I am still working on my book on the history of Britain’s churches, a book which has taken is taking me much longer to write than I anticipated.
The book is about rediscovering churches, rediscovering, in fact, the idea of sacred spaces. And one of the things I’ve experienced while working on it was how, throughout all my research and writing so far, I’ve felt like I have been treading a path walked by many others before me, albeit in very different ways. Like following a trail through a wood. You write something and then you find that decades, centuries before, someone had the same experience.
For example,years ago when I started, I wrote this in the intro:
The churches which feature in this book are those which have spoken to me, and what I thought they were saying. On the whole, none of these are very grand places. I find that Cathedrals and the so-called ‘greater churches’ don’t so much talk to you as shout.
And more recently, writing about the wonderful little Saxon church at Escomb, I wrote
Many grand churches try to humble us with their size. But small churches humble us through their example. Grand churches proclaim a God of majesty and awe; small churches preach a more intimate relationship with a God who is patient and kind. Great churches overwhelm us; Escomb befriends us.
Then I read this a few days ago in a piece from Edward Thomas
I prefer any country church or chapel to Winchester of Chichester or Canterbury Cathedral, just as I prefer ‘All around my hat, or ‘Somer is icumen in, to Beethoven. Not that I dislike the cathedrals, or that I do not find many pleasures amongst them. But they are incomprehensible and not restful. I feel when I am within them that I know why a dog bays at the moon. They are much more difficult or, rather I am more conscious in them of my lack of comprehension, than the hills or the sea; and I do not like the showmen, the smell and look of the museum, the feeling that it is admiration or nothing, and all the well-dressed and fly-blown people round about.
It comes from his book The South Country published in 1909.
I love that phrase ‘the feeling that it is admiration or nothing’. So now I am devouring Thomas. Which will no doubt just add to the time this is taking…
The Church of St John, Escomb, County Durham