Within a day’s hike from my house in a quiet corner of Kent, there are at least four ruined or abandoned chapels. My father, a retired Anglican clergyman who likes to keep his hand in, takes a regular service in a church that dates back eight centuries. An hour’s drive across the county brings you to the spectacular remains of St Mary’s, Reculver, which was begun almost 1400 years ago after St Augustine converted the Kentish kings at the start of his mission to the Anglo-Saxons.
When I lived in Oxford, it took barely an hour to stroll out along the Thames to the ruins of Godstow Abbey, a nunnery dissolved by Henry VIII which has been gradually falling down for 400 years since being badly damaged in the English Civil War. In the very centre of the city, at St Michael at the Northgate, you could drink coffee and browse books at the foot of a tower that was completed before the Norman Conquest.
Christianity has left a mark in the British landscape, just as it has in our laws and culture. Even non-Christians feel the draw of locations where prayer has been valid. Consider the vast crowds who visit cathedrals each year, and the steady stream of visitors to even the most humble of parish churches. It’s not uncommon when perusing visitor books to come across phrases like “such a peaceful, prayerful spot” or “a wonderful place to just sit and be still”.
The feeling of reverence that some doubters and sceptics have for such places has never been more beautifully expressed than in Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going”. Larkin was nobody’s idea of a devout Christian, but it’s hard to dissent from Peter Hitchens’s view that he was, “without meaning to be, and indeed while meaning not to be, a great religious poet”. At the core of “Church Going” is the insight that churches cannot and will not cease to be places of meaning and exploration, even if they are no longer used for organised Christian worship, “Since someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious”.
The physical fabric of Christian England acts as a reminder that Christianity is an old faith that draws on powerful springs – what CS Lewis allegorises in the Narnia books as the “deeper magic from before the dawn of time”. The speed of modern communications, and particularly the rise of social media, has made all of us very vulnerable to becoming overly immersed in What’s Going On Right Now. But to step into the cool, quiet interior of an English parish church, or to look up at the soaring vaults of a cathedral, can help us overcome those unhealthy impulses. As the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott once said: “I’ve always thought the need to know the news every day is a nervous disorder.” We can gain consolation from occupying the same space in which people far distant from us in time and language and experience have heard the same prayers, the same chants, the same hymns.
There are also lessons to be learned for Christians from the rootedness of an ancient church building. We have grown used to hyper-mobility, to having a huge range of choices about where we live and work. It is not hard to see how this might militate against the creation of a settled Christian community, of the kind which has been the norm for most Christians in most places throughout history, and which is clearly envisioned by most of the biblical writers and the Church Fathers (and by St Benedict, too, in his original Rule).
In an age when Christians will perhaps be limited in the careers they can choose, the places in which they can work, the universities and schools they can attend and to which they can send their children, they may rediscover the importance of staying in a place, devoting themselves to it and making a strong, close community. Having an edifice which has been part of a constant Christian presence for many lifetimes could be a potent psychological aid to this.
There seems, too, to be a link between building and ritual. Liturgies and traditional practices act as an anchor: they remind congregations of their adherence to the Creeds; that they are part of something much greater which should not be lightly rejected or tampered with. Solidity, routine and sacraments help to build strong Christians. The physicality of churches emphasises that faith is not some kind of gnostic spiritualised thing, but is closely concerned with the material creation and with the lives of people who have bodies.
Doubtless many of the millions who visit churches have no real spiritual purpose in doing so – they are the “ruin-bibbers, randy for antique” whom Larkin gently teased in “Church Going”. They are not seeking or expecting an awakening or insight. But there will be others who find something more profound in these places, where heaven and earth meet.
A general view of St Mary’s Church, where guests can pay to stay overnight in what is known as ‘champing’, is pictured in Edlesborough, Buckinghamshire on September 2, 2019. (Photo by GLYN KIRK / AFP via Getty.)
This article first appeared in the February 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.
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