I WONDERED how best to place my three “articles of religion” so as; then settled on the chronological order by which each has shaped me spiritually. First, the rosary I used at my mother’s bedside, before she died. Picking it up, most Friday mornings, makes me consider her. But — as with every aid to prayer — the worth just isn’t in the article, but in what it signifies. I even have owned many rosaries, lost some, and had others stolen. But they’re all functional as a toothbrush (getting a job done) or a bus (taking me where I would like to go).
I started praying the rosary as a student, encouraged by a book by the Methodist author J. Neville Ward, which helped to “detoxify the brand”. I wondered then, as I sometimes do now, why my enjoyment of Catholic spiritual practices was not drawing me to Rome. But it never has.
In time, the rosary opened up the lifetime of Jesus spiritually. It transformed my prayer life from solipsistic agonising into something other-centred. I’m still a work-in-progress, spiritually speaking; but learning to hope the rosary was a step-change.
NEXT comes my spiral-bound anthology of Welsh hymns. It is inscribed “Gwyl Dewi Sant [St David’s Day], Little Baddow URC, In appreciation for conducting our annual service on Sunday twenty eighth February 1999”,
I used to be newly ordained then, helping out my parents, who were members of the Chelmsford and District Welsh Society. I continued taking the annual service until 2018. It was an annual step outside my comfort zone, and back in time; for the layout of the little church is identical to that of the Baptist church that I began attending in my late teens. The minister was on the centre. Uncomfortable. I climbed into the pulpit after entering through the door behind which lay the “vestry” (not a robing room, but a gathering place).
After I left the parishes of Gamlingay and Everton for Cambridge in 2005, this service became a moment for reconnecting with so-called “unusual” ministry. Warm greetings from people whose names I never learned. A way of tribal identity. The crowning glory was the Welsh hymns: passionate, familiar, unselfconscious. I might give the blessing and lead the Lord’s Prayer, in Welsh. There is a lot that I even have yet to learn in regards to the spirituality of Welsh hymnody. But that learning began there, with Calon Lân — pages 36-37 within the Detholiad o Emynau Cymraeg, in the event you were wondering, written in tonic sol-fa in addition to modern staff notation.
MY THIRD article of religion also has a Welsh connection, but this time it just isn’t a matter of parentage. It stands for the years from 1998 to 2019, once I used to make an annual retreat to what was first St Deiniol’s Library (brown carpet tiles, communal bathrooms), but later became the Gladstone Library, in Hawarden, Flintshire (en-suite, with Melin Tregwynt bedding). In each identities, it gave me space, silence, and solitude, removed from family and friends, where I could attend morning chapel and breakfast, after which spend the day reading. A library with comfortable armchairs has develop into a icon of heaven for me.
In this place, I even have browsed, and rummaged, and looked, at leisure, without clock-watching to rush off to teaching or meetings; I even have read books I might never otherwise have come across. But there have been less cerebral advantages, too. An orchid nursery just a few miles off (now gone) and a superb wool shop (ditto). One attraction that has not gone, and will definitely outlast me, because it has endured for hundreds of years already, is St Winifred’s Well, within the little town of Holywell, on the north coast. I visited every yr to gather well water, said to have healing properties; to attend shrine prayers, and to venerate the relic of the saint.
If St Winifred has healed me physically, it have to be in inconspicuous ways. But I even have found spiritual healing there: the sort of joy that comes from every little pilgrimage. The instinct to place effort into searching for God is a healthy one, I feel. Covid broke my pattern of visiting St Winifred, “y santes Gwenffrewi”. But I don’t forget her on 3 November, even when she has to share with Richard Hooker. This yr, I’m resolved to return, refill my bottle of well water, venerate the relic on the shrine, and be glad over again that I’m a part of something so old, so beautiful, and so true.
The Revd Dr Cally Hammond is Dean of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and the writer of the Church Times Sunday Readings column.
