During Easter time 1930, a couple of young men came down off
the fells south of the village and walked over the Derwent into Blanchland.
They had roamed over the top from Stanhope and crossed the watershed between
the Wear and the Derwent. They stayed the night at the Lord Crewe Arms. “No
other spot brings me sweeter memories” said the one who felt so much at home in
this landscape. He ordered champagne at the bar and played Brahms on an ancient
piano. He was of course the poet W. H. Auden.[1]
Writing for the American Vogue
magazine in 1954, Auden poses the question: where do we place our own Eden,
that “Innocent Place where no contradiction has yet arisen between the demands
of Pleasure and the demands of Duty. What is its landscape, the ethnic origin
of its inhabitants, its religion, its form of state, its architecture, its
system of weights and measures, et cetera?” For that child of the Midlands, his
compass always pointed north.[2]
His favourite landscapes were not the olive groves and classical ruins of the
Mediterranean but the sombre Pennine Fells, whale-backed and lonely under the
grim grey lowering sky that the North does so well. And best of all, what he
called his “great good place, the part of the Pennines bounded on the south by
Swaledale, on the North by the Roman Wall and on the West by the Eden Valley”.[3]
Precisely where we find ourselves today, indeed, what he called “the Never-Never
Land of my dreams”.[4]
To Auden, I think we can say, the North Pennines were a
sacred landscape. It wasn’t only the natural beauty of the area that loved for
its own sake, but for the way it had been worked and reworked since prehistoric
times, through antiquity and the middle ages into the industrial era of
modernity. Especially the industrial relics of its lead mines. Alan Myers and
Robert Forsythe have painstakingly documented Auden’s knowledge of the North
Pennine’s mine workings in their study W.
H. Auden: Pennine Poet from which I have already quoted. He reckoned the
loneliest Pennine Dale of all, Rookhope, where we once owned a lead-miner’s
cottage, to be the best. Specifically, the watershed between that dale and
this. A poem of 1940 tells us why.
Always
my boy of wish returns
To those peat-stained deserted burns
That feed the WEAR and TYNE and TEES,
And, turning states to strata, sees
How basalt long oppressed broke out
In wild revolt at CAULDRON SNOUT….
To those peat-stained deserted burns
That feed the WEAR and TYNE and TEES,
And, turning states to strata, sees
How basalt long oppressed broke out
In wild revolt at CAULDRON SNOUT….
The
derelict lead-smelting mill,
Flued to its chimney up the hill,
That smokes no answer any more
But points, a landmark on BOLT’S LAW
The finger of all questions. There
In ROOKHOPE I was first aware
Of self and not-self, Death and Dread….
There I dropped pebbles, listened, heard
The reservoir of darkness stirred.[5]
What he tells us is that it was here among these landscapes
that Auden found his poetic voice, where juvenilia metamorphosed into a
maturing poet. The first poem he admitted to his adult canon was a poem called
“The Watershed”.Flued to its chimney up the hill,
That smokes no answer any more
But points, a landmark on BOLT’S LAW
The finger of all questions. There
In ROOKHOPE I was first aware
Of self and not-self, Death and Dread….
There I dropped pebbles, listened, heard
The reservoir of darkness stirred.[5]
Who
stands, the crux left of the watershed,
On the wet road between the chafing grass
Below him sees dismantled washing-floors,
Snatches of tramline running to a wood.
An industry already comatose…
On the wet road between the chafing grass
Below him sees dismantled washing-floors,
Snatches of tramline running to a wood.
