Everything Faster Than Everything Else

Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part 37)

Hello friends, this week we’re on the road to Canterbury and London. First, here’s a brand new conversation recorded between me and my friend Mark Vernon. You may enjoy the bit of spillage from today’s post.

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Dreamer at the Gate: Canterbury Cathedral, Autumn 2024

There’s an unexamined England just waiting to be re-beheld.

I’m not sure if catching the train to Canterbury with a bacon roll, coffee and wine gums really qualifies as a hard-core pilgrimage – in fact I’m sure it doesn’t – but I thought I should be transparent from the get-go. It’s the swift route not the earned, learned long road today, up to the famed city of Canterbury. A grey-skied middle England peers back at me through the train window, and I hear various folks sneezing away, it’s that time of year. I drift in and out of sleep and after one quick schlep on the London Underground I find myself on another train and in the ancient centre by mid-afternoon.

Everything quick these days, if it can be. I imagine an App on my phone called DIVLIT – Divine Liturgy for Busy People. Get through the ceremony in ten minutes, with reward points and encouragements – Gee, you’re doing great! – for how long you can sing along to the truncated ritual without sitting down. Surely somebody, somewhere is working on the prototype. After being bounced around in the wires and lights of zippy trains and ailing passengers I contemplate how folks used to make time to arrive here in a more thoughtful tempo than my own.