Butterflies
I saw a Wall on the Wall,
A Peacock on the path at my feet
And in the speckly sunlit wood
Two Speckled Woods danced

I met some more wall walkers, coming from the West. This was the best day’s weather they had had each reported to me.
Over breakfast this morning my host told me she worked for a churches heritage project in Northumbria. She told me about a small church dedicated to St Oswald on the route. As we talked it confirmed in my mind the importance of the stories of the Northern Saints and how the gospel came to this part of England. It is just one other pieces in my post menopause spirituality.
About the time I became Chaplain I began to take an annual retreat to Holy Island. The URC have a project there and I stayed several times, once writing a service for a dead school boy on St Cuthbert’s island.
Going on retreat has been important to me for over 30 years. This was just one place I visited. It was there that I first understood that Aidan missionary and pastoral ministry combined and how the monks from Iona had been re-christianising the North, after Paulinus and Ethelburga.
So I decided to seek out further bits of this story and piece them together if I could in a way that might speak to people today, both those of the faith and those of other faiths or none, so they could see what part faith had and might play in the future.
One person in the story of the Northern Saints is Oswald who is remembered near here for the Battle of Heavenfield. Sandra and I stopped there to see St Oswald’s church, mentioned earlier. The current building replaced a much older one, but it is still a relatively simple structure surrounded by a neat grave yard, and a view all the way to Scotland.
Later, with the evening sun still two hours from setting, I did a short local walk, surprising some deer, hinds and fawns, that bounded across the fields ahead of me

As pants the hart
For cooling streams,
when heated in the chase:
So longs my soul
O God for thee
And thy refreshing grace.