An industry already comatose…
He sees an almost mystical significance in the relics of an obsolete industry, as numinous to him as the monuments that we admire that have come down to us from the ancient world or the middle ages. Numinous may seem a strong word in that context. Not when a place has become charged with meaning because you became a poet there, where you saw “into the life of things” for the first time, to quote Wordsworth. Auden ventures up to a derelict mine working somewhere on the fells above this village and drops a pebble down the shaft, and, he says, listens and hears, senses the reservoir of darkness stirring, becomes aware of self and not-self, Death and Dread. The language is redolent of religious experience, the kind of primal awe described by Rudolph Otto in his great book The Idea of the Holy. For him the reservoir of darkness doesn’t mean what is sinister and frightening, rather, the hidden depths of the land, of life, of the soul, of God even, which it is the vocation of every human being to uncover and explore if we want not to live in the shallows all our lives. The experience may be raw and disorientating. But that is the whole point. That’s where watersheds in human life are crossed and our human existence becomes significant in new way. To encounter the native spirit of a place in this visceral, life-changing way is, I think, how we become more truly alive, and therefore more truly ourselves.
I find Auden’s discovery of the sacred within the landscape
intriguing. I think he can help us reflect on our theme today, Sacred Space and Community. What he
suggests is that “sacredness” is a bigger concept than simply marking a site
where people of faith have gathered and done religious things, where “prayer
has been valid” to quote T. S. Eliot. The sacred
is about finding meaning in a place,
recognising in it that which evokes responses like attachment and belonging,
reverence and awe. Sacred literally
means “set apart”, so it defines space marked by thresholds that we cross where
we behave in particular ways. The classic instance is Moses at the burning bush
where he is told to “take off your shoes, for the place where you are standing is
holy ground”.[6]
It’s to recognise the rich, coalescence of myth, memory and story, symbols,
images and human community past and present – clusters of associations that compel
us to stop like Moses, to consider and reflect, discover who we are under God.
I think it works like that for people of faith who want to enter into the cultural,
historical, and theological meaning of religious sites and artefacts, what we
call our spiritual heritage.
Let me offer you three theses about sacred space that I hope
will help us understand what we are talking about here in Blanchland.
********
My first thesis is: Sacred
Space is an Aspect of Landscape.
Two weeks ago, my wife and I were in Greece visiting classical
sites. It was our first visit. We landed at the same time as the mini-cyclone
Zorba that you may have read about. There was torrential rain in Athens. So we
experienced what many visitors never do, the sight of the Parthenon sailing
above a sea of umbrellas. After that we went to Delphi. The rain had moderated
but the skies were leaden, dark clouds sitting over Mount Parnassus and that
cleft in the hills where without warning you come across that extraordinary
site. Having never been there, the effect was overwhelming, walking up the via sancta or pilgrim’s path along which
temples and treasuries, theatre and stadium and the seat of the oracle itself
perched on a cliff-edge beneath crags that soared up into the cloud-cover.
When we were back, I talked about Delphi with a retired
school teacher who was also a reader in her cathedral. She had taken A-level
student groups there to perform classical drama in the theatre. “Of course,
what you sense when you’re there is that this is a holy site” she said. “And
that’s something to do with the landscape setting itself. It’s not simply the
centuries during which people went there to seek wisdom and worship at the
shrines. Something about the place itself suggested the numinous, the sacred.”
I dare say it might not have struck us so powerfully on a hot sunny day, for
the weather seemed so much part of our experience of Delphi – but then again,
who knows?
Haydon Bridge on the South Tyne, where I live, is best known
as the birthplace of the early nineteenth century painter John Martin. You will
know him for the vast canvasses he painted such as The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah at the Laing Art Gallery in
Newcastle or The Plains of Heaven at
Tait Britain, said to be modelled on his native Tynedale. His art tried to
capture what people of that time called “the sublime” in landscape that cuts us
down to size and inculcates a response of awe in the presence of the divine,
what Freud called that “oceanic” feeling that overwhelms us at times and that
we often associate with religion. As far as I know he didn’t paint Delphi but I
couldn’t help thinking about him as we clambered up the Pilgrims’ Way to the
top of the site and looked across the valley. 
