GREEN AND WHITE

 

To recap.  Walking has been part of the distinctively Christian story from its beginning. How many miles must Jesus have clocked up as he and his caravan of disciples followed the Palestinian paths and tracks? Even his birth involved a mandatory pilgrimage from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Today many of us find solace in trekking to holy places. Beginning in 2016, by the end of 2021 I’d been on foot to every one of the roughly four hundred parishes in the Diocese of Peterborough, and now I’m walking from our new home in Rutland’s Morcott to the neighbouring dioceses. My walking is partly for fun and for health reasons, but also to make a point. So far this season I’ve symbolically linked my old and new projects by walking from Peterborough to our driveway, and now the pilgrimage proper begins, by closing my front door and setting out west towards Leicester and the setting sun. As I go, I’m still insisting that we Anglican Christians, so apparently divided and few in number are BETTER TOGETHER, BETTER IN COLOUR (and new for 2023!) BETTER THAN WE THINK WE ARE. 

Long, long ago, Caravan, a band from Canterbury, recorded an album they called ‘In the land of grey and pink’. A lot of prog-heads remember it fondly, though maybe the cover’s one of its stronger features – a Tolkien magic sky-city dressed in dusky, dusty tones, from an original ink and water-colour painting by Anne-Marie Anderson.

For a few weeks now we’ve been ‘In the land of green and white’. Depending on the light, at times and from a distance the hedgerows below the path to Glaston look as if snow has fallen. The gardener Monty Don remarked the other day how beautiful cow parsley can be: a never-ending filigree shawl strewn along the verges of the roads at this time of year, topped by billowing head-dresses of May blossom. Post-war decorating on woodwork and walls seemed mostly to consist of green and white/cream. It was everywhere in institutions like schools and hospitals, and it was all over our homes too. Everyone loved ‘magnolia’. Twenty years back DIY makeover programmes on telly often showed this being gleefully covered up and ripped out to make way for the latest nouvelle vague.  Simultaneously other interior design types were touting the very same colour combo as gloriously, trendily retro. I’d always assumed green-and-white was a fifties’ austerity thing, but perhaps after all it was inspired by the explosive arrival of cow parsley in spring, signifying everything new, clean, modern and healthy. Yellows have been good this year too. Cowslips at first – and a bumper crop of dandelions – alongside the ubiquitous oil-seed rape. Now there are buttercups everywhere. Am I noticing the colours more since we came to live in the country, or has it been an exceptional year?

Oxygen starvation: Glaston 

I walked this field four years ago,

Muscles strained, brain running slow.

I lost the path crossing row after row

Of beets. Now where is that hole in the hedge?

 

Distant trucks and a dipping sun,

In another hour the light will be gone.

Mind and boots clagged. Time to be done

With all this.  Please show me the hole in the hedge.

 

The wind has dropped: a paean of sound

From the birds. The lumpen ground

Obscured by dusk – but at last I’ve found,

And none too soon, the bloody hole in the hedge.

 

A habit of thinking that’s hard to shake,

Re-working scenes in the dramas I make

About love and faith: lessons to take

From simple things

Like an elusive hole in the hedge.

Should pilgrimage hurt? Depending on its length, inevitably it will. Any repetitive activity, as we all know, results in pain to some degree. Sportspeople sometimes double the agony. They do the hard yards in their chosen métier, and then dunk themselves in an ice-bath to mitigate the consequences. Rather them than me. But does pain really bring us closer to God? Doesn’t prayer actually become more difficult?

I choose to walk beside the A47 to Uppingham (on a dedicated roadside path! I wouldn’t risk mixing it with the bikers and HGVs!)  It’s not pain, not even really unpleasant on a mild spring day. It’s just less of an experience than other walking might be.  ‘Father, hear the prayer I offer/Not for ease that prayer shall be… Why?  Did God design sacrifice and discomfort into us? And with what purpose in mind? 

