I go to church every day. Sometimes, twice. I don’t go in. No, I never go in. But I go there because they’re beautiful places that poke out of the detritus of town and country and often have benches to sit on and quiet grounds to sit in. The church I walk to every morning at the moment so that Margaret can empty herself and stretch her legs is a couple of hundred yards away. Big and gothic with a splendid tower that spikes into the sky at all corners. I could see it from my desk now if I lean back, poking up, as I said, above the house roofs. But it’s dark and it’s not lit up.
At our last house the church was a little further; about a mile through open country and much more quaint, tucked away as it was in the folds of the Worcestershire countryside. There’s a main train line running right outside the churchyard walls and I used to recall, as I sat on the bench by the south wall, times when I’d been on a train as it flew past and caught the tiniest glimpse of the old place in a thicket of trees; yew and oak.
I thought then about how inconsiderate it was to have built a train line so close to such a venerable place of worship and to have disrupted the peace and tranquillity which it must certainly once have enjoyed, and still did except for when 1420 Birmingham - Worcester thundered past. How sad that the modern world had plonked itself right on the doorstep of an ageless institution and usurped the sacred monument.
Then this morning I visited another of the beautiful little churches that used to walk to, this time when I was a student and had time to walk the five miles from home more often than I could now. Similarly the church is surrounded by yews, some of which are said to date back hundreds of years - perhaps as old as a thousand in some cases. There is no train line for miles around and the lane which passes is mercifully little used, but at the back of the building, hidden in a little gulley and overcrowded with willow and ash, is an old well. A well which, according to legend, had been visited as a holy site for millennia before the arrival of organised religion. It is not the Church that the yews surround, it is the well. Just as the modern need to get from one place to another at breakneck speed on iron rails has usurped many a sacred Christian site, there is a story that runs much deeper and tells of how these Christian churches were plonked right on the spots where people had been going to worship for time immemorial.
In the church itself, under pews and even in the stained glass of the windows there are images of the Green Man and indications of a people who worked the land and worshipped the land for what it gave back. Looked up to the sun and revered its power to make the land productive and feared all other things that couldn’t quite be explained.
Peel back another layer and there is another real story. It is all truth and one does not disprove another. Pyramids of truth, remember.
I found something today that I’ve been looking for for ages. This will be a busy week at school but I’ll get round to the story in good time. It’s worth it because it’s a true one, like they all are.
Felton Black 