TEN years ago, sheltering from a sudden summer storm in the welcome dry quiet of a Dorset church, I met by chance (what is chance?) a shabbily dressed woman with wet hair. After a conversation brief in minutes but eternal in essence, she gave me a polished stone of dark marble, and a much-rubbed piece of paper with “Hope Renewing” written on it in pencil.
Outside, the rain stopped, the sun shone through the stained glass, and I went on my way. I don’t know who she was, or why she gave me a treasure, but her stone — marked with a cross crafted by some freak of ancient metamorphosis — and the grubby paper sit on my desk as I write. I do not know why.
Then, as we were heading south after our yearly visit to Iona, a traffic light halted us at a crossroads. To the left, Lindisfarne beckoned. We took the old pilgrim route across the causeway. By the first big dunes, a myriad of wading-birds were calling, and across the channel a great host of seals were singing the songs that seals sing.
As we stood there with our binoculars, a car drew up beside ours, and a couple got out. A smile of instant liking, as if to say: “We have known and understood each other a long time.” “What are you watching?” “The seals — and those redshanks by the water.” They stood, awed in delight like ourselves. Too soon, stopped time resumed, and our ways parted. But such moments are the glimpses of joy we are allowed. You do not forget them, ever.
IT IS not easy to find, or to get to, St Issiu’s, in Patrishow — Merthyr Isw. His tiny shrine is still there and, probably, his sixth-century relics, too. After yet another one-in-four lane, aggressively potholed and throttled by hazel hedges overflowing their greenery in the tired exuberance of late summer, we abandoned the car and emerged from the hollow road to a view of all the kingdoms of the earth, it seemed, in a glory of sunlight and racing wind. Sheep safely graze where people must have dwelt, and the tombstones, cut in the brown local sandstone, exfoliate in wind and rain and frost and lose even the memory of the love and pain and pride that had their carving.
We heard voices inside the church — it sounded like singing. The wind’s voice was stilled as we closed the heavy door. Half hidden by the magnificent screen were a priest in a green old age, and a younger man, grizzled at the temples. The priest was speaking in Welsh, but, as his reading ended, they lifted up their voices in an English Te Deum to a chant that I’d known as a treble in the village choir at home. So, I joined in, and together we finished the beloved BCP matins in a mix of English and Latin and Welsh.
Of course, we then talked — no names were given, or needed; we understood each other. Many moments out of time, sharing so much, said and unsaid; for our thought language could rejoice in ellipsis. . .
For we few to meet by chance in this palpably holy place on a far hillside was the inevitable consequence of an endless chain of action and inaction, choice and serendipity, reaching back to the very beginning of time.
The world is more various than we can ever grasp, and we never know the end of the stories in which we have a part. What will be the consequence of that encounter? What will be the consequence of my trying to trap its remembered polyphony into the plainsong of words? The priest blessed us, and we went down from the mountain, never to meet again, but having known one another as if for ever. “That place was a portal,” my wise Rosanna said.
Dr Charles Moseley is a Life Fellow of Hughes Hall, Cambridge.
charlesmoseley.com