Today is a Sunday and I am at Pilsdon Church just a few miles north of the Marshwood Vale and Chideock where I stopped in May. Since then I did a tramp at the end of June and slept out in a hollow under some trees overlooking Ryall while it rained as the last light of the day faded to black.
I didn’t sleep much and the following day the tramp became a trudge with my feet feeling like lead and the rigours of nettle stings and wet legs more of a frustration than normal. I ended up here at Pilsdon church in need of a rest. In the meadow next to the church there were two people in white with net covered heads attending to some bees, their movements slow and deliberate.
Inside the church there were no pews. Just hay bales lined neatly along the walls. I thought of people in the past who sought refuge in churches. I think of the young man who my dad once found sleeping in the church next to my parents’ house when he went to lock up. He left him to it and went to bed. I think of the now popular pastime of ‘champing’ (church camping) where people pay to sleep in churches.
To me there is something comforting about a church especially after wandering miles alone in an unknown landscape.
I lie down on the bale and feel the peace of my surroundings; there is a sense of calm in the otherwise birdlike flutter of my heart.
It soon dawns on me there is something different about this church. It feels a little more ‘private’ than a conventional parish church.
In 1958 Percy and Gaynor Smith decided to establish a community at Pilsdon Manor (next door) modelled on Little Gidding, ‘the first Anglican community after Henry VIII’s dissolution of monasteries’ which was set up by Nicholas Ferrer in 1625.
According to The Pilsdon Community website ‘Since 1958 the Pilsdon Community has been offering a refuge to people in crisis, welcoming those from all backgrounds. Pilsdon is a community that shares a common life of prayer, hospitality and work’. At any one time there are 25 to 30 people living there who also work the farm. There is the manor, the church and a farm. They bake their own bread, grow their own vegetables and enjoy milk, butter and cream from their own herd.
The warden leads the community and they worship 4 times a day in the church. At Little Gidding the guests were said to have found the ‘’spirit of joy and serene peace’, a peace that continues today at Pilsdon’.
I park my car in their drive. There are middle aged men wandering around quietly. Mary must be in her thirties. She had been working and living here for 7 years. She talks about the benefits of ‘the steadying of a contemplative lifestyle’. She tells me how they live here not to seek an outcome or achievement but ‘living with the seasons’ and finding the joy and rewards of ‘living in the moment’. She had come from a stable, joyful background but says how she finds rewards in living alongside people who have suffered or experienced ‘relationships that have been broken’. She says how they follow the vision of Little Gidding and T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same name is about ‘returning to the start’ meaning we ‘end how we start’. It’s a little ambiguous but I think I know what she means.
She also says that it says a lot about their community that it has survived this long. Their vision is ‘worship, hospitality and work.’ They are a lay community so only the warden is ordained and they don’t have to make a pledge to an order like a monastic community.
However they are very much encouraged to focus on being part of the community and being there to work alongside each other. She herself has only one day off a week where she will leave the community.
In the church I meet Chris who turns out to be Mary’s husband. He tells me the pews were taken out many years ago to install underfloor heating. I say that must be the first church I’ve been to with it.
He tells me that on a Sunday people come from the local area to join the community in prayer.
I can’t help but think about the different ways we approach life. Here is a community of souls, many of them seeking help or solace, who have come to live in this corner of Dorset to live a life of contemplation and hard working alongside nature. It is a life similar to monks and ascetics of the past.
It is one of those moments when I have stumbled upon something which forces me to reassess and to try and learn from the not always usual lives of others. And it seems to be in keeping with my newfound openness to a simpler appreciation of the world around me. It is a reminder that life seems always to me to be about learning and surprising oneself and how in this moment the will to explore this adventure of path and life is stronger than ever.
The Slow Walker 