After a glorious week in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, exploring places
throughout the Midlands and along the coast, I have most definitely discovered
one thing.
My English roots, that at first seemed separated from me by a great
divide of generations and centuries, are in fact very much near the surface.
It was hard to explain throughout my life why I felt such a pull to
England; I had never before visited and thus had nothing upon which to draw for
a sufficient answer. But the feeling was there nonetheless. There was something
about this place that was calling to me, not audibly or on the surface but in
an internal, very deep way. It would have been very easy to chalk it up to a
desire to experience the history of the place, to wander through villages and
castles and soak up the stories of the men and women who shaped this nation. I
could have pointed and said that I wanted to go because that is the place where
Richard III met his fate or a site where the Vikings camped on their
expeditions across the Europe. This first week, I have been truly blessed to
experience a bit of that history, to stand gazing at the Magna Carta and to walk
through a medieval village abandoned long ago and now tucked quietly and
largely forgotten in a valley in the Moors.
But beyond that, deeper than that, I have experienced in the many
opportunities for worship with my friend Trudy that my calling to this place
has been – all along – a deeply spiritual one.
As an American and an Episcopalian, I still find myself amazed that I
am a member of a denomination that stretches back more than two centuries.
Certainly I am very aware that it grew from the Church of England, but that
connection for me was more a historical rather than spiritual one – something
to read about in my church history courses and simply think, “Oh, that’s quite
nice. We come from a great tradition and we owe them a lot.” But to have an
opportunity to explore those roots, to worship in places that – as Trudy
jokingly but very accurately reminds me – “are older than your country,” is
much more powerful indeed. A connection that before now was somehow missing has
now been made in an extremely powerful and emotional way.
I was reading a newly-written Lenten reflection about Mary, the mother
of Jesus, reminding us that she had been told that because of who her son was,
her heart would be pierced. That is a very apt way of explaining the feelings I
have had with worship this week: my heart has been pierced. Before being
alarmed, it is not a painful piercing, the type Mary experienced. This is a
piercing that has made my heart full, a piercing that has injected me with
something utterly beautiful and almost completely indescribable.
Hearing the majestic sounds of a choir singing Choral Evensong in the
darkened Peterborough Cathedral in the way that it has been done for centuries.
Sitting in the ruins of Whitby Abbey and reading Celtic mid-day prayer in a
place where for nearly 1,500 years men and women prayed and devoted their lives
to nothing more than loving God and living God, the only sounds being their
voices and the crashing off the waves in the North Sea. Joining with three
other people in the cold choir stalls of a 12th century Norman
Church for a service of Holy Eucharist, stripped away of everything except the
words and the elements – and despite those absent parts finding it to be one of
the most meaningful Eucharists I have ever attended. And hearing my friend,
herself following the call of God into a new vocation and soon to be ordained a
priest in the church, read the Gospel and have her voice and those words echo
in the space and then slowly fade and blend into the ancient and communal
memory of the countless voices of those proclaiming God’s word since time
immemorial.
For me, there is a distinction between having roots and being rooted.
My roots are in rural Virginia, in the countryside resting in the shadow of the
Blue Ridge Mountains. There, too, are the roots of my personal faith journey,
in the Episcopal churches I attended in my youth. But I have now seen – have
now experienced – have now lived – the realization that I am rooted in a
church, in a faith, that stretches across the ocean and into cathedrals and
parishes, hidden villages and ruined abbeys. I have not been reminded that I am
rooted downward; experiencing God in this new way has very much shown me that I
am rooted inwardly, held in place by the prayers and voices and worship
of saints and ordinary worshipers.
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