Touch, kneel and hold
I’m writing this at my desk in the Close at Bangor, the Cathedral city of north-west Wales. To the south-east of the city lie the vast mountainous ranges of Snowdonia, which long acted as a natural fortress for the Princes of Gwynedd, protecting their lands from English advances; and to the north-west of us wends the Menai Strait and, beyond it, the green arable acres of Anglesey, and beyond them, the Irish Sea, that medieval highway that connected this out-of-the-way part of the world to a Celtic and Danish international economy of goods, people and faith.
Immediately outside my window stands Bangor Cathedral itself. What’s to be seen now is mainly the work of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, improved by Sir George Gilbert Scott in the second half of the nineteenth. But beneath lie the foundations of the Norman church, with its apsidal shrine and chapels at the east end. And, five centuries before those foundations were laid, on this same patch of land, Saint Deiniol established his cell, under the protection of the local prince, and surrounded his enclosure with a wattle fence, a “bangor”, that still gives the city its name a millennium and a half later.
Deiniol was one of many who, during the Age of the Saints that followed the years of Roman retreat, settled near a well, in a glade, at a cave or by a grove in this corner of Wales, and established there a cell, which became a “llan”, a holy gathering place, and thereafter the foundation of a parish church. North-west Wales today is peppered with small, ancient churches that stand on sites hallowed by time, prayer and faithfulness.
My job here, as the Diocesan Secretary, is to support the Diocese of Bangor’s operations, with a particular responsibility for its buildings and finances. For much of this past year, it has felt a little as it might have done when the Irish Sea’s channels brought the Vikings here, or perhaps when Henry IV’s troops arrived to put down Owain Glyndŵr’s rebellion. The pandemic has caused a quiet sort of chaos in the land, upending life, emptying high streets and mountain paths and beaches, and leaving those of us with the care of churches counting the cost.
While our grief must chiefly be reserved for those who have lost their lives to the virus, and for others who have suffered quietly behind closed doors for many months, we can also grieve for the cost the pandemic will have exacted on our parish churches. The challenges of this past year have been especially acute for rural churches. It has been painful to see churchwardens and congregations bowed down by the necessary but onerous demands of adaptations and risk mitigations. The shrivelled tourist economy, and the disappearance of whole year’s worth of fundraising events, mean that both income and engagement have diminished. At a time when parochial infrastructure across the U.K. is already under considerable strain, the pandemic will have flayed away another layer of resilience from many a parish church.
But, standing on the threshold of spring, I am far from comfortless. In part, I’m comforted by the stone and the soil. Our country parish churches have been icons of changelessness across the sea of the centuries. Churches in my part of the world will have withstood Reformation, Civil War, Georgian disinterest, Victorian meddling, nonconformist dynamism, Disestablishment, and all the twentieth century’s societal earthquakes, and still they stand, their roots deep, their simple structures honest, and their survival a source of hope. “This, too, will pass” has been a phrase not far from the tip of my tongue this past year; and, when it does, whatever else has changed, our country parish churches will be there, their ancient robustness a reminder, too, of the deep faith and the unfathomable yearning for God that will have sustained so many of us during these dark days.
I’m also comforted by my confidence that our parish churches will still be needed — and needed in new ways — as we emerge from our confinement. We have lived for months now largely in our heads and on screens. Some of us may well have valued the opportunity for reflection and contemplation; and all of us will have marvelled at technology’s capacity to keep us connected despite the restrictions on movement. But we know that this is not the fulness of life — we are barely human without the physical, the communal, the relational and the gathered. And the parish church, above all other places, is where a community meets, celebrates, mourns and remembers — where a community does together those things it cannot do apart. Just as our faith is not internal, but incarnated, so our very humanity needs the physical and the gathered, the nave and the chancel, the place and the space where the sacred is made solidly real for us.
In the stained glass, in the ancient stone, in the laughter of the village fête, in the candlelight of the carol service, as the coffin stands for a moment under the lychgate, caught between two worlds, God will be glimpsed again on the other side of this pandemic. And the physicality of our parish churches fundamentally allows this grace and truth to be experienced and known. A golden age of the experiential may well lie ahead of us, and our ancient, faithful parish churches will be its beating heart. Do support, do give, do pray, and, as soon as you can, do visit, touch, kneel and hold.
Written for a county historic churches trust’s journal earlier this year.
