Who are we?
This page is a representation of some of the individual thoughts of members and friends of the congregation.
Sacred Places
At a recent service three members were asked to give an account of a place that was sacred for them. These are two of their responses:
Great Hucklow
My special place is a tiny Derbyshire village in the Peak District known as Great Hucklow, considered by many the green heart of Unitarianism. It consists of a handful of grey stone houses nestling along the skirt of Hucklow Edge and contains a pub, the Queen Anne, a simple old rectangular chapel with windows of clear glass and a long low building known as the Nightingale Centre. Miniscule fields, infinitely varied in shape and bounded by dry stone walls, stretch as far as the eye can see until they meet the blue of the distant hills. The light shifts constantly as clouds play over the open sky. Nights are a stargazer’s delight for there is no pollution from street lamps. In the friendly dark, both pub the chapel stream a welcome of golden light. The air is full of birdsong interspersed with the occasional lowing of cows and bleating of sheep. It is a haven of peace, a place of retreat and renewal, conducive to the forming of green thoughts in a green shade. Unitarians go there for all sorts of reasons – courses, meetings, holidays, music making, congregational outings, weddings and celebrations of all kinds, for Hucklow is a verb as well as a noun, and can only be sampled through living. It is the one place where you can live in a community of people who share the same values and concerns although they express them very differently. And you will learn new ways and discover reaches of the self you hardly dreamt of. Sages, the middle aged, teenagers and babes in arms are equally welcome, as are the happy and prosperous, the lost and the lonely, the compulsively social and the uncertain novices. No matter how different in interest and temperament, everyone who spends time here experiences a sense of deep sharing and joy. Days can be spent in discussion, craft, dance, worship and play, well-dressing and walks, laughter, song and meditation. Heart and mind join hands. And deep down, the unfrequented spirit unfurls its wings.
If you could distil the essence of Hucklow into one person that person would be Simon John Barlow, minister extraordinary, craft maker, theologian, poet, lord of the summer dance, weaver of heart and mind and soul into patterns of meaning and delight To know him only slightly was to feel that the world was better for his presence; to know him well was to love him dearly, as leagues of his friends on both sides of the Atlantic can attest.
On an October afternoon in 2008, when the trees on the Edge were bronze, and amber, and gold, and the autumn mists hung low, we laid Simon John to rest by his father in the graveyard and said our farewells. Sadness and loss had entered our green world. At forty seven, he had suffered a brain haemorrhage from which he did not recover. Now he is forever part of the rich earth of Hucklow, its abiding genius loci.
In the final story about Winnie the Pooh, Christopher Robin bids goodbye to his early childhood and the daily companionship of his beloved bear before he is sent away to school. “But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way in that enchanted place at the top of the forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”
May it be so with us and our beloved Simon John and all who ever visit Great Hucklow!
Margaret Hamer
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This week I was asked if I would like to reflect on a place that was special for me. When I didn’t answer immediately and with enthusiasm I was given a few hints of what I could focus on- “this place needn’t be a geographical location, it could even be a sofa, and, it can be special because it feels like a sacred or spiritual space.” That second hint provided the incentive because I was recently thinking along those lines myself. I knew straightaway that my ‘place’ was outdoors. I have been thinking, in an old hippy sort of way that I have had a previous life as a peasant-type person who worked on the land, probably with sheep and probably in the Middle Ages. I must say that I am not strongly committed to this idea as a fact, but I am interested in the reason that it came into my head, and that is the part that relates to this topic of the sacred space.
