CITY OF GOD

 

On my way into Peterborough, Lou Reed’s re-mastered ‘Transformer’ is on the car stereo. Reed had just left the uber-cool ‘Velvet Underground’ and this much praised album (1972?) was largely recorded in London with David Bowie, Mick Ronson and others, including the legendary British bass player Herbie Flowers. (Flowers was real. ‘Herbie’ was a nickname. He’s actually and disappointingly, Brian). These days ‘Transformer’ sounds tired to me, ‘Perfect Day’ apart, although others still champion the record, glam-rock flirting with Berlin style cabaret, but failing to embrace either genre satisfactorily, or so I think. It was the epitome of ‘counter-culture’ for a while, making transgender hip – and in it Reed may even have invented the phrase ‘coming out of the closet’ for all I know. These days to be transgender is mainstream, and not at all counter-cultural. Which is weird.

Am I grown up enough to try reading Augustine of Hippo’s ‘The City of God’?  Once upon a long time ago I was a student philosopher, but never got round to it (or the many other volumes I ought to have read!)  There’s a short chapter about Augustine in Rowan Williams’ ‘Luminaries’ which makes me think I should give it a go. As I understand it, this outstanding saint was defending Christianity from the charge that the new faith weakened Rome and was thus the cause of the empire/city’s fall to the pagans. There are parallels with today…

The Faith is under attack. No one with charisma and media presence is prepared to make the intellectual case for it. If anything, the Church is a target for blame. The charge is that we’ve connived at slavery, sexual abuse and exploitation of the earth’s resources. The old order is rapidly changing…

This entire final section of my Big Walk lies within the City of Peterborough. I begin at Itter Park in Paston. It’s half term, so there are children and parents, strolling, playing, buying coffee from the stand. I skirt the open field behind the tennis courts, and cross the A47.

Some people are amazing. Two middle aged ladies are patiently clearing litter from the verge of Fulbridge Road, dropping the detritus into a cumbersome cart which they’re humping and bumping over the tangled grass. It’s not a beautiful corner, and in most communities the rubbish would be left to fester, but these two volunteers have decided to devote a Thursday morning to making things better. I stand on the bridge above them, and think about calling down my respect, but the traffic noise is too great. I do swap a ‘thank you’ and a smile as a tattoo-ed young woman makes nice with me, giving social distance further up the road.

 

New England

Turning right into St. Paul’s Road I’m suddenly hit by evidence of social deprivation. There’s a smell of stale food, the streets become raggedy, the people seem tired, lame and poor. Though it’s only mid-day, a clearly drunk man is helped down the Lincoln Road, flanked by supporters to right and left. The area known as New England and to its south, Millfield, are host to an array of communities making faltering progress towards becoming New Britons. On hoardings and by their presence on the streets, I register Polish, Lithuanian, Slovakian, Turkish, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Hindu, Portugese, Filipino. There is the Timisoara mini-market. Here is the Afghan store. At the Baltic coffee house, the crowd seems South Asian.

There’s no shortage of built Christian witness. St. Paul’s sits in the middle of a one-way triangle, and then further down in Millfield I come to St. Mark’s. The Sally Army are here, and over the road from St. Paul’s is the Peterborough International Christian Centre. I’ve just passed the Gospel Hall and a Kingdom Hall. But how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?  It’s a shock, being in a proper city, after walking round a mostly green and pleasant diocese.

There’s an ironic inevitability in the gathering of these new communities just here. When the Great Northern Railway was built and trains began to thunder up the eastern side of Britain towards Edinburgh, Peterborough was one of the important rail-hubs (perhaps aside from Doncaster the most important) between London and York. There were engine sheds and a large marshalling yard to the west of the line, and the houses of New England were built for the men and their families who worked there. The optimistic spirit of the Victorian heyday was in the air, with a burgeoning empire and booming economy in a time (mostly) of peace and increasing prosperity. People felt they really were building a new kind of England. The thrust of that development went on for a hundred years, itself powering the nation’s financial health despite the hiccups of the two World Wars. Then, during the last fifty the white British population started to move on from New England into suburban patterns of housing it deemed more fashionable and comfortable, while the country slipped out of manufacturing into a service-based economy.

