Thoughts beside an Ancient Church.
Church buildings are temporal memorials to eternal truths.
They are built to mark out and protect a space where the people of the local community can gather for worship and prayer, but their purpose is not just utilitarian shelter, even when the people of the church are not gathered there the building stands as a testimony to the presence of God. Church buildings mark in stone something which seemingly cannot be touched yet can be experienced vividly. Like the memorials in the church yards that surround them, they silently speak of eternal love. In that sense church buildings are sacramental, that is they are visible signs of God’s grace. Love cannot be touched unless embodied, in flesh, or stone, or bread, or some other gift, remember - “Do this in remembrance of me”.
Love is astonishingly visceral for something that cannot be nailed down.
However, temporal memorials to eternal truths decay, unlike the truths they proclaim they are subject to time. To me this is what makes them so beautiful and fascinating. The wear of wind and rain on sandstone walls. Rust on iron railings. Wooden gate posts bleached silver-grey by the sun. Time worn tokens of humanity’s struggle to sign post eternity.
“Change and decay in all around I see:
O thou who changest not, abide with me!”
The most ancient church buildings by virtue of the passing of great spans of time seem to suggest both timelessness by their continuity, and subjection to time by their decay.
The path they signpost is Jesus, he is the way to life in this world and the next.
Jesus reveals how things really are.
In him we see united both temporal and eternal, the Son of God become the Son of Man, the Word made flesh. He was subjected to mortality, to the wear of aging and effort, under the heat of the sun he sweated and tired, and at the cross he bled and died.
Died and rose again.
And so shall we.
And so shall all creation.
The great river of time set flowing by God empties not into oblivion but into the eternal sea before the heavenly throne where all things born of love are kept in love.
Love lives on in God, as the disciple John wrote, “God is love, and those who live in love live in Him, and He in them.”
“We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
Yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine.”
The eternal love of God flows through creation carrying everything born of love through death into new life. We may see change and decay even in those signs we fabricate to point to eternity, but through Jesus we can see that eternity shines through, as the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote,
“Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God…”
Life and love overcome change and decay.
Even in us, even in us who are so afraid that we walk in the valley of the shadow death and fear evil, even in our mortal frame He can work redemption and bring us to eternal life in this world and the next.
Pictured, St Peter's Dalby, looking astonishingly lovely in the dappled afternoon sunlight, and a couple of items that speak of time passing – an iron window frame, and a seemingly handmade notice board for all those important official communication the Parochial Church Council has needed to put up over the years.
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