The Spirit of London

Months ago, when I saw the advertisment for a London vacation at a price I couldn't refuse, I called long-time friend D'on and asked if she wanted to travel to London for a week. She never hesitated. Her answer was an emphatic YES! We had traveled in England and Scotland for two weeks 15 years ago, and spent all of our time in small towns and out in the country, promising to return to see London later. We never expected it to be 15 years later, but life gets complicated and time evaporates.

It was hard to leave Biloxi two weeks after arriving. I felt guilty for much of the trip about what I had left undone in arranging the Santa Shop and other small projects I had begun. But one thing that this work teaches you is that you cannot manage every aspect of projects. Too many variables interrupt and confuse and things you count on never come to pass. I gave myself the lecture several times, decided to get over my guilt and to enjoy the realization of a long-delayed dream.

One thing became obvious. No matter how many miles you walk in a day, there is more to see in London than you can possibly accomplish in a week. Our pedometers registered 22,000 steps often, and our fatigued feet and legs confirmed what our digital output told us. I saw so many old buildings, beautiful churches and museums that they began to run together in my memory. As I sat down to write the collection of sights and events, I began to find the reflection that pulled together what will remain with me long after the words of my journal entries fade.

Much of what continues to awe me about the buildings in which I sat and walked is the people who had been there before, and the spirit of the place that had changed because of their presence. One of those people is the fictional Jack Aubrey, a creation of Patrick O'Brian. I have been reading through the 17 novels which comprise the adventures of Aubrey and his ship's surgeon, Stephen Maturin for years now. They sail for the Royal Navy against Napoleon Bonaparte and his American allies in the early 19th Century. The world which O'Brian portrays is so complete, that my arrival at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich made me feel as if Aubrey himself was about stride out the door of one of those imposing symmetical facades and click his heels together, sweep his hat under his arm and introduce himself. The orderliness of the layout, the beautiful decoration and proportion of the chapel and painted assembly hall transported me back 200 years, and I found an appreciation of the spirit of the Royal Navy that put me inside it's culture instead of leaving me an observer. The hike up the hill to the Royal Observatory put my feet on the prime meridian and explained finally why a spot in England became the place where time originated. It was an Englishman who finally figured out how to fix your location on the globe by using time rather than by the stars. The spirit of those discoveries and the people who ventured forth to claim all that they enabled saturates Greenwich, even though it is also a lovely little town with shops and pubs and well-dressed 21st century inhabitants out buying Christmas presents and skating in the ice rink rigged between the wings of the Royal Naval College buildings. I was glad we had finally gotten to take the river eastward to appreciate the Thames as a highway for trade and travel, it was a beautful and interesting trip. But Greenwich itself overpowers the day for the immediacy of the past that lives there still.

The same immediacy lives for me in Canterbury. We took a bus trip into the Southeast on Saturday morning to view the Cathedral of Chaucer's tales and the Abbey of Augustine of Canterbury - a historical figure from my Early Church History. Gregory the Great sent Augustine as a missionary from Italy to Britain in 598 CE. We walked the damp grass through the ruins of the old abbey, and viewed the Tudor castle that forms the Northeast wall of the remains. It was interesting. We had made a decision to attend Evensong in the Canterbury Cathedral, wanting to experience it as a worship space first before seeing it as an old building. It was one of the best decisions we made, as the liturgy and song in that ancient space prepared us to approach the remains of the shrine of Thomas a Becket with a reverence that connected me powerfully to those pilgrims whose feet had worn the stone steps to their precarious unevennes. I began to reflect on my own pilgrimages, my own cares that needed to be put down in prayer in this place which had served so many before me as a sanctuary. This building is not just a beautifully porportioned space, or even an inspiring space for worship. It still holds the hopes and dreams of those who have carried their burdens there, and mine are only a small addition to what this place can contain and lift up to God.

The connection that these buildings embodied for me will be the strongest memory of this trip. In those moments, fatigued legs and aching feet faded away in the face of the living spirit of the place. But there was wonderful music in lovely old churches - D'on and I met each other in choir, so hearing choral music together is a special joy - amazing art, and always architecture that layers thousands of years side by side. I'll tell you about that later.