I WAS GLAD

 

Man, those knees...

There are plenty of spaces in Peterborough’s short-stay car park, and even the payment machines are working today. It’s noon on Advent Sunday 2021, cold and sunny, and this is the final leg of my Big Walk, imagined and begun in the spring of 2016. The messages are still Better Together and Better in Colour. All along the way I’ve argued that if the Church of England is to survive it must very quickly draw together despite its wide spectrum of internal liturgical and theological differences, and celebrate rather than fear its diversity – which is represented in its history as well as its present. In other words, it must do the very opposite of what we read in the Church Times week by week, where personal disagreements are aired publicly and acrimoniously, hobby-horses ridden relentlessly, exclusive factional agendas pursued at the expense of harmony and good order. Individual churches may want to worship God in ways that are uniquely shaped by the people who come through their doors, but they must respect and love those whose mission is differently targeted, or our Church is fatally flawed. One size doesn’t fit all in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Sue and Matt are with me for these final few steps. We walk across the square to the church of St. John the Baptist, which is open because a service hasn’t long since finished. June welcomes us, though she and her colleagues are hoping to close up for the morning. When I explain who I am and what I’m doing, the welcome becomes even warmer, because, goodness gracious me, she’s been reading the blog – or at least the post which included Werrington.

St. John’s is a real Tardis, broad, long and generous, with oodles of space even with the bookstore at its west end. The altar, reredos and expanses of glass are lovely and inspiring. Another sidesperson draws our attention to Matthew Wyldbore’s monument on the south wall of the Lady Chapel. This eighteenth century M.P. once got lost in the fog on Peterborough Common, and found his way safely home courtesy of the church bells. He subsequently endowed the bellringers, left money for the poor, and provided that an annual sermon should be preached. Each year the bells are still rung on March 15^th, the anniversary of his death. Quite apart from the wonderfulness of Matthew’s name, so glorious is this story that perhaps it should be told to each new incumbent as she/he takes her seat in the House of Commons. (Most of the current lot seem lost in a fog of some sort: few of them are much Summoned by Bells – unless it’s the division bell).

Saying goodbye to the St. John’s team, we return across the square which is now almost medievally deep in a pre-Christmas retail bustle. Music plays, people dressed in funny costumes waddle around, and some kind of graffiti competition is under way: the hieroglyphics are beyond my decoding. Then in the precincts, absolute calm.

Inside the Cathedral a baptism is taking place at the font immediately by the recently expensive front doors, a new baby introduced to the family of Christ - and on the first day of the new Christian year too. I wander up towards the roughly fashioned wooden front altar where it stands before the portable choir stalls, and unload the rucksack and staff which have accompanied me around the diocese these last five years. For me this is a singular moment. It reminds me of the time when the fourteen year old Matt and I went up to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. So loaded is it with meaning, my unspoken prayers are almost incoherent: something about thankfulness for the gift of life, and a hopeful petition that the English Church should continue to be a vector of God’s grace to the peoples it tries to serve. But you know what I mean, God.

An honours board along the north chancel records the names of the first Saxon abbots in Medeshamstede’s (later Peterborough’s) monastery, founded ‘in a fair spot, because on the one side it is rich in fenland, and in goodly waters, and on the other it has an abundance of ploughlands and woodlands, with many fertile meads and pastures’:  Seaxwulf, Cuthbald, Egbald, Pusa, Botwine, Beonna, Ceolred, Hedda, Ealdwulf, Cenwulf, Aelfsige, Earnwig and Leofric – and these all before the Norman invasion. Everyone knows that Katherine of Aragon’s tomb is here. We remember a recent exhibition of Tim Peake’s space capsule, derided by some in the Press, but a good reminder, as I personally reckon, that Christians must eagerly embrace the study of science. Less than a year ago and socially distanced we were listening to The Sixteen deliver their vocal perfection to an audience which also included our new friend from Morcott, churchwarden Jane Williams, now so sadly missed. ‘Sublime!’ was her reaction, and she might have been describing more than the music. We remember our own Evensong here with Weston Favell’s choir in 2007. Two psalms, not one, were prescribed for the service, which tested choir and conductor to the limits. This is our mother church, the place to which we cleave when local and personal matters become too hard to bear. Dear Lord, preserve her and those who work here, that she may be a blessing for many generations to come, if indeed our earthly world is more or less without end, as we pray.

There’s art on display today in the space before the high altar. Five thousand steel leaves are scattered there, each one with the word ‘hope’ stamped upon it. This is artist Peter Walker’s response to the pandemic, in memory of those who have suffered and died (we currently approach at least 145,000 deaths in Britain alone). The title ‘The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations’ refers to a line in the twenty second chapter of the Book of Revelation. The Cathedral website says about the work: ‘The shape of a sycamore leaf has been chosen as it symbolises strength, protection and eternity as well as clarity. Steel has been chosen as the material for the leaves, to remind us of our resilience and collective strength (my underlining). As it moves around the country (for this installation is going to other cathedrals too) the steel will age, rust and change colour, just as the leaves of trees do when they fall each year. It is hoped that the simplicity and beauty of the installation will give people the chance to pause and contemplate their own response to the present situation’.

As we turn to leave, the sound of children’s voices floats down the Cathedral’s length. The choir juniors are rehearsing the chorus of ‘Ding Dong merrily on high’, striving for that elusive Goldilocks articulation in the chorus’s Gloria, neither too staccato, because that’s ugly, nor too legato, because that’s sloppy and imprecise.

By the Cathedral gate, on the doorstep of the tearoom, someone is more or less finally down and out on this unusually freezing November day. Two members of either the café or the Cathedral staff, are trying to get some coffee or tea into him. It’s a loving act that deserves a Caravaggio or Rubens to render into permanent visual record: the Church acting on its calling.  I used to think the gilded cross which hangs above Peterborough’s nave rather self-conscious and awkward, but now find it utterly moving each time I’m worshipping there. It carries the Carthusian Latin motto: Crux stat dum orbis volvitur – ‘The cross stands/remains while the whole world is turned’.

Stars in the bright sky:  1.5 km (if you count the walk to and from the car). One and a quarter hours. 2 deg C. Sun turning to cloud. One church, one cathedral: both open. Shoppers, tourists, children, OAPs, priests and vagabonds: all human life is here, waiting. 

I was glad,

Glad when they said unto me

Let us go

Into the house of the Lord

Our feet shall stand

Within thy gates O Jerusalem…

A final post (should that be ‘the last post’?) will be published on December 13^th, with a summary of the last few walks, and some facts and figures about the whole project. 

And then, what next?