A poem about worship in a farming community in Cornwall |
A Little Church on the Lizard Goonhilly Downs, not a name to conjure with, high on a moor with a collection of satellite tracking discs spreading around the summit of the Lizard Peninsula, that soapstone jewel of the Cornish coast, blends into the plateau south and west where small, scattered farms scrape at the thin soils and set apart a field with a caravan or two to gain some pocket change from a tourist family, perhaps to pay the television licence. My little family found one of those farms, stayed once and returned year upon year, so well did we come to love the Lizard, and time brought us close to our farming hosts. Thus we earned an invite to their Sunday church, accepting in our curiosity to learn of rural worship but unaware of the honour bestowed on us. They are a close-knit bunch in these remote and scattered communities, defensive in their isolation. A few miles away, on the main road to Coverack and St Keverne, small towns but most important in the emptiness of the Lizard, stands the church, or, perhaps more accurately, a tiny chapel. Here we arrived, our bright blue car a stand out amongst the battered and ancient Land Rovers, and wandered into the bare and sparse interior with benches built into walls and floor, part-filled by a congregation of twenty perhaps, no more. We were youngest there and greeted with old time politeness, the gnarled and sunburnt hands shaking ours with dignified welcome and aged lips framing their Cornish accents, such music to my ears. Shown to seats unoccupied for generations maybe, we waited with the rest, noting the tiny old lady taking her seat at an antique piano while, at the front, the minister shuffled his feet, fingers whiffling through a suitably black and imposing Bible. And so we began. The old lady attacked the keys with a slightly out of tune old Methodist hymn. The congregation burst out in a cacophony of sound, the fellow to our left way too sharp, another to our right apparently singing a diff'rent hymn entirely, the rest sharp and flat and anything in between, all of them bellowing at the top of their lungs. The sound was, if I may be truthful, terrible beyond belief, and we, shocked into submission, mouthed the words in silence. We were products of the Fellowship movement in the cities, creators of the music-producing mega-churches like John Wimber’s Vineyard and the Australian Hillsong. The culture shock was too much and we could do no more than last somehow through the sermon to stagger outside and disappear with brief farewells. We never went back and, to my shame on reflection, made fun and laughed at our subjection to musical torture at the ends of the earth. It is only now that I understand how privileged we were to be amongst those farming folk that day and, not being a betting man, I am prepared to wager a few nickels or groats that such fervent and joyful faith falls upon the ear of God as the sweetest of sounds, sweeter indeed than the massed choirs of half the cathedrals of Christendom; sweeter than any number of braying Archbishops wallowing in their agnosticism. Lines: 63 Word Count: 533 |