MY WORLD was about to change, and, if not scared, I was certainly queasy when I encountered the Zouche chapel, in York Minster, for the first time.
I was 18, looking at universities, and was in York to do battle — so it felt — with the Department of English and Related Literature. Up to the day before interviews, I’d gone to look round (and fallen in love with) the Minster. I found the chapel by chance as the late-afternoon light was fading, just off the south choir aisle through an old door with the fierce sign “Not available for sightseeing but visitors are most welcome to use it for prayer and meditation.”
Late 14th-century, and named after Archbishop William Zouche (1342-52), it is a small, quite utilitarian, vaulted space, of light grey stone, with oak cupboards lining the north side. The three-light east window is lopsidedly off-centre and filled with fragments of medieval glass: a bishop on the left, a cardinal on the right, and a king in the middle. The Sacrament was (and is) reserved there, and, in the gentle glow of the glass, I was able to lay out my trepidation before God in the tranquillity and timelessness of a sacred space, before climbing back up the few steps for evensong.
THE next day, I met the avuncular Professor Derek Pearsall (later at Harvard), who asked me, rather disarmingly, if I thought that the Wife of Bath was a bad woman. My garbled response was enough for him to offer an unconditional place, and so — for me, at any rate — the rest was history.
I did a three-year degree, and had such a good time that I stayed on to do an MA in medieval art, specialising in stained and painted glass. In those four years, the Zouche chapel was a constant reference point through all the ups and downs, exam traumas, and emotional growth of student life. The glass fragments became recognisable as 14th- and 15th-century, with glorious yellow-stain quarries of birds and flowers, oak leaves, and even a unicorn; yet for me it all remained timeless, a touching-place.
Over the years, I have gone back many times, in my forties and fifties and most recently in my sixties, touching base with God and with the unfurling teenager I once was. The chapel remains the same; I am different each time, with new layers of experience, challenge, and personal history, but the fabric of the space — its atmosphere, intimacy, and spiritual resonance — remains unchanged.
I AM always interested in the idea that (apart from some bones and bits of the nervous system) our bodies are renewed roughly every seven years; so the oldest parts of us really are our memories. I take these decades of memories with me to the Zouche chapel and lay them out in front of the “eternal changelessness” of the lopsided window.
As I age, and as the arc of my life continues its trajectory, I will keep touching base with this place. For me, it is the epitome of the passage from T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: “You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid.”
The Revd John Wall is Rector of the Uckfield Plurality in East Sussex.