Sermon preached at the Festival Eucharist on the National Pilgrimage to the Shrine of St Edward the Confessor 2024

What is a pilgrim’s imprint upon the earth? And what is the claim of ancient paths upon the present? To be a pilgrim is in some way to follow where others have trod: to seek their footmarks and in them plant our own. To orienteer one’s life with an inherited chart and compass.

One day in 1967, the artist Richard Long, then a student at St Martin’s College, took a journey from Bristol back to London and stopped off in Wiltshire (as all wise pilgrims should). He found a grassy field and proceeded to walk up and down it in a straight line until the flattened hay made a visible path. He photographed this, and the resulting work, entitled A Line Made By Walking, became a well-known and innovative sculpture, hanging today in Tate Modern, where it continues to arrest and perplex. Long’s work is concerned with the act and art of walking – the performance of life in a particular direction, and the trace or trail that remains, however briefly.

Humanity’s growing awareness of an indelible footprint on creation in the decades since shows Long’s work as prophetic, I think, and invites us to understand the heat, the heft, the half-life left behind us and how this shapes the journeys of those who follow on.

 Jesus and his disciples were on the road, St Mark relates, going up to Jerusalem, when James and John make their endearingly self-interested pitch for power in the coming kingdom. Jesus was stepping out ahead of them and the brothers come forward to catch him up. They appear to be on one route to the holy city, with our Lord on another entirely, who abruptly puts them right: ‘You don’t know what you are asking’… he says to them: ‘whoever wishes…’ read 43b-45.

The messianic path was an ancient route, but one taking new departure along the way of the cross, the way of Christ, who understood how conflicting claims to the same territory tend to end. Relentless self-advancement was hopeless, terminal. Only service and self-emptying could open a new and living way. So it is that Jesus catches each of us, puzzling over the map marked ‘me’. ‘You are here’, he points: ‘and the map’s upside down…’

St Edward’s Christian confession will have been paced out in an equally contested political landscape: his reign holding a straining peace between competing interests in this still new nation: Norman, Saxon, Viking. In his History of Britain, the poet John Milton (a familiar of this holy place) writes that ‘the softness of Edward’s nature’ found the threat of insurgency from those about him almost impossible to resist and records a vision of the dying king wherein God’s judgement is about to fall upon England’s divided and godless factions, delivering the land to their enemies. At this, the worldly and extortionate Archbishop Stigand is said to have laughed. ‘But the event proved it true’, the poet concludes, darkly.

Milton was perhaps the last in a long line of chroniclers who viewed this country’s history through an explicitly biblical lens. For a thousand years or so - from Gildas onwards – historians viewed our story as a kind of extension of the Book of Kings, whereby spiritual and political degeneracy bring the loss of what powerful people long to possess, especially the land itself. 

Latter day Stigands will laugh at the idea, naturally, but England’s peace (and arguably that of the world) is no further removed from that of Jerusalem than it ever was, and we are fools if we try to walk the line through contemporary geo-politics while ignoring the state of our nation’s soul – or the urgent need to regrow one. 

Monarchy emerged in part from people’s desire for a single corporate personality – what Walter Bagehot describes as ‘local holiness’ residing in one place, one person. In other dispensations, this instinct is not extinguished, of course, but finds alternate focus for our towery expectations. No wonder we seek, like Samuel, leaders of heart and humility. No wonder St Paul urges us to pray for those in high office and see them in their right perspective to divine power. 

All of which suggests that our pursuit of the common good – of being a body in a corporate sense - starts with incarnation: with being a body in the singular and personal sense. (For any attempt to work backwards, beginning at some abstract or universal level, national or otherwise, soon becomes dehumanising). Politics, policy, charity at the human scale. Religion (dear friends) at the human scale, and the perception of others as first of all neighbour and fellow-pilgrim. 

This abbey-shrine holds together (as few other places could) the national and the personal, the lofty and the local: grounding them in a pursuit of ordinary holiness. For the Christian route to God (indeed, the resurrection of all things) begins with a person who is like a path: offering a way through all our deadly competitions. 

However you arrive here this day, each of you will have traced the paths made by others, known and unknown, whose journeys have directed your own. Some of the lines they have left will be long gone, restored like trodden grass, or ferry trails in the sea. Others will be scored in for good - or ill - and will need wisdom and maybe courage in deciding how to stray from their beaten track. We have our familiar routes, our desire lines, do we not - and some of them need leaving behind. 

What, then, should be the pilgrim’s imprint upon the earth? Heavy enough to trace but light enough to change, I suggest. For such is the generosity of time and space that God affords us: so that we are not doomed or determined merely to repeat the past but instead to settle with history.

As you do this, may the living God grant you the gentleness of St Edward in testing times and lead you in the way everlasting. 

Amen.