Notes from Bambi – Page 3 – Traveller's notes

Roles

Dear Benedict,

I am writing to you. It’s one of my occupations. I’m not sure if it’s one of my roles but that’s what I’m going to write to you about today. The bible reading/remembering today was the story of Martha and Mary. Well, actually a small bit of it. Like most of the gospel we only get small snippets of information into the daily life of Jesus and those who followed.

Everyone in a family has their roles, so too anyone in a community and your Rule has loads on that. But most of all you say it’s not competitive. For example, when the Deans are chosen in chapter 21, it’s for wisdom not rank. Yet as humans we are obsessed with competition. So too with interpreting Martha and Mary. In Luke’s words even Jesus gets hung up on it: Mary has chosen the better part.

I’m suspicious about the gospels (or any religious text really). Luke is seen as a ‘good editor’ for women so why did he write this nasty little snippet in which Martha understandably gets upset when tired and Mary gets commended for the better part which ‘won’t be take away from her’ but ultimately is (i.e. women are stripped of their right to equal discipleship by the Church)? There are a few options but most have the get out clause: sexists society, sexist Jesus.

John comes in later with a different snippet on the family: Lazarus dead, Mary grieving and Martha announcing Jesus as ‘The One’. Different tensions, different words, but still the roles get taken away. Whatever way you look at it, Martha and Mary do not come out of the written gospels with their roles as equal disciples with the named male disciples in tact, at least according to traidtional Church Theology.

Today I played the unassailable role of organist at the small church in the village. Anyone can preach (today my husband) but not everyone can play the organ. Most of the year now it stands in the corner gathering dust. I can play it. I learnt years ago and it still gives me a huge lift in my mood to sit there and thunder out a good tune (even if I do it rather poorly). So you’d think I’d be happy, and certainly as small communities go this is a delightful one.

But I’m still left with my Martha and Mary questions and much besides about roles in any community. There have been and will be many wise ones who will not be appointed to appropriate roles because someone else will get the job due to bribery, favouritism, phobias and other corruptions. Even in the death defying communities that the church is supposed to be, the status quo will predominate. Someone will be slow to embrace change and that will trip us all up.

In my rememberings of Martha and Mary they were carers for Lazarus, the non speaking member of the family who died in unspoken circumstances: the one who gets called out from his own tomb by the Tomb Quitter. These two sisters knew each other well and if 1st century caring is anything like 21st century caring they were both exhausted. One makes and bakes, another sits and listens: roles should be made for us but in family, or community, life is not always like that. Even Jesus struggles to hold the tension together, making promises about discipleship that the Church will eventually fail to honour for centuries.

There was a moment in my organing this morning when I pulled out the trumpet stop in the middle of a verse and blasted it out, because it had all got too comfortable. We were singing ‘Jesus Christ is waiting’ and that moment where it says in the lyrics ‘I am angry too’ we all sounded too nice. This was my ‘hymn of the pandemic’ and I’m still angry, so I let an 8 foot trumpet rip for a couple of lines and felt better. It’s probably a sign that I am completely unsuited to any role in community.

From my remembered bible: ‘I am like a green olive tree’ (Psalm 52: they are known for longevity in harsh climates).

I am angry too!

From a Friend of Scholastic and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Janet Lees: 17.07.2022, in Longdendale.

Build

Dear Benedict,

Yesterday we gave our toy bricks away. Some of them I’d had since a child and some were from my daughters childhood, but they never date. We passed them onto a child, aged 9, who arrived from Ukraine on Tuesday, a country that will require substantial rebuilding.

Look around our world and you see a lot of that: there’s a lot needs rebuilding. I expect you found that too. Its wasn’t all picturesque ruins even then. I’m not sure there’s really any such thing. After all the ruin of anything has a complex story to tell as evident for example in the Grenfell inquiry.

