Returning to the begining

The Phillip's family have arrived in Ilkley and unpacked. We have left the cutlery in deepest darkest Oxfordshire, but I suppose you can not have everything. It is arriving by Ordinand courier service on the way to her retreat next week. So all is not lost in the long term. We have been made to feel most welcome and we are beginning to feel very settled already.

What we could not have predicted when we moved, was how soon we would be making a return to the place where this journey all started. Not just once but twice in the space of two days. There are many beautiful and God filled places in the North East.  They are multitudes of awesome places to find silence and prayer amid the beauty of God's creation. However there is one point of pilgrimage that people around the world flock to. It was here in this magnificent cathedral, that towers over city, castle and hill that this journey began.

We have spent nearly all of our married life living in the beautiful city of Durham. It has an allure to it that I have only found in one other city (St David's). Despite being a city, it is like a small village full of people you know and who know you. Despite being away for over three years, I was able to walk through the streets and bump into people and converse with them like I had never left. Indeed, I suppose part of me never really did. It was a wrench to leave Durham. It was the place of our first house, our marriage and the birth of all our children. It is already a place that many people who settle there feel hard to leave, adding those events made it seem all the harder. However we have covered my tendency to get attached to places in previous posts and I am digressing. 

We were called to go back to the seat of St Cuthbert so soon by particular circumstances caused by our current move. We had not returned during the entire three years of my husband's training. The Cathedral stamps a mark on Durham from almost whatever direction you enter the city, making even the castle seem tiny. It is a building of towering beauty that is strong but also peaceful and is a towering witness to the awesomeness of God standing over the City.
Coming back after three years this is what struck me the most. I had worshiped there for many years and it had become part of the woodwork for me and did not seem exceptional. However on returning, walking through the door, seeing the Rose window radiating it's light at the end of the vast expanse of nave. I was truly humbled. It is a space that is just full of the presence of Christ. Even among the mid week low rumble of school visit chatter, tourist fascination and pilgrim prayer, the presence is tangible and it is a building full of grace, peace, love and wisdom. Walking around the staff have changed very little since I was last there, neither have the clergy. It is a truly special place that retains staff in this way. Though time has passed and things have changed (they have completely changed the shop for instance), it is like a little piece of life that time forgot. It stays comfortingly the same because of the wisdom and godliness of the people who serve there. It was truly special to go back and share the beginning of the next step with the people who nudged, encouraged and believed in my husband in the first place.
God is always there towering over our lives. Like the magnificent building built for us to find him in, his presence is always there stamping it's mark on our lives. We can choose to walk past the wonderful beauty, strength and peace, or we can choose to seek it. We can choose to ignore the timeless unconditional forgiving love or we can choose to embrace. I would suggest that choosing to embrace it would vastly improve our lives. Not make them simple or easy, in fact in many ways it involves a great deal of sacrifice. Through those sacrifices though we develop wisdom and gain inordinate amounts of peace and love, which we can in turn reinvest in the people and lives around us. 

Home is where............

I am not unused to a transient lifestyle, as I have said before we have moved several times before. However prior to coming here we had stayed put for longer than ever before. Now after three years here and the reality of only three/four years somewhere else the reality that I am going back to a transient lifestyle for the rest of my life has hit. Don't get me wrong I am not adverse to moving, in fact I quite like it. It is always an adventure, this time more than most as I have not even seen the house I am moving to. I do have one hitch in the moving plan though. I get attached, to quickly to the places that are around me. Somehow it feels every time like I am up and leaving a part of who I am. No matter how hard I try not to I invest every part of me in where I am at that point, I always do. So I am at the moment an emotional gibbering mess (what's new you ask?).

I am slowly coming to the conclusion though that what makes me attached to the people and places I grow to love is not my proximity to them but the changes they effect in me. There have been many people and places in my life that have had profound effects on me. Being a passionate person these are very rarely moderate changes but huge big ones. The first was a long time ago whilst at boarding school, the Nuns and the school Chapel.

At a time when for many personal reasons I was vulnerable, they provided me with a stability  I would not have otherwise had. This time in my life is very much the foundation of who I am. I have realized over this last year, you can take the girl out of the Roman Catholic Church but you can not remove what it is to be essentially Catholic. When I left this school, it was a most difficult time for me, all I had and knew collapsed, as indeed did my Faith.
It has been a long a round about journey back to where I am today. My mother always said you return to the worship you began with. I think she desperately hoped that would be the Salvation Army. Her spiritual home. However, for me the routine of the Daily Office, the sharing of The Body of Christ at Mass, the reflection of Benediction and the theological ideals of what it means to be a Catholic Anglican is where I have found my home. It is not where I started, it is not where my Mother would have seen me and certainly I am not in the Convent as the Nuns had foretold. But I have found many places of Sanctuary in Oxford. Each has given me back a bit of what I have lost through my past. Yesterday I was sad as I said Goodbye to one, today however I rejoice in the fact that I am not leaving it behind. I am taking it with me, for it has changed me. As long as I take that change in my heart and carry on what has been started, I am taking it with me.
So much of what God gives us it is easy to leave behind. The gifts and opportunity left in our paths are easily dismissed. It is easy to walk away, I know I have been guilty of it many times. God knocks on our door and say "Who me, are you kidding?" It has certainly been tempting to say that this time. To stay firmly in the places that have taught me to be at peace with my self and my beliefs, it would certainly be the easy option. But I think to stay would be to waste the gifts that have been placed before me. So this time, I am taking home and God with me, to make a new home with the old one as a foundation. So I guess what I am saying is home (and God) is where your heart has been and where your heart is yet to go.