Thanks for the birthday good wishes. I spent the day on a steam hauled train , travelling around Kent, remembering the armistice and offering me a chance to visit Canterbury Cathedral
It was coincidental that we visited the Cathedral on a controversial day for the Church of England. I noticed prelates in earnest conversation and learned later of the publication of a report into historical sex-abuse under the Church’s watch.
My experience was different, we had come to the Cathedral to worship and we spent a beautiful hour in the crypt doing just that. To know that our prayers and singing were layered on 1500 years of spiritual engagement , we had to be there and that is what a pilgrimage is. It may be a weak pilgrimage involving little given up but it seemed to us at the time that we were connecting with those who had come before.
I have limited time for considerations of historical incidents such as the murder of Thomas Becket. The pillars of the crypt are individually carved by masons over the centuries and bear testament to an enduring yearning for something more than the political machinations we read about in history books and see on the stage. Whatever is going on in the Church of England today is parochial and secondary to its monuments of faith. It carries our nation’s spiritual heritage across reformations and wars and to this day it allows people like me and my partner to make pilgrimage to its holy places.
As we swept back to London we travelled over Dover and Folkestone , the train plunging down to the sea between. We could see France in the distance as the sun broke through after many cloudy days. The carriage was full of elderly people, some of whom had worked on the railways and were revisiting days of their youth when steam still predominated.
One of my close relatives, who is gravely ill, phoned from her hospital bed – using Whatsapp and the hospital wi-fi. She is 92 and survived great hazard in the second world war. We talked of peace and the peace she is finding as she struggles with a failing heart.
So the day will be memorable to me as a day of remembrance and recognition that in the Garden of England there is a deep connection with the past, with Europe, with our spiritual heritage and with an ineffable goodness that supersedes the foibles of individuals or the laxities of governance of any institution.
In case anyone has doubt that we have lost our spirituality, I would suggest they attend a Nick Cave concert next time he and the Bad Seeds come around. Or that they take the train to Canterbury, walk through the West Gate and worship at this City’s great shrine to mankind reaching out.