Walking along the canals of Britain I’ve seen many extremes. Some things are rebuilt, some are pulled down, some places are rewilded, some are chopped down. There are disused things, like railway lines, that are reused for traffic free paths, while other sections got swallowed up when the M1 was built. A railway route existed between London and the North of England. It was called the Great Central Railway but it was closed so now HS2 starts the process all over again.

All of this made me thing of chapter 57 about Artisans in the monastic community. These were skilled people who could make stuff but the point was they had put that skill at the disposal of the community. Therefore it was directed by the leadership of the community and any benefit accrued was for the community. The artisan was expected to be humble.

It sounds quite sensible until inequalities start to creep in. The leadership might keep more of the artisans products than they should for themselves and the profits are not all given back to the community for decisions about what to do next, for example. The artisans may be encouraged to be humble but what about if their gifts are misused or they are taken for granted. The chapter is not just of concern to the artisans who’s work is under consideration, but for everyone who is concerned for a fair community.

Such are the challenges in community. After all, as we regularly hear these days, it only takes one bad apple. We can rebuild stuff, we can rewild places, but we have to see it as a benefit to everyone. It seems that some businesses that contribute most to human induced climate change wish to be excused some of the responsibilities or receive greater compensation. It’s as if they don’t believe that having a thriving planet is in everyone’s interest.

Building is therefore a complex subject. You go as far as to suggest that monastic artisans should under cut the market price compared with prices outside the monastery. But what if those outside do not have the same support as the monastic artisans and have more overheads from high rents or a profit driven supply chain? If these artisans are under cut by the monastery then they may be driven out of business and into poverty. Not for the first time I find your rule lacking in an understanding of justice, but maybe market forces didn’t seem as complex in your day.

Any worker should do what they can to retain their integrity, but that can include calling out unjust situations or unsafe conditions. ‘Artisans are doormats’ is not an attractive slogan in a monastic community or anywhere, particularly when we regularly see the product of unsafe working or unjust labour laws.

At school I was told by the class bully in a pottery lesson that I should smash up the clay figure I’d made as it was ‘too good’ and that was somehow ‘unfair’ to everyone else (including him of course). I didn’t. I still have it to remind me of some of the challenges of being an artisan in a community.

From my remembered bible: a wise person builds on rock

May we have the integrity to build justly.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Janet lees, 03.07.2022, in Longdendale.

Human

Dear Benedict,

Back from our long Spring/Summer Walk I think I better get back to writing to you, about your Rule and living with it in the 21st century. Two human beings many centuries apart, I wonder what we would make of each others lives? You a monastic, me a lay Benedictine in a very different world, both of us wondering about how to be human in community.

At the moment our society is going through a very divisive phase. There are many different attempts to glorify ‘us’ and demonise ‘them’ when in fact of course we’re all members of one race: the human race. Such attempts have been ongoing throughout history. Each Empire has given rise to folks who think they are in some ways superior to another set of people. Within each set rules have developed that segregate, exclude and disadvantage some on the grounds of specific characteristics: for example sex, race, ability, sexuality, gender and income.

Walking seems like a simple thing. The majority of the population can do it and it’s a form of movement seen us defining human evolution, until of course you can’t do it or not very well when all sort of obstacles and challenges appear and you are no longer in the mainstream. At that point discrimination steps in and all the ‘non-walkers’ or ‘poor-walkers’ are excluded from quite large parts of life because of their lack of bipedal motion or their difficulty with it. It’s just one example. One that from a position of current privilege (I can walk) I have experienced the world recently having walked to London and back.

Along the way I meet many other folks and interacting with them found of course that I had more in common with some than others. It was ever thus. Religion is one thing that currently gets bad press. ‘I’m not religious’ countless people tell me. Some add a story of having fallen out of the church or feeling they got pushed out. Mostly religion comes out of it poorly. It was experienced as a set of dogmatic rules and a straight jacket to behaviour that was applied without care or concern by a hierarchy of leaders who were later found, too often, to be suspect at least and dangerous at worst. So much for religion then.

