Norfolk Pilgrim

  Farewell to Green Pilgrimage?  I jolly well hope not! But to face facts, there 'aint no hope for any more EU money and grants from Interreg Europe.  See -   https://www.interregeurope.eu/greenpilgrimage/ Interreg Europe borrowed (stole, maybe?) the brand from Alliance of Religions and Conservation (website now unavailable).  The European Green Pilgrimage Network    has its roots in ARC's Green Pilgrimage Network.    As I write the ARC's website is newly down and it remains to be seen if the European Green Pilgrimage Network will survive Brexit and the loss of EU money.   The need to tread lightly on God's earth   has never been more important   "Green pilgrimage is about respecting the local environment and treading more lightly upon the earth.  You might expect that pilgrimage destinations – considered our most holy and sacred places – would be the most  cared for places on earth. But sometimes the opposite is true."

In a Post-Covid world, the C of E can can no longer ignore the writing on the wall for many country churches.  Locally, the direction of travel is set out in a Diocese of Norwich Deployment Review A process will be agreed to enable some churches to be designated as Festival Churches, no longer required for regular public worship, but remaining the responsibility of the PCC. A proposal will be formulated and costed for a significant expansion of the Diocesan Churches Trust, with a view to Synodical approval for this to be fully funded. Longer term strategies will also be needed. The old culture where the village church, pub, post office/village stores and school were the hubs of rural communities has passed away.  The post-war drift from the land and 20th/21st Century mobility  eroded it bit by bit; and, although one may wonder if working from home might reverse the trend, falling church statistics from the halcyon days of the 1950's to the present can no longer be ignored. Declari

 Easter! Ascension! Pentecost! A succession of waymarks from where we plot our routes out of Covid towards the  unfolding future. In June when ( or should that be if?) we are finally free, we will be 15 months older. And some of us were old when we went into lockdown for the first time! Here our church congregations tend to be elderly, so much so that this 78 year old is part of the youth group! What I am saying is, “the future of the Church in our rural villages uncertain.” You could be accused of wishful thinking if you imagined it might have any future at all! Easter is a reminder of the impossible possibility of good news beyond our wildest dreams. In the early dawn of our (Christian)  resurrection faith, the doing this with bread and wine in upper room and around the kitchen table, revealed the risen Lord at the breaking of the bread. In the Easters of 2020 and 2021 some of us have  had parallel experiences - by the wonders of 21st C technology, around Archbishop Justine’s table

No chance of going anywhere today! I  am socially isolating in advance of a small op' scheduled for tomorrow! So here I go - pilgrimaging on the internet! Sauntering ( Sainte terre ing )! I had planned to go to Hautbois Church, drawn there by a host of wild daffodils and a church dedicated to Jesus' mum. I was there at a similar time last year  - see Annunciation Pilgrimage .  But I wanted, more than anything, to pick up where I left off last Sunday, with that Roman brick in the wall of my mother church, St. John's; and to reflect on earlier generations of Mother Church. I am imagining the generations like so many Russian dolls one inside the other! We owe the life we live to them!  Norfolk has no Roman or Post Roman church buildings, no great Constantinian brick built churches as in Trier and only the hint of their existence in the place names of villages.  Norfolk has two Eccles , a name derived from the British word eclesia meaning church . Suffolk has one Roman church s

Last Sunday's pilgrimage  had left me with a nasty taste in my mouth.  Could the fate of St. Michael's Sco Ruston be the writing on the wall for other rural churches?  For my local church, St. John's in  Coltishall? Today's pilgrimage brought me to St. John's and a particular length of wall. The oldest part of my parish church, dating from 11th Century.  Just to the east of the North Porch there areseveral pieces of  re-used Roman brick and tile built into the fabric.  It is possible, but by no means certain, there was a wooden building on the site that predated this wall, but we can be certain the brick was made before the end of Roman occupation. No later than the 4th Century. Among the haphazard assortment of broken pieces there is small section of complete bricks laid in a herring-bone arrangement. These complete bricks are a standard  15" square by 1 1/2"  Bricks like these were used to build the cathedral church in the Emperor Constatine's northe

  From Lockdown to Locked Out Today's destination church was St. Michael's Sco Ruston of what's left of it.  Ruined in the 1980's  An ivy clad dangerous ruin.  Thoughts turn to the future of the Cof E in the country. Is this the future for many rural churches?  The answer to the question is clearly yes, unless someone takes responsibility for preserving these buildings that are the treasure chests of  their community. But need that be a problem for the future ministry of our national church? My answer is a definite, No! Give or take a bit of local difficulty with invading Mercians and Vikings the Church in East Anglia used central places for their mission. Often adopting the existing central places. See -  Ritual Landscape in Pagan and Early Christian England    . It was only in the 11th century that there was an explosion of church building and a division of once large parishes. Centering the Church's Mission on central places should work well in the post-pandemic

