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.

London is Fabulous

I'm not sure my legs know what happened to them. We walked The City yesterday looking at Christopher Wren churches and buildings, the Bank of England, the Guildhall of the City of London, and other assorted monuments. We found the Lutheran Church of St Agnes and St Anne, which happened to be having a noon concert of a Bach Cantata. We grabbed a sandwich and cup of soup and ate there. Fabululous.

Today we spent a few hours at the Tate Modern, maybe the best contemporary art museum I have every seen. This evening we were at a Christmas concert benefit for the Blue Cross, like the Red Cross for animals. It was held at St Peter's Eaton Square, one of the ritzyest neighborhoods in London. My daughter Rachel sent us there because Anthony Stewart Head, also known as Giles on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was doing one of the readings. She is quite the fan, and when she heard I was going to London, she checked via the internet for an ASH sighting for me. The concert was quite nice, and we enjoyed it- and getting to know a different part of town. It was quite a change from our ethnically diverse Portabello Road neighborhood with all its ethnic restaurants.

Tomorrow is a river day, with a trip down to Greenwich to stand on 0' longitude and then a chance to wander Westminster Abbey before a Carols by Candelight concert at St Martin in the Fields. If there's time, I still want to see more paintings at the Tate with all the Turners. But we are finding that time flies much faster than we expect. I think that's the sign of having a very good time.

London

Greetings from London. I landed this morning, took the train from Gatwick airport to Victoria Station and then took a taxi to my hotel on Bayswater Road, across the street from Hyde Park. It is wonderful to be here. It is so.....so....English. Driving on the scary wrong side of the road and turning into the wrong lane is just the beginning of how different things are here. This must be the most diverse city in the world. You hear every kind of language passing by you on the street, including nearly unrecognizable versions of your own. Who ever said we speak the same language?

Friend D'on got delayed by bad weather in Chicago and was rerouted through JFK to Heathrow, I met her at our hotel hours later. Our window looks out over Hyde Park, and our hotel room is quite comfortable, except that they put the light switches in the weirdest places. We are beginning to figure it all out. We are blocks from the Portabello Road market, which has market stalls on the street every day and the huge antique sales on Saturday. We walked today through that neighborhood and the adjoining Notting Hill neighborhood - which actually is on a hill. Who knew? Tomorrow is tour day, and planning all the other things we want to see and do for the rest of the week. I'll have pictures in a day or so. See you then.

Quilts

It has been really cold here, for Biloxi, I mean. It got down around 26' Thursday night. I wondered why I had no water in my little RV when I flushed the toilet at 5:00 am. It took awhile for me to figure out that it was because the hose that hooks me up to the water supply was frozen. And when I got dressed it felt like my underwear had been kept in the freezer. It was still pretty cold during the day, and I took an application for help from a woman who needed jackets for her children. We have a voucher arrangement with a thrift store down the street that would help with the jackets. When I found out that she also needed bedding, I offered her some sheets and quilts from our supply. The quilt supply was getting pretty low. I went into Judy's office to tell her, and she assured me that contributions of bedding were already on the way.

Within minutes, she got a call from someone looking for blankets. It seems that the FEMA Village about 2 miles away from us had lost power during the morning. A transformer had cut out. There was no heat in the trailers, and the woman on the phone wanted to know if we had blankets. Not really. Not anymore. Six of us sat down and prayed for blankets. Judy decided that we should use some of the Wal-Mart cards we keep for emergencies and buy blankets to last until our supply arrived. We thought that several hundred dollars worth of blankets would last until the emergency was over. Lisa, the Medical Administrative Assistant and I dropped everything to hop into my car and drive to the largest Wal-Mart nearby. We found comforters on special; Twin size for $15 and Queen/King size for $25. We loaded up three baskets with 7 Twin-size and 7 Queen-size comforters and got into the check-out line. Suddenly it occured to me that I had automatically hopped into my own little Honda Civic instead of taking one of the Suburbans or the Dodge Caravan. My Honda was still full of my books, jackets, a suitcase with summer clothes and the long carrier with my alb in it. I looked at the comforters stacked over the tops of the baskets. "How will we get all these blankets in my little car?" I said to Lisa. She smiled. "Do you think that if the Lord can send us the blankets we need, he can't get all these comforters into your car? They'll fit." It looked impossible, even beside the car, but after moving bags around in the trunk and squishing the comforters into the smallest possible spaces, We got them all in. The top one popped out of the trunk when we opened it up, and the back seat was piled to the ceiling. But they were all there.

The word got out quickly, and even when we limited the distribution of comforters to one per family, we were down to one quilt at the end of the afternoon. It was about 5:30 when the phone rang again about blankets. Judy had been on the phone most of the afternoon, looking for blankets and the manager of the warehouse that supplies many of the relief efforts was on the phone. He heard that we needed blankets and he had a supply. "How many do you need?" Judy explained the situation. "Would 100 be enough?" he asked. "Bless you. You are the answer to our prayers." The blankets were delivered a couple of hours later. Some of the blankets are thick lambswool that would keep anyone warm, and some are heavy cotton jacquard. We haven't opened all the boxes yet, but this is a wonderful beginning.

The Faith Business

All these years I thought I knew what it meant to live by faith. I didn’t know anything about it. But I think I am learning about the faith business now. Bethel was planning a Santa Shop for Christmas. Parents would be able to come and pick out new, donated toys for their children’s Christmas, and children would be able to choose gifts for their parents from shirts, socks, cosmetics and other donated items. There was one small problem. The huge truckload of toys from churches in South Carolina turned out to be only a small portion of a truckload.

We had applications for 132 children to receive toys from the Santa Shop, and barely enough toys to fill those requests. We went into the sanctuary to pray about the situation. How could we tell families we were not able to live up to our promises of Christmas gifts? Last Christmas was so chaotic; this will actually be the first Christmas celebration after the storm for many. As we read through the applications we came to understand in a new way how the smallest material things can make a big difference to those who have lost everything.

We contacted another site to see if we could work together to deliver the promised shopping opportunities. We were overjoyed to hear that they had a pile of donated toys and lots of money and would be glad to send it all to our Santa Shop. It was my job to meet with their site director. I came away heartsick. There were no toys, only a promise of a huge truckload (where have I heard that before) to be delivered about 3 days before the event. The cash is only promised, too, as are the matching funds. I have been in business way too long, I guess, because all I could see was an empty warehouse and a lot of customers who would be disappointed. Those kids were counting on us.

Our volunteer coordinator smiled at me when I told her my story. “What do you think?” I asked, “You have been in the faith business, but I have not. Should I worry?” She didn’t answer. But that afternoon, a giant bag of Beanie Babies arrived from a doctor at the VA hospital who heard that we were planning a Santa Shop. Then two women volunteers arrived to cook for us this week bringing five trash bags packed with Beanie Babies. Tonight another site called to say that they had several big boxes of donated toys, and they would drive them over to us. I sent out an e-mail to our support network explaining our need for people to adopt families and support our Santa Shop and within an hour we received an e-mail from a couple who had volunteered earlier in the year. They are sending money for toys and their congregation will adopt a family. I have a family in mind for them already. I work with people who have seen miracles happen in the last year. I want to be in the faith business, too. I think I am in the right place.