But religious or not, many people share stories and embedded in most of these is a thorny issue of identity. ‘I used to be…’ is a commonly encountered beginning. The one thing we still are, and cannot relegate to the past, is human. So what is it to be human and be united by our attempts to find identity in humanity?

Your Rule offers a group of human who want to live in community a way of living together to discover more about this. But it wouldn’t suit everyone of the humans I know. The idea of rules is coming into question everyday. What is legal or illegal? Can a person legally be illegal? I wonder what it is we don’t like about ourselves that means we want to define people like this.

In a week of weeks this business of being human came up in many forms. A small group of people, whether legal or not, were to be put on a plane, whether they wanted to be on it or not, and taken to another country, whether they wanted to go there or not because another group of people, human like them but not subject to the same rules, had decided, without asking even more people, that it was a good idea, whether legal or not.

Some of the other people who said they didn’t support it were religious leaders. It lead to a further ramping up of the debate about whether being religious and political was tenable or not. Now you need to know that some significant aspects of my faith formation happened in South Africa between 1984 and 1994, a time when the religious and political things was a major issue in that country. Religious leaders had said that discrimination on the grounds of race (and more specifically a way of governing called Apartheid) was morally repugnant and could not be defended on religious grounds. That it had been so defended by a white minority for a long time is a matter of record. It was, to some extent, down to the way people interpreted the bible, a religious things, but it was mostly about being human.

Earlier in the year, one of the leading opponents of that struggle against Apartheid died (I wrote about him then). ‘The Arch’, Desmond Tutu was quite a human but as a religious man he didn’t shy away from the link between religion and politics, and neither do I. ‘When White people came to Africa’, he, a Black African, used to say, ‘They had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray” and when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land’.

It was my time in South Africa that influenced my interpretation of the bible the most. It has been living in Britain in the 21st century that has challenged me to use those interpretative skills the most, including amongst my religious siblings in an out of community. Our shared humanity is not negotiable when it comes to being religious. At the centre of it is One Human who I choose to follow. On the walk someone asked me about that.

A fellow traveller, he described himself as a Pagan and told me he’d been very moved by the companionship and community he’d experienced when taking part in the Camino, that 800 kms centuries old walk across the north of Spain known as the Way of St James. I was walking a few hundred kms on a route of canal towpaths and disused railways in England at the time, but it was my Camino. He asked me what I thought the essence of Christian faith was. For me that comes from me remembered bible: Jesus said ‘Love one another’. He also ‘Follow me’.

He told me he could understand the first but he wasn’t sure about the second point. Why follow? On a towpath or disused railway line this may seem redundant advice. The path has one direction and away we go. But life is not all canal towpaths or disused railway lines, as this week has amply illustrated. How we will decide our direction? What will be our moral compass?

Will it be the further accumulation of wealth and status? Will it be how to bend to rules to suit ourselves and disadvantage some other people? How could it be arranged that my direction is inclusive and encouraging to others such that we travel as fellow humans, thriving in each others company whoever we are.

Some say it’s like that on the Camino. I’ve never been so I can’t comment. But I have been End to End and on a lot of other paths. I have considered how to stop planes from taking off and what to do about food poverty in a rich country. I have though about other human beings, both known and unknown and whilst I’ve not always made the right decision I’m still following the Human One. I’m grateful to all those who keep me company, religious or not.

From my remembered gospel: Jesus said ‘Follow me’.

I journey this day in the name of the Human One

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Home

The last two days of the #GreatCentralRouteBack were wet, but we were nearly home.

Day 14 was a wet day in Wharncliffe Woods. The TPT covers some of the route of the former GCR and ocassional signs are seen like the carving on the old station at Finkle Street.

The lovely green woodlands were dripping on me and the birds were singing. In the spirit of Pentecost, the language I wish I could speak is ‘bird’. It’s so diverse and a total joy. My reward for a wet walk was a barn full of piglets.

