Canterbury

From my room in the Cathedral Lodge I look out at the immense bulk of the Cathedral itself. Surrounding it are the various buildings of the close which house the Cathedral school and in which live some of the 300 paid staff of this busy and ancient society. People have lived in intentional Christian community on this site continuously for 1,400 years. Surrounding the close is the town of Canterbury, bustling with students and a few, hardy, out of season tourists. All of it, Cathedral, Close and City wear the patina of age. Houses are crooked and streets are narrow. Ancient fortifications sit jammed against ancient places of worship and ancient dwelling places. There are half timbered houses and walls made of stone or flint and panes of runny distorted glass. And yet there is a strong sense, not of being in a museum, but in an energetic, vibrant modern town.

It is a bit incongruous for someone like me, used to the Historic places trust getting twitchy over minor changes to an 80 year old building, to see 500 year old ones housing pizza joints or tattoo shops or estate agents. This afternoon I went to a pub with David Rice and Ross Bay. From the dozens of cutesy ye olde English alehouses available, we chose, naturally, The Bishop's Finger. It is tiny, it glows suitably with the oak which lines it and which last photosynthesized around the time of the first Queen Elizabeth. It has little tables made from old barrels and a range of good English beers, and a row of pokie machines lined up against one of the walls. It is, like the rest of the town, a functioning, living place which participates in the 21st Century as much as the 16th.

And so, although abbey and it's priory are only metres away I am staying in a very modern, very comfortable room in a very modern, very well designed conference centre whose existence is a sign of the continuing life of this, one of the most significant holy places in the world. There is a pattern of life here, of daily worship, reflection and community life which I have been assimilated into and for which I feel a peculiar sense of ownership. Here is the central point of my tradition. I am very thankful to be here.

Comments

Anonymous said…

'The White Hart' a short walk from the Cathedral has a good beer garden as well.
If you're free on Sunday, why not come along to St Mary Bredin Church on Old Dover Street - large and very lively.

Brian

3 February 2011 at 23:02

Anonymous said…

Also the central pint of your tradition.

4 February 2011 at 21:49

Casino New Zealand said…

The White Hart is a well recognized part of town. I have fond memories there.

6 February 2011 at 02:43

Kelvin Wright said…

Hi Brian. The timetable is a bit tight, but there may be some time late on Monday afternoon

6 February 2011 at 17:16

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...

Kindle

Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on. I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...

Available Light

Search This Blog