I think it’s important to underline the landscape context in
which we are sitting. You often hear it said that “church” is not a place or a
building but is people. There is a truth in that, as I’ll go on to say, but
that cliché is as much false as it is
true. It’s false because it implies
that sacred space is only ever configured by what human beings have
historically done and continue to do at particular sites and buildings. But a
more robust theology of creation would at once challenge that assumption. If
the created order was declared “very good” when God finished his work on the
sixth day,[7]
then we should expect that the Creator continues to disclose his presence in
and through the natural world as the Psalmist affirms: “the heavens declare the
glory of God, and the firmament proclaims hs handiwork.[8]
Or again, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and
the stars that you have established, what are human beings that you are mindful
of them, mortals that you care for them?”[9]
Discerning the holy in the created world, however flawed or broken it is and we
are, is a primary God-given instinct. 
Here at Blanchland, then, we should not be too quick to
assume that “sacred space” only means the Abbey and its surroundings. Residents
in this village may tell different stories about sacredness that may not wholly
align to the church’s preferred narrative. When people talk about communing
with God in nature, we shouldn’t dismiss the importance of such spiritual
experience. When Jacob exclaims at Bethel, “Surely God was in this place and I
did not know it!”[11]
he was speaking not of a formally-established place of worship but of a
numinous experience in the open air where he had a dream about heaven and earth
that shook him to the core. The shrine followed the experience, not the other
way round. And I did not know it is
the crucial point. It may be precisely where we do not know God, or expect to
find him, that he discloses himself. Beth-El
means “house of God”. God has many mansions. Most of them are not churches.
********
My second thesis is: Sacred
Space Tells Stories.
I said that Auden’s experience of this part of his beloved
North was of a highly-textured landscape. Geomorphology and natural history are
a big part of the story of the North Pennines: this Area of Outstanding Natural
Beauty was designated as a UNESCO geo-park, one of only seven in the UK. The focus
is “on using Earth Heritage to support sustainable economic development of the
area, primarily through geological and responsible tourism”.[12]
This has included “geology events, developing trails across the landscape,
creating displays in local museums and visitor centres, producing educational
resources, working in local schools and more”. So the story of this particular
sacred space predates any human story by hundreds of millions of years. In
Durham Cathedral I always pointed out to visitors the fossils embedded in the
black Frosterley Marble piers. These are the oldest living things whose traces
can be read in the fabric of this building. Every building, every site, tells
such a story.
Blanchland’s narrative is especially rich. It is told in the
church guidebook[13]
first issued in 1951, originally privately printed, we are told, for Vaux and
Associated Breweries Limited, Sunderland, and reprinted in the 1990s for the
Lord Crewe Arms, Blanchland Post Office and Blanchland Stores. There can be a
whole story in the obverse of a title page! It’s an invaluable guide, and is
now available on the village website[14].
There are key historical layers of this story. The foundation
story is of the establishment of the Abbey in the twelfth century. Despite its remoteness,
this site was not far from Dere Street, the Roman road that crossed the Tyne at
the town of Coria, Corbridge as it headed north to the Stanegate and the Roman
Wall just beyond. In Saxon times, it was on the edge of the Shire, the land
given by Queen Etheldreda to Wilfrid to endow his great church at Hexham which
he began in 674. Later, as we know because the stories are documented, the
valley found itself in the English Middle March, a frontier land where Scots
raiders and reivers would sweep down and plunder. Northumberland has a long
history of being fought over, and as I said in a recent lecture[15],
this sense of liminality has coloured much of the county’s history, even on its
southernmost flank as we are here. The Palatinate County of Durham, just across
the river where the king’s writ did not run, was established precisely as a
buffer-state to protect England from invasion out of the North. 