Day 15 was the day that saw us home to Longdendale. We had a short damp walk from Longsett to Oxspring on the TPT, downhill as Bob says. I can confirm that the tank ramp and turntable site are still in situ: not so lost engineering.

We crossed the old GCR bridge over the TPT on the Padfield Main Road and it was welcome home. I’ve walked 225 miles since we left on 22nd April.

From my remembered bible: And I shall live in God’s house forever.

Rest

From a friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Janet Lees, Longdendale, 6th June 2022.

Old ground

We are getting nearer. In fact we are nearly back to places we know well. In 1998 we moved up to Sheffield as a family and there are places in the #GreatCentralRouteBack on days 12 and 13 that featured in family life from that time.
Day 12, I started walking at Inkersal on the Transpennine Trail, albeit a section I’d not walked before. Bob drove up to Rother Valley County Park and walked back towards me. It was a lovely walk, shady and pleasant, sometimes beside sections of the Chesterfield Canal which is under going restoration. At Rother Valley we ended with a well earned ice cream.

Day 13 was a ramble round Sheffield. We lived in the city for 10 years until 2008. Visiting again some things seemed the same while some had changed. There had been changes to some road junctions and bus services but the ammont of wayside rubbish and the bored faces of the shoppers at Meadowhall seemed much the same. As for Meadowhall itself, there were definitely more doughnuts.
We went to Darnall to visit a section of the GCR still in use although it now runs into the Sheffield Midland Station. The highlight of the day was a seam hauled service going to Buxton which followed our local train into the station: Bahamas 45596.

We walked over to the site of the Sheffield Victoria Station where the restored war memorial to the workers of the GCR who died in WW1 is now situated.
A short walk to The Wicker, we found an interesting Ethiopean resturant for lunch. Back through the city centre on foot, we caught a tram there to Meadowhall where we picked up a few bits and pieces to take for an unpromptu tea with friends.

Former railway lines come in three categories on the OS map: disused, dismantled and disappeared. To be fair the last isn’t a category. It’s just what seems to have happened to much of the GCR route: it’s no longer visible on the ground. Those are the lost sections which we have not been able to visit on this #GreatCentralRouteBack. But thankfully there have been other sections to revisit and enjoy.

It’s good to be back on more familiar ground. I am certainly tired and I’d perhaps forgotten just how tiring long distance walking can be day after day. Not many more days left of the #GreatCentralRouteBack now.

From my remembered bible: those who want to build the kindom of God should rember that, like ploughing, looking back is of limited use.

God grant a quiet night.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Janet Lees, Sheffield, 4th June 2022.

Backwards

On Day 10 of the #GreatCentralRouteBack we were going backwards to Ruddington. This is not uncommon on the heritage railways I’ve been on. Even on the Great Central Railway at Leicester sometimes the engine was running backwards. We were going backwards, back towards Loughborough although not that much.
Ruddington is an interesting village. We started at the Nottingham Heritage Transport Centre which is a mighty hotch-potch of locomotives of all sorts, abandoned boilers and other parts, buses and coaches in various states of repair and a miniature railway. There was also quite a lot of bric a brac and excellent all day breakfasts.

We walked back into the village to visit the hand frame knitters museum, which was very interesting. It seems that Ruddington was quite a centre for this in the 19th century. The museum still has quite a collection of the knitting frames. Looking for justice for textile workers seems to have been a significant problem then and still is now in the global context.

Walking south from the village we were back alongside the GCR, and we finished our walk in the Country Park.

On Day 11 of the #GreatCentralRouteBack we were looking back to last summer when we walked in this same area, but on different routes. I started walking at Newton on the Five Pits Trail which follows the route of the GCR or goes alongside it in places.

Both in the Hand Frame Knitting and Mining industries, whole families were involved, with both health and education taking direct hits from the working environment. Yet we seem to fail to learn these lessons from one generation to the next.

