I WONDERED how best to put my three “articles of faith” in order; then settled on the chronological order in which each has shaped me spiritually. First, the rosary I used at my mother’s bedside, before she died. Picking it up, most Friday mornings, makes me think of her. But — as with any aid to prayer — the value is not in the object, but in what it signifies. I have owned many rosaries, lost some, and had others stolen. But they are all functional as a toothbrush (getting a job done) or a bus (taking me where I need to go).
I began praying the rosary as a student, encouraged by a book by the Methodist writer J. Neville Ward, which helped to “detoxify the brand”. I wondered then, as I sometimes do now, why my delight in Catholic spiritual practices was not drawing me to Rome. But it never has.
In time, the rosary opened up the life of Jesus spiritually. It transformed my prayer life from solipsistic agonising into something other-centred. I am still a work-in-progress, spiritually speaking; but learning to pray the rosary was a step-change.
NEXT comes my spiral-bound anthology of Welsh hymns. It is inscribed “Gwyl Dewi Sant [St David’s Day], Little Baddow URC, In appreciation for conducting our annual service on Sunday 28th February 1999”,
I was newly ordained then, helping out my parents, who were members of the Chelmsford and District Welsh Society. I continued taking the annual service until 2018. It was an annual step outside my comfort zone, and back in time; for the layout of the little church is just like that of the Baptist church that I started attending in my late teens. The minister was at the centre. Uncomfortable. I climbed into the pulpit after entering through the door behind which lay the “vestry” (not a robing room, but a gathering place).
After I left the parishes of Gamlingay and Everton for Cambridge in 2005, this service became a moment for reconnecting with so-called “ordinary” ministry. Warm greetings from people whose names I never learned. A sense of tribal identity. The crowning glory was the Welsh hymns: passionate, familiar, unselfconscious. I would give the blessing and lead the Lord’s Prayer, in Welsh. There is so much that I have yet to learn about the spirituality of Welsh hymnody. But that learning began there, with Calon Lân — pages 36-37 in the Detholiad o Emynau Cymraeg, if you were wondering, written in tonic sol-fa as well as modern staff notation.
MY THIRD article of faith also has a Welsh connection, but this time it is not a matter of parentage. It stands for the years from 1998 to 2019, when I used to make an annual retreat to what was first St Deiniol’s Library (brown carpet tiles, communal bathrooms), but later became the Gladstone Library, in Hawarden, Flintshire (en-suite, with Melin Tregwynt bedding). In both identities, it gave me space, silence, and solitude, far from family and friends, where I could attend morning chapel and breakfast, and then spend the day reading. A library with comfortable armchairs has become a icon of heaven for me.
In this place, I have browsed, and rummaged, and looked, at leisure, without clock-watching to rush off to teaching or meetings; I have read books I would never otherwise have come across. But there were less cerebral benefits, too. An orchid nursery a few miles off (now gone) and a very good wool shop (ditto). One attraction that has not gone, and will certainly outlast me, as it has endured for centuries already, is St Winifred’s Well, in the little town of Holywell, on the north coast. I visited every year to collect well water, said to have healing properties; to attend shrine prayers, and to venerate the relic of the saint.
If St Winifred has healed me physically, it must be in inconspicuous ways. But I have found spiritual healing there: the kind of joy that comes from every little pilgrimage. The instinct to put effort into seeking God is a healthy one, I think. Covid broke my pattern of visiting St Winifred, “y santes Gwenffrewi”. But I do not forget her on 3 November, even if she has to share with Richard Hooker. This year, I am resolved to return, fill up my bottle of well water, venerate the relic at the shrine, and be glad once more that I am part of something so old, so beautiful, and so true.
The Revd Dr Cally Hammond is Dean of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and the author of the Church Times Sunday Readings column.