Blanchland would not exist but for the Abbey. Its very name tells us that its origins belong to a religious story, Blanch-Land, meaning, probably, the land of the White Canons as the Premonstratensians were known. In this, its foundation story has many parallels in medieval Europe, like Durham, the city that grew up around the shrine of St Cuthbert, or Salisbury, the city of New Sarum that established itself in the same way when the Romanesque cathedral of Old Sarum was abandoned on its hilltop and a new Gothic cathedral begun down in the valley. In both cases, you can draw concentric circles round the formal sacred space of the church itself: its conventual or college buildings, the enclosure of the precinct, the city that sat on the far side of the precinct wall, and the hinterland beyond. As in Greek or Roman cities, the pro-fanum was not some barbarous place where the holy did not penetrate; rather, it was the space before the temple in which holiness took a civic, rather than cultic, form. “Ordinary space” as compared with sacred space. So sacred and profane co-exist in the localities that are within the orbit of holy sites. In this locality, for instance, life in the upper Derwent Valley would not only fall within the cultural and spiritual “reach” of the Abbey, but, all-importantly, it would be wholly under its economic power as well.
This is easier to understand in Durham, where so much has
survived of the medieval Priory, than in Blanchland where the dissolution of
the Abbey resulted in the creation of an altogether new townscape. We know that
Abbey buildings were despoiled for stone with the village began to be
re-imagined as we currently have it. The Abbey Church was severely truncated,
losing its nave, south transept and pretty well all its conventual buildings –
cloister, refectory, chapter house, dormitory, abbot’s lodging and infirmary. Unless
you know what you are looking at, reading the layout of the conventual site
from the present-day village can be difficult.
So when I say that the village would not exist but for the
Abbey, it would be more accurate to say, but for the despoiled Abbey out of which it was created. This means that the
townscape we look at and admire is the legacy of the bitter religious upheavals
of the sixteenth century when so much of the legacy of the middle ages was
swept away across England. It isn’t correct to say, as some of the promotional
material does, that Blanchland is an unspoiled medieval village. Far from being
unspoiled, the canons of Blanchland would certainly have said that their holy and
beautiful house had been spoiled beyond recognition by Henry VIII and his
commissioners. It is true that its stones are (largely) medieval, and a few of
its buildings, those that preserve the Abbey’s footprint. But the fabric of medieval
Blanchland with its severed limb of a church refashioned in the eighteenth
century, like its village, is paradoxically both familiar and remote.
It doesn’t stop there. The Abbey estates passed to the
Derwentwaters of Dilston Castle and became part of Jacobite history for a while
until the sympathisers James and his younger brother Charles Radcliffe were
executed following the abortive 1715 and 1745 Jacobite rebellions. You need to
read Walter Besant’s novel of 1884, Dorothy
Forster to get the feel of those times, or more recently (and accessibly), Devil Water by Anya Seton, both of which
are set in this locality. From then, the key player in the story of Blanchland
is Nathaniel Lord Crewe, the Bishop of Durham who cherished this village and
created the model village as it is today. The Lord Crewe Trust has managed it
ever since. You see how densely textured the story of this place turns out to
be. The brand may say unspoilt medieval
village. The story tells us that the reality is a lot more complex than
that, but Lord Crewe’s village may be
closer to what visitors actually see.
My point is that the story of Blanchland’s concentric circles of sacred space is ambiguous. It preserves the memory of centuries of worship and piety on the part of the white canons, the goodness and purity of heart that flowed out of the Premonstratensian vision of life lived in the service of God and neighbour. Yet it’s an ambiguous history like the story of the landscape here in the North Pennines. You could say that the natural beauty of our Pennine landscape carries a shadow side, the evidence of how it was despoiled by the raids on it of centuries of lead-mining. Now, the mines have gone too, and with them the livelihood of many a Pennine village and family. In the same way, the Abbey was done violence to by a Reformation that some welcomed as the work of God, but many, particularly in the North, saw nothing but disaster in the abandonment of the old faith. Loss is written into this place. I tried to capture the spirit of the place in my book of 2013, Landscapes of Faith. Having described the village and the Abbey, I wrote, a trifle nostalgically, “It offers an emotive, living memorial to a lost way of life, with the remoteness of the village’s beautiful setting and its still obvious monastic layout a powerful memorial to those long-dead white canons”.[16] The story of sacred space is always ambivalent, carries a shadow, or at the very least can be read in different ways.
