Day 29 of the End to End was also spent walking along the Severn Way beside the River Severn. By lunchtime I’d reached Sharpness and we had a picnic. There are many advantages of a long well signed route. It’s much less trouble than the ins and outs of lots of smaller joined up footpaths. You can find your way more easily, although sometimes you do get diverted.
So what was I thinking about on LEJOG? I can’t give you minute by minute accuracy on that but I can tell you about some broad themes. The blogs do of course point to some of them but others are hidden between the steps.
Much of the time my mind would wander over some well worn stuff that continued to confound me. The way the natural world leapt up in front of my eyes was good for getting me out of my head into the real world again. That the same themes would return is not surprising: the human mind is like this. It is particularly true when we are dealing with any kind of loss and by the beginning of our 7th decade most of us are doing so to some extent.
We know that dealing with loss moves in many circles. We find ourselves back at a similar point, looking at the same events or feelings only a little further away, like the ripples on a pond. Each new circuit gives us a chance to think again, revisit, repackage and then step out again. I was familiar with this and there’s no doubt that the walk gave me a chance to do this kind of work alongside the business of getting from A to B each day.
I was dealing with several different losses, some larger than others, some smaller. The main one that came back again and again was the sense of loss of connection to the church as I had known it for fifty years or so. This loss had come about a few years earlier (and had set in train my current plans, retirement and so forth) when the Yorkshire Synod decided not to further the Chaplaincy at Silcoates. The process that accompanied this decision had been a jagged one and despite the best efforts of a few very dear and close people I had been significantly hurt and further damaged by the whole thing. I’d limped on for a couple of years but now I was stepping out on a route of my own.
A year after that walk I’m still walking, but slightly differently. I have completed the LEJOG, much to my amazement. I took my own route. This route taking has informed a lot of my subsequent thinking and doing. I am still walking a route of my own. After a telephone conversation with my best friend Jane, I downloaded Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘A room of one’s own’ where I found that she had first put her thoughts about the subject together whilst sitting by a river.
A river is a good place to make discoveries, whether of a room or route of one’s own. It continues to slip by and can take all sorts of stuff with it. I am now outside of the institutional church. I consider myself to be ‘nondenominational’ having grown from Reformed roots. I am part of the invisible church; one of those who calls herself Christian in life and worship but no longer attends church in the formal sense. I still pray as often as I can and remember the bible everyday. I hang out at times with a bunch of Benedictines and some others. I continue to weigh my life by the basics of the gospel. It has been a route of my own and I’m still travelling.
From the remembered bible
Be still and know God.
This is one of the prayers from the LEJOG that others have liked to pray too.
Prayer for a walk
Let faith be my raincoat
And joy be my map
To explore every path,
Be backed up with an app.
And let me set free
With my pen in this age,
Words of encouragement
From every blank page.
JAL: 30.04.2020 in Longdendale.