a short walk from Swanwick

a short walk from Swanwick

June 22, 2010, 1:38 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cycling, pilgrimage, resources, walking

I spent last week in Derbyshire at the Bishop of Birmingham’s Conference for Clergy.

I am pondering how this fits in with this blog’s theme of pilgrimage.  Two physical elements stand out.  A couple of us cycled there and back, starting from Birmingham Cathedral at 5.30am on Monday.  As one of the voluntary workshops on Wednesday afternoon, I took ten colleagues for a four mile walk into the countryside.  This fitted the need to get outside and away from a very full programme of talks and discussions.  We agreed to walk for about half an hour while talking, then to have half an hour’s silence, and then to talk again.  The silence was profound.  It is interesting (and I suppose obvious) that we pay far more attention to our surroundings when we are not listening to each other.  At first, people spread out to be alone but, as time went on, we bunched up close in quiet and attentive companionship.

Here is a handout I gave everyone:

A Four Mile Walk from Swanwick

Directions

• From the entrance to the Hayes, walk down the drive.  Climb the stile on the right and walk through field.
• Turn right onto track.
• Follow track round to right and take path signposted to Golden Valley.
• Walk under the first railway bridge and then turn right under the second.
• Keep ahead to cross railway track.
• Take the left fork uphill.
• At farm, bear left through wood, following Path 4.
• Turn left onto road.
• Turn right at t-junction along quiet lane.
• After 3/4 of a mile, take Footpath 18 on the right (opposite road junction and past transport depot).
• Bear left.
• Cross railway line and fork right.
• Cross the tracks next to Butterley Signal Box and follow path to right.
• (There is supposed to be a path to the left leading directly to the Hayes – if it is obvious and I missed it, follow it to the Hayes!).
• Follow railway to Swanwick Junction.
• Descend and cross tracks.  Go up steps and through station.
• Head for tin chapel, passing to its right.
• Climb gate to cross tracks and pick up path back to the Hayes.

What might God be trying to say to you on and through this walk?

What are you thankful for?

What thoughts and prayers does the walk prompt?

Does the walking make you pray?  How?

How do you engage with the beauty of the countryside and with the stark industrial impact upon it?

How are you grateful?

How are you one of God’s pilgrim people?

Sing Alleluia and keep in walking  (Augustine)

Put on your travelling shoes and jump into the arms of God (Meister Eckhart)

The meaning is in the waiting (RS Thomas)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil ;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod ?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod ;

And all is seared with trade ; bleared, smeared with toil ;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell : the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent ;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things ;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah ! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

On the Camino in Spain, I gradually discovered that the walking becomes the praying.  Alan Ecclestone describes the pilgrimages of Charles Peguy to Chartres: A pilgrimage gets to the holy place at last but what gives it its part in prayer is the slamming down of ones feet to complete the journey while praying the while for all its features.  In putting one foot in front of another, in the tiredness, in the blisters, in the being at one with myself, the landscape and God, in the mind quietening, in all this, walking, pilgrimage itself, became prayer.

Happy are the ones who are able to tread transitional paths, scarcely looking to left or right and without distinguishing an end.

Patrick White

For everything I felt a love

The weeds below, the birds above

John Clare

If you wish to be sure of the road you are travelling,

close your eyes and walk in the dark.

- John of the Cross

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