Dem bones, dem churches.

Back garden of St Mary's vicarage; Viv's streaky kitchen window

Mmm, sobering thought (not that I've had anything more than half a pint of shandy in the last few days; the English language is so full of possibilities for creating slight misunderstandings). One of the things that happens here now and again is that a load of bones are wheeled past my front door and returned to their resting place in St. Peter's church, Barton-on-Humber, having been excavated and now available to researchers for study. Here is Kevin Booth of English Heritage pushing some of them home in boxes, which are like shoeboxes, with the longer side the length of the longest bone in the human body. It always makes me feel I ought to bow reverently when I see this happen.  I tend to do a silent blessing of them and wonder what their lives were like, and how many will have trodden the earth that is now under my back garden. Some date back to Anglo-Saxon times.

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/st-peters-church-barton-upon-humber/

That link shows the view out of my window (not the one shown here - that's of the back garden) when I'm peeling veg, so I feel very lucky. We have two mediaeval churches here in Barton, no-one knows the exact reason why this should be. Our house lies very close to St. Peter's, but St Mary's is the one we use. It rather reminds me of the story about the Welshman who gets shipwreecked and winds up alone on a desert island. He settles down there, gets on with his life, till eventually someone finds him and gets him to show them round the things he has built. Proudly he shows them his house, and two churches. 'Why two churches?' the rescuer asks. 'Ah well,' he says pointing first to one of them 'This is the church I go to' and then pointing to the other (firecely) 'and this is the one I don't go to'. Sorry to any Welsh readers, it's just that the joke sounds a lot better with a Welsh accent, and probably it ought to say 'chapel', not 'church'; I think it can apply to all situations where inter-church/chapel relations in small towns anywhere have not been good. Let's hope it is a thing of the past. So anyway, St. Peter's is only very rarely used for worship, and we have to pay to get into it otherwise, which is a great shame for the people of Barton, some of whom used to like to come and just sit in it. Many Bartonians are not in a position to pay for English Heritage membership. Of course, both our churches are Anglican, but presumably in the distant past they may well have had two mainly separate sets of worshippers. Not many decades ago both were in use month and month about by one congregation, with a special wheelbarrow to take hymnbooks and choir robes between the two.

This is the one we do now use:
http://www.stmarysbarton.org.uk/

We have an excellent musical tradition here, and apart from August, we have full choral evensong at 6 on the first Sunday of the month (as well as other sung evensongs). Our organist Geoff Brown has just written a splendid new setting for the eucharist, 'Missa Rosa Mystica', which we are just learning. I hope we will be a beacon of excellence in congregational singing in the fulness of time, to the glory of God in the highest.