Internationally Britain is now in a very different place. Without a core industry to maintain in north Peterborough, will these new communities be an engine of progress for the nation or a drain on resources? We don’t yet know, but we do know that the Church of England no longer has the finance or sponsorship to throw up buildings like ‘The Railwayman’s Church’ (St. Paul’s Peterborough). In 1867 this was a brand spanking new facility; an attractive, visible sign of God’s grace and welcome. There was a great enthusiasm for spreading the Gospel among working people. Now in a multi-multi-cultural society, we have no confidence in preaching Christ as the way, the truth and the life. We tend to see Jesus’ call as one among many life options from which we could choose, as if we were buying a new computer or car. What will it be today, Kabbalah or the Tao? And even if we did claim primacy for Christian values and faith, we don’t appear to have the money to do much about it. So what do we do? Give up?

And, with the perspective of my many miles round this largely green diocese in mind, how do we reconcile the dispersed needs of the countryside, and the apparently urgent demands represented by the Lincoln Road’s staggering noontide drunk?

As a muso and at this time of year, my mind goes to that great (though rather jingoistic) Victorian hymn of Edward Plumptre – ‘through many a day of darkness…etc.’ The last verse goes: ‘And we, shall we be faithless? Shall hearts fail, hands hang down?/ Shall we evade the conflict and cast away our crowns?/ Not so. In God’s deep counsels some better thing is stored/ We will maintain unflinching: ‘One Church, one Faith, one Lord.’ If that hymn comes your way this Remembrance-tide, don’t you dare sing it without a tear in the eye or a wobble in the stomach.

Lincoln Road reaches a t-junction with Westgate. I turn left and spend a few minutes with coffee and cake in a strangely empty Beales department store. It’s recently re-opened after refurbishment. Peterborough has lost its John Lewis, and on the evidence of this footfall, I don’t give much for Beales’ chances. Out of town facilities, on-line shopping and the differently-placed retail needs of the incoming communities make this what commentators call a ‘challenging business environment’.  When I emerge again into daylight the streets around the Queensgate mall are thronged, driven into the open air by a fire alarm. Observing the blue lights reflecting off St. John the Baptist’s church in the square, I smile to myself that this is no new Day of Pentecost, though Stanley Spencer would have done a fine job of picturing Peterborough’s citizens running around in front of the Cathedral with flaming hair.

I walk on, past the market and the Passport Office, and admire the pretty glass and stone façade of St. Mary’s, which looks like a nice church to go to if you don’t fancy the wide open spaces of the Cathedral, though it seems a bit weird that there’s a modern church of this size just five minutes’ walk away from the Bishop’s Palace and all. What was the thinking behind that? The answer is of course ‘the parochial system’, about which there’s much debate at present. I’m on the side of those who wish to protect and nourish it, and I suppose the price of that is that sometimes anomalies will occur. And this is one of them. As with so much else, the pandemic heightens the intensity of critical thinking. If we weren’t all still half-Zoomed, if we weren’t cash-strapped, we wouldn’t think twice about the apparent double-up.

Up on Park Street sits All Saints Church, currently in vacancy, but offering shelter within its Anglo-Catholic tradition to musicians, philatelists, Yoga for health, and the U3A amongst many others, no doubt. As always in cities, you travel a block or two and the social dynamic alters abruptly, as a protagonist finds to his cost in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Drive down the wrong ramp in New York, and your world begins to unravel.  Even in London, it pays to know how the neighbourhoods do or don’t match up. Here, close to the King’s School, all is mostly comfortable and safe, at least on the outside.

I trundle on northwards and, heading for Dogsthorpe, take a careless wrong turn through the detached and bungalowed suburb, before reaching Christ the Carpenter church, a fifties’ style build with an attractive copper roof. In student days I think we came to play here. ‘We’ were ‘Twentieth Century’, a very uncool name even in 1970, heirs to the group of Cambridge beatniks who started to write ‘jazzy’ (well, not particularly) versions of favourite hymns. Get with it, daddio. The vibe was a Cliff Richard film c. 1959, but sometimes you can still hear their alternative tunes to ‘Oh Jesus I have promised’, or (more commonly)  ‘At the name of Jesus’.  I still have a soft spot for Geoffrey Beaumont’s jolly ‘Now thank we all our God’. The funny thing is that as they used to say about the sixties and early seventies, ‘if you remember it, you weren’t there’. And I can’t remember a single thing about the Dogsthorpe gig. It might have been a performance of Mike Lehr and John Lockley’s clever and inspiring ‘A Folk Passion’. Or perhaps it was one of our regular concerts, whose content might amiably ramble between Joni Mitchell, Roger McGough, Sydney Carter and Ten Years After - all in the service of the Gospel. Despite our flared trousers and flowered shirts, we weren’t very counter-cultural, just moderately dedicated, broke, followers of fashion. But today we Christians are truly radical, often working against the grain of society, and if we could only work out a consensus manifesto, asserting a completely different set of assumptions to those exercised by the vast majority.

