A Postcard from the Pilgrims Way

Dear Trinity friends,

Greetings from the village of Chilham, where I am about to walk to Canterbury and take your prayers with me. I wanted to share a few moments of my travels so far. Check out the videos below, and see the pictures for more detail. I didn’t want to disturb people by making videos inside churches, so I took pictures instead.

In Christ,

 

The Rev. Cn. Dr. Kara Slade, Associate Rector

 

The Temple Church, London

Mother church of the Magna Carta and the common law

A wonderful example of Norman architecture

The round interior of the church is an allusion to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, and to the ties between the Knights Templar and Jerusalem

Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford

Reformation Memorial

The chancel is built at a slight angle to the rest of the church — your eyes aren’t deceiving you! This is called a “weeping chancel” and signifies the image of Jesus inclining his head towards penitent sinners in mercy.

The flat notch in this pillar was cut to hold the platform where Thomas Cranmer was supposed to publicly recant his Reformation ideals — and refused to do it.

A Few Bonus Pictures:

A procession for the feast of St Mary at the Anglo-Catholic parish of All Saints’ Margaret Street in London. The gentlemen in red coats are Chelsea Pensioners, retired soldiers who participated as an honor guard.

I ran into recent Princeton graduate (and ECP alum) JJ not once, but twice on this trip! If you are an 8am person you may know JJ from Trinity as well.

I also had the pleasure of dinner in Oxford with AKMA and Margaret Adam, who were at Trinity when Leslie Smith was rector.

Praying with Your Body

Sulking Doggo

Greta has been sulking today. She saw my travel pack emerge from the closet shelf and knows what that means: mom is going away.

On Friday morning, I will leave for an 11-day trip to England to make plans for a parish pilgrimage sometime in 2024 — and as a pilgrimage and time of renewal for myself.

Pilgrimage is not tourism. Tourism involves a change in where we are, a change in our experiences, but it doesn’t necessarily involve a change in us. Pilgrimage is a way of opening ourselves to God in order to be changed, restored, reconciled, and empowered for our vocations. Fr. Richard Rohr writes,

If no interior journey has happened, we really haven’t made a pilgrimage….we’ve just been tourists. We’ve traveled around and said, ‘I saw this, and I saw that, and I bought this,’ and so forth. But that’s what a tourist does, not a pilgrim. And God has called us on pilgrimage. Above all else, pilgrimage is praying with your body, and it’s praying with your feet. It’s an exterior prayer, and the exterior prayer keeps calling you into the interior prayer.

I hope that you will begin praying about whether God might be calling you on this pilgrimage next year, to learn and to be changed by God in the places where great deeds of faith have been done and where God is worshipped in powerful ways.

I also hope that you will send me your prayer requests. If you email me by Monday (sladek@trinityprinceton.org) with the subject line ‘Prayer Request,’ I will offer your prayers at the site of St. Thomas Becket’s martyrdom at Canterbury Cathedral, where thousands upon thousands of prayers have been said over the centuries.

 
 

The Rev. Cn. Dr. Kara Slade, Associate Rector

 

The Most Important Meeting You’ve Never Heard Of: The Synod of Whitby, 664

I originally planned on sending a video this week, but I’m writing instead because I’m still recovering from Covid and it would take a lot to make myself look presentable! Remember that in my last video, we learned about the development of “Celtic” practices of Christian life in early Britain that were sometimes at odds with how things were done in Rome. Some of those differences were small, like the way monks cut their hair. Some were critically important for political and financial reasons. In the early British church, the real power brokers in the church were the abbots of monasteries rather than bishops. But one seemingly small difference in practice would rearrange how Christianity in Britain worked.

In the court of Northumbria, King Oswiu had been taught by Irish monks and followed their method for calculating the date of Easter. But Queen Eanflaed, his wife, was taught to calculate Easter according to the Roman method. When one half of a couple is celebrating Easter and the other is still fasting for Holy Week, it’s bound to create some tensions. In 664, a council was summoned to the great monastery of Whitby to settle the question once and for all: how do we know when it’s Easter?

Whitby functioned as a “double monastery”, where a community of monks and a community of nuns shared the same church but lived in separate quarters. Because they were generally governed by an abbess, these double monasteries were the home of powerful women leaders, and St. Hilda of Whitby was no exception.

The debate at the Synod of Whitby centered on a question that is still relevant for Christian life: Where does the church’s authority come from? Who decides, and on what basis, when differences of practice or belief come up? The supporters of the Irish method of calculation argued that “we’ve always done it this way,” a refrain you can hear in church arguments even today! But the supporters of the Roman method appealed to the authority given to Peter in Scripture: “You are Peter and upon this rock I shall build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it and to you I give the keys to the kingdom of heaven.” King Oswiu found that logic convincing, and as a result Christian practice in Britain was brought into alignment with more universal practice.

I encourage you to check out the links and learn more about St Hilda, one of the truly fascinating women of Christian history.

This episode of Time Team, one of my favorite TV shows, focuses on the archaeological search for St. Hilda’s monastery.

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