Uppingham is scratchy today. The café is busy. A waitress serves me reluctantly having yattered to and taken orders from her friends - who arrived after I did. The pharmacist is rather short with a lady who’s turned up at his counter without the required paperwork. Day visitors wander the streets thoughtlessly, pushing other pedestrians into the gutter. It’s not usually like this. There are no school students in evidence. Half term?  What would Uppingham (and Oakham, Stamford, Oundle) be without their schools? Well, Oakham’s the county town, and Stamford has an ancient history…

Ayston church and pastoral loveliness...

I cross the town and exit on the Leicester road, then take the path towards Ayston. The houses are creeping inexorably outwards from Uppingham to the by-pass. It’s taken decades for the infill, but it’s well on its way now. Beyond the pale, St. Mary’s Ayston is CCT: sweet, peaceful and clean at the end of its little green lane by the farm. Someone cares for it.

 

but look behind you...

Uppingham may be up, but Ridlington is up-per by about twenty metres. The church is dedicated to St. Mary Magdalene and St. Andrew, and inside I meet Debbie and Richard. The former is the churchwarden. We chat for a quarter of an hour and they are charming: we know a lot of people in common. Of course we do. When Sue and I visited South Africa in the early eighties, even there, in the uttermost parts of the earth, there were Anglicans we knew.

After lunch on the churchyard bench, there’s a path which diverts from the road back to Preston, a little balcony overlooking the vale, with a great view of the village. It’s the place which first drew me to Rutland as somewhere to live. Some physicists try to make sense of apparent paradoxes in the make up of the universe by postulating ‘multiverses’, as if every decision made by every human being branches into its own individual set of circumstances among an infinity of circumstances. This seems implausible, until put beside the stupefying immensity of space, or the quantity of grains of sand on a beach. But could it really be true? Do you want it to be true? It might have immense implications for subjectivity v. objectivity. Post-modernism is no longer nonsense. My experience is unique, and ultimately validated. I am the centre of my own universe. My Jesus isn’t your Jesus. 

Instinctively, I think this can’t be right. It’s the same human mindset that demanded the Earth be the centre of the universe. I am so obviously not the measure of all things, however nice it would be.

Preston metaphysics

This is where we tried

To buy a house

But were denied

 

This is where a view

Touched the heart:

The deal fell through.

 

This is where we agree

(persuading ourselves!)

We were never to be.

 

This is where new paths were set

But somehow

We live there yet.

When he was working for the Iraq Petroleum Company in the nineteen fifties, my dad was allowed some leave in Beirut. He was a very Baptist Baptist, but after his passing I was fascinated to find a ticket stub which suggested he and his colleagues might have had a night out in a casino while he was there. Subsequently he brought back to England some extremely worn and dirty Roman coins he’d picked off the ground at the ancient site of Baalbek. Our churches are full of things which have come from far and wide. In Catholic churches throughout Europe and beyond this includes numerous sacred relics, which as we know can be the object of intense devotion and spiritual growth, even though we may sometimes doubt their provenance. It’s hard to know what if anything we should do about the still tangible links between the Anglican Church and Britain’s colonial history.

Reparations

Some words like ‘artefact’

Seem ugly, humdrum, earthbound;

Scant in natural justice

To the hard-won skill expended on

Metal, wood or stone.

 

‘Souvenir’ sounds softer,

Breathing sweetness over the midden,

Smoothing wrinkles from the truth

That these are sometimes

Spoils of war, no less,

Scavenged from the topsoil

Or looted from an alien’s home.

 

We have beautified

Our sacred spaces

With precious things

From distant places.

So we sit with Solomon

Debating white and black.

What can we reasonably keep?

And what should we hand back?

Morcott – Glaston – Uppingham – Ayston – Ridlington – Preston – Glaston – Morcott

22.5 km. 7.5 hours.  19 deg. C. Sunny and warm. (…but this was a walk done in two parts on separate days.)