 Today's destination? St. John's Church Coltishall. The doors remain shut. We are left out in the wilderness  Not a bad place to be on a Sunday on which the Gospel leads us to reflect on Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness’.  Wandering among the graves I was suddenly with Jesus in a lonely place, on the other side of the Sea of Galilee! Remember the pigs running down into the sea and drowning ( Matthew 8) ?  Jesus had come apart to find some space for himself. There he meets a seriously deranged person living naked among the graves. Cut a long story short, and the bloke is healed and ends up,”clothed and in his right mind!” What got me into the Gadereane Swine story as coming across the grave of pig farming friends of mine. It was not Geoff’s favorite story! I remember a time we had joked about it on the occasion of his pigs being spooked by a hot-air balloon. It was at least ten days before he herded them all up again!   Geoff  loved his pigs and all other living creatures!  W

The pavements are a skating rink this morning. If we were walking to church, it had to be St. Peter's, Belaugh across the frozen meadows and into the face of a bitter wind. Not the snow here that there was in 1947!  Noel Chambers, organist, late of this parish,  was apt to tell all and sundry of snow drifts up to his armpits as he struggled through to play at St. Peter's in that hard winter.  With  population of 134 in 2011 Census, Belaugh was never a large parish. None-the-less, it is rich agricultural land as the large Rectory, with lawns running down to the river, suggests. Belaugh, Old Rectory is the cream building below the church In 1947 it still had its own rector! Now it belongs in a group with 5 others. The church architecture gives some further  clues about the history. Those are a 15th Century tower and windows, but the ghost of something older can be seen a the blocked up 12th century lancet window. Time moves on. No regular services nor congregation here now,  not

 The Beast from the East Mk.2 was promised, so we decided to stay local and make for Coltishall's St. John's Church. It sits on a hummock of a hill above the River Bure. Its good to join the unknown thousands who, over the ages,  made the same journey to worship the one eternal God.  The architecture of the building suggests that people have been saying their prayers on this hill for a thousand years. The little circular windows, originally unglazed,  gave light with a minimum of draft, to the small single cell building that subsequent generations enlarged. They added glazed windows that flood the building with light. The small unglazed circular windows are typical of Saxon architecture and give us the English word "wind eyes" or "windows",  if you like! That is another week with the church empty, the ringing chamber empty, the bells silent and the plinths on the west front still lacking images of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist.  But the ch

  Candlemas Bells, Fair Maids of February, Purification Flowers, Galanthus nivalis - by whatever name  Snowdrops are a promise of spring, the hope of things to come. They match the mood of  the Church's  Candlemas celebration, in which candles are blessed and we recall Jesus' first visit to the Temple in Jerusalem.  The little babe in arms was recognised by the elderly Simeon and Anna as something big! God's special one! The one who would bring healing and peace.  As Simeon says, " A light to lighten everybody - all nations and the glory of  God's  People, Israel."  Luke 2.21 and following. Imagine flame from a lone candle, passing on the fire to other candles, in an ever widening pool of light, across national and cultural boundaries, from one generation to another, across the world, down through the ages, bringing light;  and even now in our own darkness bringing light and setting us aflame to bring that light to the darkness round us. But I digress, it  wa

This week's pilgrimage took me in the opposite direction from last Sunday. In some ways it echoed last weeks walk, going  to  another ancient church, another empty niche and another 15th century tower. All in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. My destination was St. Peter's, Belaugh, through frosty meadows... Belaugh Church's patron was the first Bishop of Rome, St. Peter, the Apostle, the fisherman from Galilee. With a river and a boatyard, I think St. Peter would feel at home in Belaugh. His mate, the chippy from Nazareth, might have made himself useful in the boatyard. When they built this church, a link with Rome was considered , 'a good thing'!  The Pope was head of the Church, Rome was a pilgrim destination, so to have a statue of Peter seemed natural.  The empty niche dates from the Protestant Reformation  in Henry VIII's reign. In a reverse of all that had been, Rome now represented all that was bad in religion; getting rid of the statue seemed the

I was not a happy! It was the Sunday before Blue Monday!  The most depressing day of the year!  Over 89,000 had died from Covid 19.  Intensive care wards were full to overflowing! Staff were exhausted and running on empty! I was not H-A-P-P-Y!  I knew I wasn't!  I was sure I wasn't!  HappyClappy choruses seemed completely empty - completely devoid of meaning! My path took me through the village, past the silent tower of Coltishall Church. Bells have not rung here since March. Once again the ringing chamber was empty of ringers! The church empty of worshippers!  And on the west front, the two plinths that once supported the statues of saints were empty too! I made my wayover the bridge to  All Saints', Horstead.  In normal times, services alternate between Coltishall and Horstead, but on this Sunday both churches were empty! Worship had migrated online!  Still, I walked the miles, "to kneel where prayer has been valid" and to show solidarity with past generations.

 I go to church on Sunday. On foot, if possible. Following in the footsteps of countless others. 10th January 2020 was the Feast of the Baptism of Christ. So I walked to my parish church -  St. John the Baptist, Coltishall. Questions abound: How many generations of Christians were baptised and buried here? On how many Sundays have Christians gathered in this place? How old is the church?  You can catch a  glimpse of the oldest bit of the church from the road. There's the ghost of a quoin in red Roman brick and two double splayer circular wind-eye windows under the eves, by the North Porch. They suggest that this bit of the church was built in 11th or early 12th Century.  By my calculation, that's 900 years X 52 weeks in a year =  468000 Sundays. And very few of those would have been without a service. Even during lockdown the church is being prayed in every week! Find the Facebook Video Here The church may date from the 11th Century, but people may have been gathering here for