I was soon crossing the line of the Silverhills Trail which we walked last summer. Bob walked towards me from Holmewood, and we had a picnic near Williamthorpe Ponds, just before the end.
A hot day, we stopped for a cold drink at a pub in the way back, and later on, in the evening, we walked to Tibshelf for some fish and chips. I’d managed over 9 miles in the day which was more like my LEJOG 2019 average, and the best so far this year.

From my remembered bible: There is a time for everything.

For everything…. Thanks.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Janet Lees, Tibshelf, 2nd June 2022.

Central

Days 8 and 9 of the #GreatCentralRouteBack were across the centre of 2 midlands cities: Leicester and Nottingham. According to my informant it was originally called the London Extension of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, but as it was built between the East and West mainlines the Great Central Railway seemed a better name. The route of the line also goes through the centre of Sheffield, but more of that later in the week.

On Day 8 we went through Leicester on the Great Central Way, an off road route that follows the GCR. We found a small cafe for elevenses en route. In the city centre I was also able to visit the Richard III exhibition. It makes you wonder what you might find under a car park.

On Day 9 we crossed Nottingham by tram, some of which follows the route of the GCR or crosses it. In the city centre we also visited the City of Caves exhibition, an exploration of some of the hundreds of sandstone caves that exist under the city. We could hear the trams rumbling overhead.

Unfortunately a shopping centre replaced the old station several decades ago.

Our last stop was Bulwell Forest where there was a GCR brick wall by the road side. Of such are great adventure made.

From my remembered bible: Can anything good come out of (enter name of city or town under consideration).

Song of the day: Underground, over ground, wombling free….

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Janet Lees, Nottingham, 31st May 2022.

Track

Days 5 to 7 of the #GreatCentralRouteBack was about following a track or the traces of one, not always walking. With a good map on which we had marked the course of the line we could tell when we were on it, near it or crossing over.

Day 5 I started walking at Onley Lane, South Rugby on a well maintained route called the Great Central Way. Maintained by the Wildlife Trust as a wildlife corridor it is an example of what the whole route could be. Butterflies, beetles, plants: it was just beautiful. Elegant bridges remain in place and extra oases for wildlife have also been engineered. The local Rotary Club have set up some art installations, including some sections of track, as if abandoned by Wallace and Gromit and the old Rugby Central Station getting a makeover.
I met Bob in Rugby and we had a snack in the new station. We then walked north out of the town on the next stretch of the line up to Newton Five Arches, also a Wildlife Trust site.

On Day 6 the traces of the track were less easy to follow, and there were a lot of nettles in places. Bob started at Newtown Five Arches, crossing the M6 near junction 1 (only a little more than 3 weeks since I was alongside junction 2). I started at Shawell, battling my way through the nettles to meet Bob. He carried on to Lutterworth back and forth to paths near the route of the line, while I drove to Lutterworth and walked the section north of Station Road (no station left). After that the line gets caught up into the route of the M1.

Day 7 was a different opportunity on the heritage Great Central Main Line railway from Leicester North to Loughborough Central. We had to change round the order of our days in order to travel on the GCML on a day when trains were running. It made a pleasant change to sit back and enjoy the route with steam or diesel. We made sure we sampled refreshments at each station.

Tomorrow we’ll be walking again.

From my remembered bible: My soul is restored.

Put me back on track.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Janet Lees, 27, 28,29 May 2022, Leicestershire.

Trace

Do you know the old man, who lives along the track,
I look over my shoulder: does anyone go back?
The old key is hanging on the door by a thread,
And the tune of this song is going round in my head.

These two days on the Jurassic Way, crossing back and forth over the route of the Great Central Railway are bound together by traces of what remains of that now disused line. We walk many disused railway lines and can only lament that this is no longer a working line or viable as an off road walking route of any length.

It’s called the Jurassic Way but there are no traces of dinosaurs as far as I could tell. On Wednesday, a grey day, we started at Woodford Halse. I explored the community woodland now in the middle of the former junction. Bob walked onto Charwelton. I caught up with him at Church Charwelton where a 12th century Church stands out in the meadows. We negotiated access to the key from its worthy guardian.

