I often wonder what visitors to St Mary’s think as they open the door, step inside and take a few steps into the church. Do they stop for a few seconds, to let the eyes adjust to the darkness; or walk down the aisle towards the glowing colours of the great east window? Do they listen for the small creaks and movements of the building, do they breathe in the smell? Do they look up to the ceiling, marvelling at the great oak beams, or stop to sit in a pew, and let themselves be enfolded in quiet?
Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘Church-going’, written in 1954, describes the experience of going into a church for the first time. He notices matter of fact details, ‘little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut/for Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff/ up at the holy end’. He doesn’t see beauty, he doesn’t feel wonder, or mystery, but embarrassment, taking off his cycle clips ‘in awkward reverence.’ The quiet of the church isn’t the peace made by centuries of prayer, but a ‘tense, musty, unignorable silence.’ Larkin thought that the tide of faith would go out, and that churches would fall into disuse. He thought they’d be abandoned and forgotten, and imagines the very last person ever to go into a church.
How wrong he was! for lots of people come into St Mary’s. Families come in to play in the children’s corner, perhaps waiting to pick an older brother or sister up from school. People come to look around, to read the ledger stones or memorials, to admire the windows. People come to sit, to pray or to think, or to find a place of peace. I often find candles burning without knowing who has lit them in prayer or in memory.
And in contrast to Philip Larkin’s matter of fact list of the things he notices in the church, I believe that what people respond to more than anything else is that St Mary’s is a m building made for worship, a building where for centuries people have joined together with the company of heaven in praise and thanksgiving, a building whose very walls are soaked in prayer.
Towards the end of his poem Larkin admits that despite himself ‘it pleases me to stand in silence here’ and calls the church ‘a serious house on serious earth’ I prefer to think that it is the quiet holiness of the building that people respond to, and that we who worship at St Mary’s, our prayers joining those of all the generations who have worshipped before us, join with the angels to make our church a place where visitors may enter and find respite from their troubles, and peace for their souls.
with my prayers and blessings, Nicola