

Amen.