Stopover at Wells Cathedral

This morning, I took the 9.45 National Express coach to Chepstow to rendezvous with my old friend from Bristol University days Mike Wilson, to drive from there together down to the Francican Friary at Hilfield, near Cerne Abbas for a re-union with Brother Raymond Christian SSF, a mutual friend for the past 46 years. Holy Week in 1964 I spent in retreat at Hilfield Friary, with a fellow Bristol student Frank Dall. That was where Brother Raymond Christian and I met and became friends. Later he'd visited Bristol for dental treatment, stayed with us and got to know Mike as well. Raymond and I last met up in Cardiff three years ago, when he was staying with Fr Tristram Hughes, but the last time Mike, he and I were together was when Raymond made his life profession at Hilfield thirty years ago. It's amazing how time whizzes by.

Mike and I arranged to travel down from Chepstow together and stay in Sherbourne overnight before meeting up with Raymond on Tuesday morning, so we took advantage of an unhurried journey to visit Wells Cathedral on the way. I think this may have been my first visit there since 1966, when Clare and I spent another Holy Week there as guests of the theological college, and attended all the services of Holy Week in the Cathedral itself. The detail of that week I hardly remember. We went to church a lot, and heard devotional addresses and sermons each day, but their content is beyond recall. What has lasted is the sense of occasion, the atmosphere, the silences, the exaltation, the fellowship, and the sense being immersed in the mystery of Christ's presence. Since those far off days, observance of Holy Week has always been for me the most special part of the Christian year. I owe my priestly vocation to mission and evangelism to it, and the renewal of my faith in God in many a difficult time.

Wells Cathedral is not as vast as many are of its kind, but is beautifully proportioned in such a way as to convey a kind of intimacy within a large sacred space. The warmth of the stone and the colour of its glass contribute. In recent years a sympathetically designed visitor centre entrance area has been added, and there are some new modern furnishings that reflect changes that have taken place in liturgical usage over the past half century. It's rare to find a Cathedral or a large city church these days which doesn't have a votive candle stand, or for that matter sacred paintings and sculpture, even though these are the kind of things which the reformation targeted as popish abominations. Anglicanism has evolved in a way that has enabled it to reclaim the value of these things in encouraging the piety of the faithful. 

One innovation stands out in my mind, however, and that is the introduction of Byzantine style icons. Wells has quite large icons of Christ, Mary and St Andrew its patron saint. It also has icons of the fourteen stations of the cross painted Byzantine style, although devotion to the way of the Cross wasn't an original Byzantine form of prayer outside of pilgrimages to Jerusalem. My journey of faith has been influenced by Orthodoxy since I first met it, forty eight years ago. It was rare in those days, even in High Anglican churches to see an Eastern icon displayed. Now it's commonplace in churches of all kinds, largely due to the influence of Taizé, but also because young people like me growing up in the post war world discovered this ancient Christian ethos whose mystical approach provided an element of counter culture in the face of the historic Protestant and Catholic confrontation that preceded ecumenical dialogue and partnership.
 

I am happy to think that faithful people will find these icons a way to engage in prayer an mediation. It does depend on how well teaching about them is integrated into the process of catechism - icons are so much more than beautiful pictures from another age, seemingly closer to eternity than we seem to be. It was lovely to observe a large party of school children being accompanied on a tour by their teachers and by the Cathedral's education officer, giving them a taste of the experience to be found in a living sacred place. The liklehood is that they were from a church school, and that the content of the visit will be followed up in the classroom. But what of their parents, I wondered. Will they be sufficiently educated to re-inforce the learning of the day, particular its devotional and spiritual content? Several generations of parents have emerged,  raising children, that missed out altogether on Sunday School, not to mention Religious Education in day school. How much needs to be sustained to turn back the tide of spiritual ignorance today.