LONG STANDING STONES

Sammy and I had to go and collect some wood today from our old church building. Pretty soon it’s going to be knocked down, and so over the course of the last few weeks it has been stripped to a shell, ready for the bulldozers and demolition men.

I find the demise of buildings both fascinating and sad. Once bright and vibrant colours are reduced to tired greys; paint and plaster flakes away, and ceiling tiles crack and crumble. This building never got to the stage of daylight-through-the-roof but you can see how time might have worked its way eventually.

With no chairs or fittings, with no staging left, or art on the wall, with no wood along the window sills or hand rails, the shell echoed in a way it never had before. The carpet, still there but faded and thick with dust seemed like a wasteland for the final bits of strewn papers and wood. It was all very empty, very lifeless.

I thought of the abbey ruins. In our town, a great medieval abbey once stood. A king is even buried there. Since the Sixteenth Century though, the abbey, reformed by Henry VIII, was eventually ransacked and ruined. Now it is great stone walls, covered in moss; vast eroded sections of chapter house, nave and dormitorium, left to time and open skies.

Our little church was given much less time, and won’t be left to the skies. I could see though today, that long decay has its ways, and given that this was our abbey in our lifetime, it did make me feel sad.

It’s being rebuilt from the ground up. Though the old is going, the new will be great. And it’s the right time.

We collected the wood we needed (it’s for art, apparently) and we left by the back door, locking it up and driving off the same way we have for twenty years, just as if we’d be back there next week.

You know, in the abbey, sometimes you can feel the stones. It’s as though eight hundred years wasn’t quite enough time to pull the prayer-soaked walls down, or erode the worship of dedicated monks who believed in God’s house and God’s presence. There was a last day when they gathered. Now, some things remain.

That’s what I hope will be true of our shell too - even as it goes through a rebuilding. Long-standing stones that heard our prayers, the ground on which we knelt in worship, the sky above the roof where we cried to God, all testifying to lifetimes of goodness and wonderful stories of faithful people.

It’s a good thought isn’t it?