The Bartlemas Chapel – a name that sounds like something out of Dickens, and the chapel felt like something from a disappeared world as well. A few hundred metres down a laneway from the noise and bustle of the Cowley Road lies a former leper chapel, feeling as if it were behind a portal to another time, when Cowley was still country fields across the River Isis from Oxford.
The Bartlemas Chapel was rebuilt in 1326 to replace a 12th Century original. After leprosy was essentially eradicated in the 16th Century, it was used as an almshouse. Later, under Cromwell it was used as a stable, and then in Victorian times as a cowshed. Yet, somehow, the instinct to pray in this place reasserted itself afresh in century after century.
Part of the parish of Cowley St John, Evensong is prayed in this little chapel on the fifth Sunday of the month, under clear glass and whitewashed walls. This will surely be the last such service for some months held without the building’s only heating turned on, a cast iron brazier fired with coal. Dickens would be in his element.
Eight of us chanted Evensong from the Book of Common Prayer. The familiar words of the psalms and canticles connected me with the world of daily prayer at Salisbury Cathedral I had just the day before left behind.
“The Lord setteth up the meek : and bringeth the ungodly down to the ground.” How appropriate in a leper chapel.
“He hath no pleasure in the strength of an horse : neither delighteth he in any man’s legs.” I grinned, as always. Religion that lacks a sense of humour about itself is a terribly dangerous thing.
I was connected to many of my own yesterdays; with the people praying the same words in St George’s in Belfast at the same time, and in another St George’s in Cape Town, and dozens of other churches scattered across several continents.
“Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles. Esurientes implevit bonis, et divites dimisit inanes.”
But I was connected well beyond that; with the lepers in the reigns of the Henrys and Edwards, sitting in the same spot, for whom the promise of Mary’s song, chanted in Latin, with its exaltation of the humble and meek and filling of the hungry with good things, will have been the only promise of a better tomorrow they heard.
הַלְלוּ-יָהּ
Connected still deeper in time and further in place, to the Temple in Jersualem a hundred generations ago, to people praising the Lord for the coming of a restoration unimaginable during the long years of their exile.
“He giveth snow like wool : and scattereth the hoar-frost like ashes. He casteth forth his ice like morsels : who is able to abide his frost?”
I pondered that the Liberal Catholic tradition in which my faith has mostly blossomed fears the idea of a mighty God; fears the idea of a God who might need to be feared. We assumed that once given prosperity, security and democracy, people were basically nice. Therefore God must be frightfully nice as well. This was the philosophy that led to whole ‘difficult’ sections of the psalms being eviscerated from the regular round of Anglican worship in 1929.
I found it difficult to reconcile this view of progress through reason to universal niceness with the living contradiction that is the Cowley Road: in the heart of one of the wealthiest little cities in the planet, home to what is perhaps humanity’s finest place of learning, junkies scream abuse at strangers from their roadside bedding at the corner of streets where three bedroom terraces sell for over half a million.
