A Child's Address
Created | Updated Jan 13, 2024
A Child's Address
For Rozzi and Jon – October 2nd 2021
Brightwell Baldwin
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The limestone from which the walls of this Church are made was laid down in the slow-motion twists, tumbles and fractures of the earth, over aeons of time.
Light that falls on us here, now, falls through painted glass in windows that have, since the Middle Ages, lit congregations gathered in community for the weekly rhythms of worship and for baptisms, marriages and the end of life. The roots of the spirit of this place go deep in human time too.
Today, in the lee of these walls, in this space, in this hour, we are gathered and forever bound in communitas, in glorious witness to the marriage of Rozzi and Jon.
There are few more precious moments in a life to which we are privileged to bear witness.
This has long been a ground of hymn and prayer, of liturgy and chant and our witness today reaches through each one of us, feeling the press of our bodies seated on pews made of wood from trees that fed and watered centuries ago, through each one of us feeling the breath in our chests, each one of us feeling our beating hearts. These moments reach back to all our mothers and fathers, to all our ancestors, in a kin-story woven in filaments of belonging across deep time and forward into the lives of children yet to be born.
Each one of us, as we came through the door into the familiar coolth of an English Church, entered a liminal space, that space where things exist at the boundary between one thing and another.
Today, we are to be witness to the sacred time of change between the moment Rozzi crossed the threshold of the Church, through the open wooden door, to the moments in which she and Jon take their marriage vows to each other and to the moment in which they leave the Church and re-enter the day as husband and wife. And in our communitas, in this liminal hour, breathes the latent power of all our possibilities.
We shall be participants too in the celebration, amidst the trees and the lights around the old House, by the stream, that drove the wheel, that turned the stone, that made the flour, for hundreds of years.
So, in witness, we belong to each other today, to the lovely of birdsong, to the promise of renewal in the sound the wind makes in the red and gold of dry autumn leaves, to the shimmer-song of flowers, to the furl of cloud and sky, to the drip of rain drop on grass and loam.
Pay attention, to each other, to the different sound the wind does make in different leaves, in different trees, at different times of the year, to water running over stone in spate and in trout tickling gentless, to light through stained glass windows, to the tree roots that grow under our feet, to family and friends and to bread and cheese, food lovingly prepared and tables set with care and candles. Pay attention to the more distant filaments of connection too.
Set your mind to walk outside a while.
Some of us, as children, wrote our address in the blank pages at the beginning of books, as we figured our place in time and space – Brightwell Baldwin, Oxfordshire, England, Britain, Europe, the World, the Solar System, the Galaxy – keep going as long as you wish, maybe into the swirl and sweep and light of stars, maybe into the obsidian black of deep space, maybe the distant view of the little blue of us is too far to see now�..
Now let each one of us return in a glorious rush of shared belonging towards the blue drop in space, towards this ancient limestone church in the here and now of communitas, and feel anew what it is to be in this time, in this place with Rozzi and Jon.
