LAST week I went, with my wife to Rutland. We’d been before but we went this time with a specific reason. We wanted to visit Little Gidding.
Here the Ferrar family, under the guidance of Nicholas, formed a religious community.
In the beginning the community was made up of Nicholas’s immediate family. The community lived the religious life keeping mainly to Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer.
They lived a common life sharing what they had and just as they shared in prayer so they shared together in their meals and in the household chores.
Near to the house, where the community lived, was a piggery which as a community they restored and made into their Chapel.
There is a wonderful sense of calm and quiet around the site and especially in the Chapel. It is one of those places which seem to be in the stones of the building.
T.S. Eliot made Little Gidding a place of pilgrimage and in his poem he writes:
“If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting anywhere
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same; you would have to put off
sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.”
If you can, then do read the whole poem. Eliot reminds us in his poem that prayer is what the Church is about.
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