Faith > Faith for Holy Places

AS A very small boy, I used to spend summers at my uncle’s hilltop vicarage. When people talked about heaven, I knew where it was. From the window on the staircase, you could see the Lakeland hills; outside was a noble yew…

HOLY places were scarce in my earliest experience of Christianity. The Congregational Church in Newquay, where my family worshipped, was not somewhere to light a candle or pop in to pray on a weekday. In any case, it was…

FEW expect to find God in Cannes. A new handbag, perhaps. A suntan, for sure. An indefinable sense of having paid rather too much for an indifferent meal — well, that goes with the territory. But the glamorous resort on the…

OVERNIGHT, I became disabled, seriously: tetraplegic. For the first few months after such a drastic spinal injury, it is a question of survival. Then, the challenge of “rehab” dawns. Initially, it seems a simple target: to be…

THE great medieval abbeys of Yorkshire are a well-kept secret. As a southerner, I had no inkling of them until, having made a mid-career move to far North Yorkshire and landed in a village midway between Harrogate and Ripon,…

I SERVED my title curacy at Boston Stump, the most counter-intuitively named church in England. Its assertive tower rises 267 feet above the flat fen, bristling with pinnacles, crowned with a lantern that lit the way for…

I SPENT seven years as an undergraduate at university. My disability prevented my studying at a typical pace; so I was granted permission to pursue my degree part-time over six years, and illness added one more to the total.…

THE Cheese Market sits to the west of Salisbury’s huge market square. It is many years since any Stilton or Wensleydale was hawked here: a triangular paved area, adjacent to the branch of Zizzi where the Novichok attack of…

TOURISTS almost only ever go to the Via Garibaldi if they are hopelessly lost. It is a long way from the world of San Marco and the Rialto, which most people think of as Venice. They are especially unlikely to go to it, as it…

WE START with a riddle: “What has keys but can’t listen to the beauty it unlocks? A piano.” And maybe that’s a doorway into why the piano is my holy place. The keys may be black and white, but there isn’t a colour under the…