Church Crawling

A pilgrimage of sorts

Have you heard of church crawling? It’s kind of like pub crawling but without the booze. Church crawlers spend their leisure time seeking out and visiting churches, often in out of the way places, and often without any certainty that they will be open to view. Sometimes you end up wandering round the outside of a church in the rain, peering through windows in the hope you will catch a glimpse of something inspirational.

The time I got hooked on this was when I visited a remote church at Bewcastle in Cumbria, north of Hadrian’s wall. It’s in the middle of nowhere, so remote there is no mobile phone signal, and it’s built within an old Roman fort. It was a beautiful, if freezing, day and the sight on emerging from the car was astounding. It’s hard to get the scale of this cross pillar (the head lost long ago) but it’s several metres tall and stunning. The church next to it was not quite as inspiring, having been rebuilt several times since, but the cross has been standing there since the late 7th century and that’s quite something.

I’ve seen a great many more churches since then, and all are memorable in their own way. Generally I am not alone when engaging in this activity, but last summer I went on a work trip and had the opportunity to church crawl alone. The last few days were over the weekend and so I spent them alone, talking only to hotel receptionists or shop assistants. It was therefore a very silent time and an opportunity for reflection.

These days, when we travel, the destination is the key, and we endure the actual travelling as a kind of means to an end. In the medieval period, the travelling was an end in itself and part of the spiritual experience. We still see this today with the Camino across Spain to the shrine of St James at Compostela, but rarely elsewhere.

So my solo pilgrimage offered me a good deal of time for silent pondering; when travelling you are thrown into an unfamiliar life in unfamiliar surroundings, experiencing new things but on a pilgrimage the ultimate goal is to end up at a shrine to pray for a particular intention. I didn’t have any such goal in mind but by the time I reached my journey’s end I was not the same person as I had been at the start.

What changed? Firstly, my immersion in silence (interior largely) taught me that much of what we think and say is superfluous and that we should aim to exist at a deeper level. Secondly, the many churches I visited were crafted by devout hands who wanted to give glory to God and express something of the ineffable qualities of the deity. Their art and architecture is beautiful; moreover some had a stillness and silence which went beyond the simple absence of noise and spoke to the depths of the heart. It’s impossible to put into words, but everyone should try it - being in a building such as Bosham (below) which has been the place of worship for over 1000 years puts you outside the normal boundaries of time and in touch with the eternal.