This weekend sees the Ride and Stride, the main fund-raising event for the Shropshire Historic Churches Trust, that provides grants for the repair of the old churches and chapels within the county; we get no money for this from the state or the diocese. Some see our old churches as a barrier to mission; we spend energy preserving stone and mortar that would be better spent proclaiming the Gospel. I disagree; we underestimate the power of God to work through a sacred space to our peril, to our folly. This is an extract from the poem “Little Gidding” by T.S. Elliot, as he reacts to the ancient church and shrine at Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire, a place hallowed by devotion.
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
Rev David Poyner