The Church’s immediate future may be that we’re a ‘remnant’, but with Martin Luther I do believe that:

God’s word, for all their craft and force

One moment will not linger

But, spite of hell, shall have its course

‘Tis written by his finger.

And though they take our life,

Goods honour, children, wife,

Yet is their profit small

These things shall vanish all

The city of God remaineth.

 

Minutes to midnight:  12.5 km. 15 degrees C. Cloud and sun. Breezy. Six churches. None open.

BLOWING IN THE WIND

You know how it is. A scent on the air from a hedgerow bush, a particular kind of weather day, the DJ plays an old song, and, well, it isn’t déjà vu, but you’re cast back in time, searching for a place where the whole of life was before you, and the world was pure excitement and wonder. It seems to happen to me more and more as I get older. You make me feel so young…

This morning, stepping out from Newborough on a bright, breezy day, something triggers Free’s ‘All Right Now’ and I’m grasping for the tantalising Spirit of ’69. I hear it clearly in my head. Paul Rodger’s accurately gruff rock n’roll voice, Andy Fraser’s groundbreaking grumbly bass, Paul Kossoff on guitar. Can he really be the son of dear old cuddly David, who told us nice Bible stories on the wireless? But in the age of the first mini-skirts, ‘generation gaps’ are a commonplace. We’re about to learn something of fathers and sons, drug addiction, pain and death: the end of a hippie dream… 

All of this before I’m out of Newborough’s 30 limit. I give the cars extra width as I walk the long straight lane southwards – almost two miles of it. Normally that would mean vehicles zipping past at 70 or more, but the wise drivers know – fenland roads are uncertain, especially on a windy day. The tarmac bends up and down, side to side, and it makes for a bouncy suspension-twisting ride. I turn onto Bridgehill Road, and pass a collection of old Fords on a farmer’s forecourt, waiting to be broken for spares. There’s an unusual 1970 stretched Zodiac limo (perfectly matched to Free), a three litre Capri which might have been driven by Bodie and Doyle, and a Mark 2 Cortina of the kind which used to be legion on our motorways, invariably driven by nylon suited mid-range company execs and sales personnel. This isn’t helping my nostalgia vibe. On another right angle, Gunthorpe Road is definitely single-lane-with-passing-places, but it must be a well-known local rat-run because I’m constantly dodging traffic. Arriving at the Cherry Barn Garden Centre, I detour in search of a cup of coffee and cake, but what’s on offer doesn’t appeal so I overtake the tutting and mumbling exit queue, and use the ‘Dodds cyclepath’ to penetrate Peterborough near a roundabout, an entrance to the city different but indistinguishable from last week’s. Maybe I was lucky to emerge from ‘Cherry Barn’ unscathed. During this weeks petrol crisis, videos have gone viral which show drivers (male) brawling by the pumps over alleged queue-jumping.

Hazards of the Fens - check out the verticals

On the subject of flat lands, I was amused by a recent tale from acquaintance Marilyn in Morcott.  Apparently Rutland County Council had outsourced the cutting of our village verges to their Lincolnshire counterparts. When their team arrived, it was unable to proceed, because the village is on a slight slope, as are some of the verges. Lincolnshire’s ‘environmental husbandry’ works only on the plain and level. Up on the Wolds, at Louth for instance, the grass presumably remains unkempt and the bunny rabbits are happy…

I make my way to Paston and its All Saints church. After many years of living in Northampton, I know the demographics of that town’s various suburbs only too well – where the liminal spaces are – how the social housing sits – the turf wars between estates.  In Peterborough I can’t read what I see. I’m passing through a jumble of different kinds of housing – well-tended modern villas here, social housing there, new build, thirties’ construction…

 I also realise I’m still really bad at reading the age of churches from their exteriors. Even after five years’ writing this blog, I’m still remarkably unobservant. I look at All Saints, and think it might be Victorian, but it isn’t – it’s an ancient place, known as the ‘church in the fields’ until the nineteen-thirties. Later, gazing across the street at Eye’s St. Matthew’s I initially interpret it as medieval, whereas in fact it’s Gothic revival. 

I’m feeling footsore from treading tarmac as I pass through All Saints’ war memorial gate hoping the church is open or there’ll be a welcoming churchyard bench. But it’s not, and there isn’t one. I perch uncomfortably on an angled stone under the gate to drink tea and eat a Waitrose chicken and sweetcorn. The board opposite me records the death of a gentleman by the name of Vergette. It wasn’t a name I’d ever come across until recent walks, but there are Vergettes all over the place around Peterborough. The word has a heraldic meaning but can also denote a rod or clothes-brush, so maybe the Vergettes were once tailors.