Something HAPPENS to me when I am outdoors in the British countryside, not always, but especially when it is cold and not the sort of weather that one would normally want to be out. Usually I am working in a physical sort of way- mowing, gardening, digging, walking a long way. Instead of feeling fed up and miserable, I feel completely uplifted and refreshed. I begin to notice individual leaves or branches of trees; birdsong is amplified as is the smell of wet vegetation. At one point this experience was so frequent that I talked to Martin about paganism, Druids and Celts. I pursued this course for awhile and found the animal, plant and tree lore that has been passed down from older cultures very interesting, but it did not serve to promote my connection with the places I feel most contented. The Unitarian in me balked at the idea of a standardised ritual for the expression of spirituality and so I abandoned formal paganism. I realised that it is better for me not to try to tie down the spirituality that connects me to the natural environment, but rather to leave it alone to seep into my consciousness whenever the constellation of conditions necessary for its appearance line up of their own accord.
All this meandering brings me round to the fact that designating one particular place is not compatible with my own sacred space. My sacred space jumps out at me suddenly and unexpected as I am doing something else. There I am trying to unblock the grass box on the mower as it is getting dark and I am only half way through the job of mowing and bang the spirit of the lord comes down and there is a little pop and I see the landscape in a different way. It is a little irritating because it is uncontrollable and cannot be scheduled into the first Sunday in the month or harnessed in any way. But now that I am confident that it will happen again I can just leave it to occur when it will. I can slow my mind right down and make myself receptive to spiritual influence and maybe my sacred space will appear more frequently.
Maybe this slowing down is the connection to the previous life phenomenon. Somehow I can’t help thinking that in a slower and simpler society when most people lived and worked on the land the spiritual connection to the natural world was a common experience and helped people to live a centred and peaceful life even in physically hard conditions. Maybe that is the reason I can cope with a blocked mower on a rainy day but not with a jostling crowd in a supermarket.
Tamora Todd-Rigby
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My own Very Special Place is not an imaginary hideaway, not a place that exists only in my mind but a very special real place in God’s own country: the English Lake District. In the North West corner of ‘the Lakes’ lies the beautiful Buttermere (not Lake Buttermere: Buttermere is already a lake). It lies in the valley of the River Cocker which joins the Derwent at Cockermouth of course.On the eastern shore of Buttermere is a beautiful old house called Hassness, where I spent a marvellous holiday in the summer of 1976. It is run as a walking holiday centre by the Holiday Fellowship and is a superb, friendly place. As you stand in the grounds of Hassness and look across to the mountains opposite, glance to your left and look at the mountain at the head of the lake. It is by no means the largest mountain in view – it is a real peak but rather lower than its neighbours. That’s the place: that’s Haystacks.
To get there, walk along the lake shore to Gatesgarth, a former working farm but for decades known as the best lakeside tea-room west of Kendal. If and when you manage to get away from Gatesgarth, cross the meadow along a well worn path towards the Sail valley. Your route leads up a long diagonal track to the left, steep but not too steep. Soon you will be on the top of Haystacks – but where is it? The fascinating thing about Haystacks is that it really seems to have no top. Those readers who know the top of Gable or Helvellyn will be certain that this cannot be a mountain as it has no defined summit. This is to me part of its attraction. It is all little mini-peaks, humps and lumps and dells. A beautiful, relaxing top indeed. Some trees are there but it is not wooded.
It is able to boast two extra attractions: two tarns, those “eyes of the Lake District”. The larger of the two is called Innominate Tarn and those of you who remember your Latin will know what an oxymoron that is: a tarn whose name is the tarn with no name. It has one outstanding claim to fame. Haystacks was Wainwright’s favourite top and Innominate Tarn was his favourite tarn. His ashes are sprinkled hereabouts and after his death there was a serious attempt to re-name Innominate Tarn as Wainwrght’s Tarn in his memory. His family, however, objected to this idea and the idea was quietly dropped. The smaller and higher tarn is simply Haystacks Tarn, a real summit tarn, probably only a few score square metres in area and only a few metres below the highest point of the mountain.
When I first went there (from Hassness) the weather was so hot the men were walking round stripped to the waist looking for some shade in which to eat lunch. That of course helped to make the site so memorable for me – truly it is a Very Special Place.
Richard Hegerty
