My scallop-shell of quiet

The Lily Cross in All Saints Church, Godshill

Give me my scallop shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope's true gage,
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage. 

Sir Walter Raleigh

This fragment from a much longer poem is supposed to have been written immediately before Raleigh's impending execution; in fact he was spared for the time being, and lived another 15 years or so. I found it printed on a small blue card, in All Saints Church at Godshill.

I've been vaguely familiar with these lines for many years, but I had forgotten them till I found this small card in a rack with other such things, at the back of the church, and bought it to bring home.

At the entrance to the church, in the porch by the south door, is a modern framed extract (beginning "You are not here to verify...") from TS Eliot's 'Little Gidding'. I have reproduced the whole section from which it is taken:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from 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. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

I am not aware that the ancient church in this little village deep inland on the Isle of Wight has ever been a place of pilgrimage as such. If so, the fact is not mentioned in any history of the parish I have seen - though there was a Benedictine priory nearby at Appuldurcombe. But All Saints seems to me like a pilgrim church. Up a steep hill above the village, with its medieval lily cross on the wall above the reserved Blessed Sacrament, it somehow asks to be approached quietly, with reverence - not for the building, but for what it means - as at the end of a long journey.

Pilgrimage is increasingly a pattern that calls to me. As I wrote elsewhere here, "We cannot know the way; but our steps are indeed ordered by the Lord (Proverbs 20.24), if we love him, and will only draw near to him in prayer. He simply says, as he always does, 'Go', or even 'What is that to you? Follow me!' (John 21.21)" Somehow I find I no longer have the need I once had to be sure of the way.