Centering

We went over to Acton Burnell Castle today: we've visited the place before [blog posts passim], but our companions had never been to the place, and we fancied another trot over there, anyway. After a wander around the castle ruins and taking in the sight of some of the magnificent trees there, we decamped to the adjacent St. Mary's Church, a grade one listed building dating back to the late thirteenth century, which was unmolested and unmodified until the late nineteenth century when some renovation was necessary and some minor additions were made, including the addition of the small, Victorian tower. For the most part, however, the place wears its Medieval origins on its sleeve and it is all the better for it. Pictured, original Medieval tiling around seventeenth century headstones in the floor of the north transept.

A lovely and peaceful place for those with or without Christian faith, it speaks mostly of human history with all of its manifest oppressions and freedoms, wealth and poverty, inequalities of life, but most of all of the great leveller: death. As to the hereafter, no-one has conclusively returned or sent word as to its putative nature or indeed reality, but, nevertheless, over the centuries mankind has created spaces for the worship of gods and prophets whose words are but the suppositions of people and ultimately unprovable to be otherwise in this realm of existence. Post mortem and post-religion, the structures we build persist however, often for centuries, and those that have survived well into what is now a pretty much secular [post-Christian, anyway] Britain in the twenty-first century, still provide quiet and peaceful spaces for introspection on one's place and purpose in the universe, whether or not one cleaves to the Christian story. In my book it's all Zen, anyway...