Having completed the section of the route for the day we enjoyed some cake at Draycote Water.

For the second day on this part of the Great Central Railway route (Thursday), Bob started at Charwelton Packhorse Bridge, a trace of a much older route in these parts. I started at Staverton and walked towards him. He was able to follow some of the line of the Catesby Tunnel, its airshafts still marching across the landscape. I was walking through arable land: oats, barley and wheat, and crossing some challenging stiles.

Eventually I reached the track bed of the Great Central Railway just south of the Catesby Viaduct. Not officially on a footpath, this right is reserved for the sheep currently in residence, but I do a reasonable impersonation myself.

Bob and I walked back to Staverton together: we then went back to Draycote Water for lunch.
I love to winkle the traces of history from the landscape. There are more sections of the Great Central Railway ahead, some reused, some abandoned.

From my remembered bible: The Shepherd One leads me in peaceful paths.

May I leap one stile at a time!

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Janet Lees, Woodford Halse to Staverton, 25-26 May 2022

Celebrate!

In this blog I will celebrate the first two days of the #GreatCentralRouteBack from Marylebone Station. No, we didn’t walk it all. First there was a train to Marylebone which was originally the London terminus of the Great Central line. The first train ran in 1899.

We got off one at West Ruislip to walk back to Denham via Ickenham. Bob grew up with this railway quite literally a back drop to his childhood as it ran at the bottom of the garden. We had a few HS2 works to contend with which meant one of the footpaths was rerouted. Eventually we met the Grand Union Canal at Bridge 182 in the Colne Valley Country Park, a part of the #GrandWalkOut I was walking exactly a week ago. We stopped for lunch at the Denham Visitors Centre.
Our afternoon route was not railway related as we drove along the A40 into Buckinghamshire across the Thame Valley. There’s was something of a mix up over our B and B so we carried onto Winslow where we found room at the Bell Hotel, and some very nice pies.
Day two began at Quainton, named after Queen Edith, consort of Edward the Confessor. It has a lovely windmill and a 15th century preaching Cross. The windmill was celebrating the 100th birthday of Dorothy which proved relevant later.

We went onto Quainton Road Station where the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre resides. The station is closed to main line traffic and Network Rail is currently taking up the track.
It is in Railway Centres like this that the forgotten corners of history are celebrated: a steam car made in Birmingham, in 1951, to run on diesel which was used on Egyptian National Railways until 1962 is awaiting restoration as is Janice, a large steam engine that, made in 1954, worked on South African Railways. There’s much more of course, piles of this and that which is bound to come in handy some day but which should definitely not be wasted.
There were plenty of opportunities to explain our #GreatCentralRouteBack one of which resulted in a conversation with a man who’s father had been a porter at the station ‘back in the day’. He turned out to be Dorothy’s grandson.
He also told us quite a bit about the local section of disused line Bob had hoped to walk. So I set Bob down in Westcott village whilst I went onto Ashendon, where I visited the church, and then to the junction of the former line on the way to Wooton Underwood. I did some rooting around whilst Bob walked there, a period of the day which was more than a bit showery and included a thunderstorm.

We moved onto a different line. The former line between Princes Risborough and Thame is now a Sustrans route called the Phoenix Trail. Bob dropped me near Hinton Crossing and I walked to Towersey. The skies were dramatic and thunder rumbled around but the sun came out again again by the time I’d reached my destination.
There’s more than a tinge of celebration about the Rule of St Benedict, I’m glad to say. These are the bits I like: what psalms to include in worship, how often to shout Alleluia. There’s so much to celebrate in life. Happy Birthday Dorothy and all those celebrating today!

From my remembered bible: God’s voice is like thunder, breaking the trees, and making calves jump.

Come on and celebrate!

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Janet Lees, unexpectedly resting at Winslow, 24th May 2022.