Norfolk Pilgrim

 I have not posted much of late. I have been struggling. Between completing the pioneering work on a possible Withburga Way between Holkham and Dereham in the summer of 2022 and today my health has gone downhill in alarming way. I'll never walk the route in a couple of days, nor yet in 3.  I'll never walk it.  The rapid onset Pulmonary Fibrosis has left me struggling for breath putting my boots on let alone walking.  Yesterday, I went to St. Benet's Abbey , ate my picnic lunch in the car park and set myself the challenge of walking from the car park to the Abbey ruins. It is 0.35 miles and uphill all the way from from the Gate House to the old rugged cross that marks the site of the high altar at the summit. The hill looked quite daunting -  "Who can ascend the hill of the Lord?" I sang under by breath. Stopping often to catch my breath, slowly one foot in front of the other, I got closer to the summit. There before the cross, wind in my hair, it felt as i...

 Well! Here am I enabling Easter Sunday at a church where 40 years ago I was rector! Quietly preparing things in church on Saturday night, I had time to reflect on the passage of time. There are a handful of people from the old days, like me older but not necessarily wiser, still part of the church community.  Not all the gaps left by those who have died have been filled. Any replacements are new arrivals in the village.  It appears that none of the baptisms or confirmations in the last 40 years have resulted in new church members.  For me, getting excited in advance of today's service,  the most shocking deficit was the lack of Easter Flowers. From forty years ago there used to be great competition between flower arrangers; and I can still tell you which was Dolly Clarke's window and that Mrs Pettit decorated the font. This Easter Sunday there are silk flowers. That's all!

 Turning left off the Hautbois Road  A path leads past Golden Gates Pond.  Ahead, the tower of  Great Hautbois Church is a silhouette glimpsed through winter trees. Beneath the tower  - Snowdrops,  Candlemas Bells.  We've come to St. Mary's Church to ponder  the Feast of the Presentation.  Did Mary travel to Jerusalem's temple to offer her own her flesh and blood, her baby Jesus to  his Heavenly Father?  Or was it to bring God to his Temple? Whatever was going on she is at the heart of the mystery. Simeon had it right.  The boy child is the light that enlightens the Gentiles but the 2 turtle doves were just a down-payment. More would be given.   Candlemas - one last look back to Christmas before turning our faces towards Passiontide and Good Friday.  And a sword certainly pieced Mary's soul when she stood by the cross.  In real time, fast military jets manoeuvre overhead and a war torn world comes into shar...

  The 1851 Religious Census -  measured bums on seats.  i) The Parish of Horstead -  with a gracious Rectory, extensive walled gardens and a late medieval tithe barn was a good living .  Forming part of the endowment that established King's College Cambridge, it provided a comfortable post for former fellows.  It was a rule in the university, not repealed until 1877,  that fellows were required to be Church of England clergy and unmarried. For colleges to have a number of g ood livings to which fellows could retire and continue their studies in relative comfort was the norm.   Since the 16th C Horstead had been combined with the neighbouring parish of Coltishall  Often served by a curate, the tithes from the parish went into the college's coffers.   On the 30th May 1851, from a total village population of 595, church attendance had been 50 in the morning and 70 in the afternoon.  In addition there had been 60 Sunday Schol...

A Wobbly  Three-Legged Stool Leg 1 - The Recent Past Through Rose Coloured Spectacles  In living memory,  each of the churches in our rural group of parishes had competent organists,  robed choirs and their own vicar!  At Harvest Festival there were displays of produce, flowers everywhere. The flowers and decorations at Easter and Christmas were lavish and the pews were full! Leg 2 -  The Medieval Church (as imagined since the Victorian restorations*)  The churches were full and thriving! Leg 3  -  The Present Reality 150 years on from the Victorian restorations,  usual Sunday attendance is less than 2% of the population. The weight of Church structures - both buildings and organisational structures - are becoming too heavy for the remnant to carry. Wobbly? I'd say! Time to take bearings!  *  So widespread were the restoration/remodelling of church buildings in 19th C - placing organ and choir stalls in the chancel with the al...

  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 o...

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 ignore...

 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 Archbish...

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 Ro...

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 Constatin...

  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 we...

 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...