In the Ignatian spiritual tradition, the words consolation and desolation stand for different states of the soul in the
discernment of God’s Spirit at work in human life. Consolation means the comfort and strength that comes from the
Spirit’s presence as Comforter or Advocate, while desolation is the darkness and disturbance of the soul through
sorrow, hopelessness or anxiety when God is, or appears to be, far off or
altogether absent. Is it fanciful to ask whether some aspects of the story of a
place’s speak of consolation while
others testify to its opposite, desolation?
If so, then Blanchland with its noble but troubled history could be a
case-study of how to read a story and, importantly, learn how to place
ourselves within it.
********
Which brings me to my final thesis. Sacred Space Must Be Inhabited and Reimagined.
I come back to the point I made earlier about landscape, that
it is just not the case that “the church is people, not a place or a building”.
When people speak about churchgoing, as Philip Larkin did in his famous poem of
that name, that’s precisely what they mean. And if sacred geography and our
theology of place[17]
are well grounded (to coin a phrase), they are right to speak as they do.
However, places, landscapes, buildings are for populating. People
do not by themselves necessarily create sacred spaces (though they can do), but
by inhabiting them they add to their textures and assign new layers of meaning
to them. I learned this when I wrote a new guide book to Durham Cathedral in
2003. In it I suggested that there were three emblems of North East England (I
believe I called them icons, but I use that word much more sparingly now) that
were instantly recognisable by everybody who lives in the region or has the
slightest acquaintance with it. They were the Roman Wall, Durham Cathedral, and
the Angel of the North. I was taken to task by a professor of history from
eastern Europe who remarked that I wasn’t comparing objects of the same type.
The Roman Wall had once been populated by a community (the army that served
along it and the communities that lived in its hinterland) but whose people
were now simply a memory. The Angel of the North was an artefact pure and
simple and was not inhabited by anyone other than in the most attenuated sense.
But Durham Cathedral was home to a living, worshipping community and continued
to be the goal of pilgrims as it had always been. The textures of these emblems
were entirely different.
I now see that it is not as simple as the professor thought.
The Wall is the focus of a community of guardians, conservators and volunteers
to whom its destiny is a matter of almost mystical significance. The Angel,
intriguingly, draws to it people who want to mark rites of passage at its foot:
birthdays, renewing wedding vows, scattering the ashes of loved ones. All of
these are temporary communities brought into being by a sculpture created out
of cold steel on the site of a former mine working. And all three attract big
crowds of visitors (who may well describe themselves as pilgrims, in which
group I include people walking along the Wall) who, for the time they are in
relationship with the object of their visit, can be said to form another kind
of temporary community.
When we come to Blanchland, we realise how the textures of
the place involve the different communities that have populated it in its
history, from the White Canons and lay brothers to the Anglican congregation
that worshipped there after the dissolution, and the villagers who lived and
continue to live around their church. (The literal meaning of parish, paroikia, is the locality that lies
around, and by extension, the people who live in it.) So a key question for the
village and the Abbey community now is, how are we inhabiting our place today,
the church itself and its pro-fanum,
that which lies before, i.e. the physical and human setting of village and
valley? How do we honour its sacredness and the sanctity of life in the wider
community? And how are we thinking about its development into the future as a
sacred space that will serve its resident and temporary communities in new
ways? And how shall we embrace the heritage and tourism activity that is so
central to the economy of the North Pennines without sacrificing the integrity
whether of our “sacred space” and its landscape setting, or of the local
community that inhabits it?
I don’t know Blanchland well enough to suggest specific
responses to these questions. But if I am right about the landscape and
narrative dimensions of sacred space, then the way we inhabit and reimagine it must
honour the setting and story if it is to continue to be a source of inspiration
and renewal. That has always been the task, to make sure that sacred space doesn’t
remain fixed in a past that is daily becoming more and more remote from the
present. What matters is the kind of dynamic remembering that both respects the
pastness of the past, but also its capacity to speak into the present and help
shape the future. Christian theologians call this kind of memory anamnesis. It’s what we do at the
eucharist as the sacred space and its story gather us together to tell of God’s
mighty acts in the past, so that they come alive in the present and transform
us with a vision of what we could become under God.