A year or two ago, there was a run of apparently insensitive clergy comments chiding the laity for being one-day-a-week Christians. If you’re the priest of a congregation whose church is as firmly closed as this, it could be tempting to think your people only turn their eyes on God when they pitch up at Sunday morning worship.

In fact of course, we very often don’t know who does what during the six other days, either in private devotion or public witness to family, friends and colleagues.  But a church which is so dark at mid-day on Wednesday, and with no facility even to sit outside and chew a reviving sarnie, isn’t a good advertisement, particularly when it presents to the world on a prominent corner. Dear clergy and people of All Saints, I don’t mean to give offence by singling you out. This is a national difficulty for the C of E, particularly in urban areas where churches have to be defended from vandalism/desecration. I think back to a visit I once made to a museum of folk instruments during a spare hour in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas. The place was deserted (in fact I had the impression that no one had been inside for years) but its two black-skirted, elderly guardians made me very welcome, despite an utter and complete language gap, and with great attention to detail showed me many, many accordions. And many, many balalaikas. And quite a lot of wooden flutes. See what I’m saying?

I yomp through more housing estates passing all sorts and conditions of people. I dodge double buggies. I say hello to senior citizens. I cast a stern eye over primary-age ne’er-do’wells. On a bridge over the thrumming four-lane Parkway I steer round two blokes sitting on the concrete sharing spliffs whose fragrance follows me on the breeze for another hundred metres. Like garlic-lovers, their olfactory sense now screens out their personal odour. 

An unexpected shower blows in rapidly from the west, and I get rather wet as I skirt the Little Wood Nature reserve, before turning down into the village of Eye, where funeral homes seem to be a big thing, and traditional thatch and timber mixes it with new wave retail and service facilities. St. Matthew’s too is closed, but its non-original saddleback tower is a striking presence on the main street – actually very close to the road itself. Thereafter it’s long horizons and an almost four mile walk back to Newborough for me, frequently making those ninety-degree turns. I think there will be some awkwardness with crossing the major roads, but there isn’t, because Peterborough has a very good system of bike routes called Green Wheel. I encounter no bicycles at all on my way back to the car, but I’m very glad of the safety provision made for them so that I don’t have to play chicken with HGVs or souped-up Beemers. Instead I cross high above or duck under the seamless lines of drive-time traffic.

A companion through much of my Big Walk has been Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity. It’s a book I can’t recommend enough, a staggering achievement in the distillation of amazing academic grasp into a cordial within quaffable reach of the average reader (providing the average reader has staying power – the Penguin paperback runs to 1016 pages before references). He’s particularly good (pp. 968 ff.) about Pope John XXIII’s Vatican 2 Council. In the early sixties Pope John swam against the tide of Catholic orthodoxy, but saw clearly where change was necessary if the Church was to survive. He had his critics, and to some extent in Popes John-Paul II  and Benedict XVI those critics pushed back against his vision.

In a very different but equally revolutionary age, the Church of England (but arguably the Catholic Church also) faces a massive challenge. We change or we perish. It’s as simple as that – but the change may be more in attitude rather than practice – because a lot of change in practice has already occurred and it isn’t improving the situation. Mostly we just have to be better at who we are and what we do. I love the titles of the two main documents which dropped into Catholic in-trays as a result of the second Vatican Council. The first was Lumen Gentium (‘the light of the peoples’) which suggested a different future ordering of the Church, although in terms of papal infallibility for instance, it didn’t necessarily correct the likely errors of the past. The second, addressing the Church’s role in the world, was called Gaudium et Spes (‘joy and hope’).

How we need to radiate joy and hope to a desperate world and mediate light to each other!

One more river to cross…

Millimetres of tread:  19.5 km. Five hours. Sun, then cloud and rain, then sun again. 14 deg. C. A blusterous wind, which made the last miles hard work. Two churches, both shut. No stiles, no gates, two bridges. A sparrowhawk hovering above me near Newborough. 

Lord

Today at Morning Prayer

St. Mark the Lion

Rolling us on towards the crucifixion.

At the end of September?

Give me a break!

I find the story hard enough in Holy Week.

But now, with autumn closing upon us

And burgeoning darkness

And a pandemic

And petrol shortages

A cruel wind

Of human frailty everywhere?

 

Yet I know

We have to carry with us always

Incarnation

And salvation.

Help us to maintain

Joy and Hope

For all we meet

Through the grace of Him

Who is the Light of the Peoples

For ever and ever

Amen.