Norfolk Pilgrim

 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 ...

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...

 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 c...

  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...