Walking the Pilgrims’ Way day 3: Wrotham to Aylesford

11 miles

Day three was a shorter walk than day two with fewer distractions of villages and churches to visit.

So I didn’t leave Wrotham without visiting St George’s Church, where there some delightful portraits from the past.

And then I was into rolling fields and big views.

Interspersed with mysterious and enticing woodland tunnels of trees.

All very Middle Earth!

Later on the path presented a rather more prosaic picture: quarries, cement factories, a shiny new new town, a solar farm and a sewage works.

Moments from the sewage works was today’s journey’s end: a guest house at Aylesford Priory. It’s England’s oldest Carmelite priory. Founded in 1242, it was dissolved in the Reformation and converted to a stately home before being revived as a religious site and community in 1948, opening with a procession of 50 friars.

I’m writing this blog in the Guest Library on the first floor of the Pilgrims Hall, originally constructed in 1280. It’s really rather nice! Not least because along with the medieval stonework and Victorian woodwork it appears to have been last refurbished in the 1970s/80s so the furniture has a certain well-used period charm.

Aylesford Priory is also the home to a large collection of Adam Kossowski ceramic plaques and murals, due to a fruitful collaboration between him and the leader of the new Carmelite community established here after the Second World War. Kossowski, who created the mural in the Old Kent Road I saw on day one, came to Britain as the survivor of a soviet prison camp and is now buried here in Aylesford.

Rather than reaching for the rituals and stories of faiths I have been reading around death and loss to see if I can find clarity and comfort in others’ words. It’s been hit and miss. I found one very lauded modern ‘grief memoir’ so infuriatingly tedious I almost didn’t finish its 150 pages.

But then a much older work by someone well-known for his Christian faith, did speak to me. In A Grief Observed CS Lewis reflects on the death of his wife Helen and documents both how he feels and his struggles to make sense of how his pain relates to his faith and relationship with God. It’s dry and sparse but heart-wrenching; his despair leaps out of the plain words.

“And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn. I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty succcessiveness.”

_{A Grief Observed, CS Lewis, 1961, p 29-30}

Yet he finds as time goes on that things change though he can’t fully understand or explain why. .

“Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early. For various reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious, my heart was lighter than it had been for many weeks. And suddenly, at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like meeting would be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use those words. It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier.”

_{A Grief Observed, CS Lewis, 1961, p 38-39}

Grief diminishing is a sad process. Grief’s sweet, tender pain and turmoil is a constant connection to the one you have lost. To feel the pain leaving feels like another loss you have to mourn. But here Lewis shows that the change is not a loss but a gift.

So often with reading it’s a matter of mood and timing so perhaps I got to it at just the right moment. But in between trying to find the serious pieces with which I could connect, I also did comfort reading, picking up books that have given me joy in the past. And strangely, I found in one of these a secular depiction of the person of Death that is truly a comfort, at least to me.

Terry Pratchett sold more than 100 million copies in 43 languages of his comic fantasy Discworld series. And Death has a prominent role, meaning Pratchett’s characterisation is probably the most popular depiction of death’s presence in modern times.

In the fourth Discworld novel, Mort, Death is growing a little tired of aeons of receiving the dying and takes an apprentice to help him out, which means he has to explain (in capitals because that’s how he always talks) something of the job role to Mort’s anxious father.

Job description is simply: “I USHER SOULS INTO THE NEXT WORLD”. His place of business is “FROM THE UTMOST DEPTH OF THE SEA TO THE HEIGHTS WHERE EVEN THE EAGLE MAY NOT GO”.

How did he get into this work? Well, now, “WHERE THE FIRST PRIMAL CALL WAS, THERE WAS I ALSO. WHERE MAN IS, THERE AM I. WHEN THE LAST LIFE CRAWLS UNDER FREEZING STARS, THERE WILL I BE.”

This Death is remorseless and unyielding. Towards the end of the book while explaining why he doesn’t reward a good person with extra life he makes it terrifyingly clear that there are no interventions for the deserving or otherwise:

“THERE’S NO JUSTICE. THERE’S JUST ME.”

_{Mort, Terry Pratchett, 1987, p 243}

That seems very real to me. But this personification of Death is also familiar and companionable, sometimes ironic and humorous, and even kindly (when not asked to look the other way when someone’s allotted span is drawing to a close). He’s perhaps a Death many of us would not be averse to meeting when the time really comes.

Strange the places where we find sanctuary. But the journey goes on.

See all the photos from today on Flickr

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