I’m not in the least decrying the heritage industry and
church heritage in particular: I’ve spent three decades of my working life
trying to open up the heritage of three very different cathedrals and
encouraging people with little or no church background to cross the threshold
and come inside. The growing awareness of our heritage “offer” as sacred spaces
is not only a key aspect of outreach, but it also professionalises our practice
and humanises our welcome to guests as we help them orientate themselves in our
buildings, understand something of what they see and respond. You’ll note the
word: not tourists who only come to
observe, but guests with the
potential to become pilgrims who,
however tentatively, are encouraged to participate, become part of the
temporary community that the sacred space calls into being. Benedict’s Rule says that we should receive guests
as if they were Christ himself. Generous hospitality and intelligent
interpretation are, I think, among the gospel values that should shape how we
inhabit our sacred spaces. We could put it another way and say that sacred space
is “shaped” by vocation, as the Hebrew Bible speaks about the land of promise,
a call that affirms a particular geography not only for its physical aspects
but for the spiritual, ethical and personal values it represents.[19]
What’s clear is that here at Blanchland, inhabiting and reimagining sacred
space are not tasks for the church alone. I’ve pointed out how in this place,
church and community are historically deeply intertwined. That gives the
village and the valley a vital interest in what happens inside and around the
Abbey. It’s partnerships in the community that are going to enable the Abbey’s
vision of its future to be achieved and flourish. That’s necessarily true of
how every church needs to reimagine itself, for the natural population of a
sacred space is the paroikia, “the
people who live around”. But this
sacred space and this community,
because of their story, are woven fine into an entity that cannot be divided
into churchgoers and everyone else. One of the hazards of our secularising
times is the tendency church people, clergy among them, to think that a
congregation and its priests somehow own the building they worship in. They
don’t. Sacred space is public space that belongs to all and is open to all because
it is God’s space, and God offers hospitality and welcome to all humanity. “My
house shall be a house of prayer for all people.”[20]
Perhaps that’s the most important insight for today. Allow it to shape our thinking about “sacred space and community” and it will make all the difference. Create a place where all can come, as Auden did, and drop pebbles down metaphorical shafts that plumb the depths of place and life and God, and listen in case something stirs.
[1]
Myers, Alan & Forsythe, Robert (1999), W.H.
Auden: Pennine Poet, 55ff.
[2] Davison, Peter (2007), The Idea of North
[3]
Myers & Forsythe (1999), 8.
[4]
Sadgrove, Michael, “Durham: A Northern Cathedral” in Wakefield, Gavin &
Rooms, Nigel, eds., (2016), Northern Gospel, Northern Church, 183.
[5]
Quoted by Myers & Forsythe (1999), 24.
[6]
Exodus 3.5.
[7]
Genesis 1.31.
[8]
Psalm 19.1.
[9]
Psalm 8.3-4.
[10]
Brown, David (2004), God and Enchantment
of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience, 152.
[11]
Genesis 29.17.
[12] www.northpennines.org.uk,
accessed on 23 October 2018.
[13] Addleshaw, G.W.O. (1951), Blanchland: A Short History.
[14] www.blanchlandhistory.org.uk/docs/BLANCHLAND%20A%20short%20history%20G.W.O.%20Addleshaw.pdf
[15] https://northernambo.blogspot.com/2018/10/christianity-with-north-east-accent.html?spref=tw
[16]
Sadgrove, Michael (2013), Landscapes of Faith:
the Christian Heritage of the North East, 129.
[17]
Rumsey, Andrew (2017), Parish: an
Anglican Theology of Place.
[18]
Wright, Patrick (2009), On Living in an
Old Country, 137.
[19]
Rumsey (2017), 79, citing the work of Walter Brueggemann.
[20]
Mark 11.17.
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