From one of the west windows a finger of light slowly moves across the floor, marking time on the foot-worn stones. The church is Georgian, plain walls and unstained windows. I'm sitting opposite one of the south windows, the simplest possible gothic arch elegantly divided into two interior arches, no flamboyance, pure grace.
Beyond the glass, branches swaying in the evening breeze as a still-bright sky pales to grey, while a fractured reflection of the window under which I sit suggests winter branches hiding among the summer leaves. We call it tracery, but it's hard not to see the analogy with trees, an image I know I've used more than once…and maybe that's part of the point?
SS Cyriac & Julitta's has the plainest of interiors. Walls are bare or pale-washed. Details picked out in colours that make me think of animals: salmon pink, dove grey, duck egg blue. The heavy dark entrance way under the mediaeval tower gives way to light and space in the unadorned knave & aisles of the 19th century rebuild. Two tiny side chapels have been pressed into modern use as a kitchen and a store room. The cruciform floor plan is completed by the tiny sanctuary at East end, which echoes the darkness of the entrance that it faces. The bright modern panelling fails to lift the defaced and flaking paintings of the Ten Commandments, The Apostles Creed and the Lord's Prayer – sad relics sitting as they do scarred by peeling plaster and scratched graffiti.
I'm told that it's common for Georgian churches to have such a small sanctuary because preaching was then more important than the communion service. The acoustics would lend themselves well to a fire and brimstone preacher, every sound from a throat clearing cough to the creak of the camp chair to soft scrape of the pen on the page resonates…not quite an echo, but the hint of reverberation.
And yet…despite knowing that this has always been a parish church – albeit one loved and left at different times, favoured over or losing out to St Mary's with whom it shares a church yard as fortunes changed – despite the grandeur of its exterior and the quintessential yew & cedar tree'd graveyard, despite its central place in the village street, overlooking Englishness every which way, somehow it doesn't feel so very much CofE to me. Without its benches and pews, devoid of all internal embellishment (save those modern painted highlights), it feels to me more like a Quaker meeting house - a place not to preach of hell and damnation, but one in which to sit in silence and be with your god. Was it always this simple, I wonder? Or were these walls once swimming with the saints and carved memorials to the long forgotten of the parish?
Sitting in silence is largely why I'm here.
This is my second Champing trip and unlike the first it has a purpose. It is intended as a mini-retreat, a point of reflection. As I near the end of a year and half in which my 'day-job' has essentially been redesigning my life, and more specifically my home, project-managing a clearance, salvage and renovation project (which makes it sound more grand that it really is, but is true to the essence of what has been involved) I am conscious that this phase is drawing to its close and all of the externalities of moving on will soon be complete. I have got through these months by often looking back, looking at where I started, measuring the progress. Logging tiny details, mini-achievements, planning the next step, fretting about what might go wrong, being grateful when it didn't, but mostly always remembering to look back. "Look how far you've come" was a phrase I often used in my manager days when team members were feeling inadequate or unconfident. We do all need to stop and remember: we have covered that ground behind us.
But also, there is a time to stop doing that. A time to stop validating on the basis of what we've achieved. Too many pats on the back will result in nothing other than a sore back. There is a time to start looking forward again. To plan, to dream, to start something new…
I must have been looking forward during this year or none of what has been achieved would have been, but I'm also conscious that there has been a horizon beyond which I wasn't willing to look. That horizon is now frightfully close, and if I step up I will be able to see beyond it.
This retreat was intended to enable me to mark the line, from looking back to looking forward.
I'm not sure whether I envisaged myself sitting here making plans or poems…as it is I find that I'm just surrounded by a peacefulness which encourages me not to think at all.
And maybe sometimes "not thinking" is what we need to do. Maybe the space between looking back and looking forwards is a period in which we stop trying to look at all, a brief space in which we just follow the old wisdom and let it be.
~ ~ ~
