Healing Waters

It's been a few days of quite some emotional content one way and another, so although Hurricane Freya may have brought trouble to some, she came with benisons to me - I looked out on Sunday morning and thought, This is holy well weather. Overcast, lightly raining, but not cold - I think my impression that these conditions are the right time to visit the wells derives from some of my earliest experiences of finding these charismatic sites, back in my mid-teens when I knew very little about them. Ironically the key moment was a time when I didn't find a well at all, but went looking for St John's Well at Evershot in Dorset, peering out of the window of my parents' car as we drove up and down Back Lane through the rain. I didn't actually discover the spring itself until years later, and what I eventually found on that day wasn't it, but the weather stayed with me. 

After the morning services and lunch were out of the way, I took myself to the outskirts of Guildford, where St Catherine's Chapel sits ruined on top of a little hill, so strangely resembling its grander and better-known (and intact) cousin at Abbotsbury. At the foot of the hill, down a perilously steep little lane bravely lined with cottages, the pilgrim finds a spring. The water pours from under an old wall and past a hazel tree, beneath a tiny bridge that leads to a stone seat, and out into the River Wey. It was once deemed good for sore eyes (like so many sacred springs), but was only called 'St Catherine's Well' from the 1930s onwards, presumably by someone who knew what holy wells were and how they worked. That doesn't matter. 

I plopped a 5p piece into the water, said the first verse of the office hymn to St Catherine -

O Catherine born of splendid line
The lily's likeness you outshine
The noble gift of virtue yours
Your gemlike holiness endures.

- and sat awhile on the seat and watched the rain on the river. Joggers, dog-walkers and couples in wellington boots made their way along the towpath. I felt the rain speckle the back of my hands.

Nietzsche challenged people to identify one moment which could redeem the rest of their lives, a glimpse of something heavenly which made life worth living. This experience is one of mine: sat by flowing water, watching the rain. I've had it many, many times, and each instance is an echo of the others. I am comfortable in Swanvale Halt rectory; Dorset is the landscape of my heart; but this moment, in all its guises, is home. This is what my heaven is like, the place of wholeness, the place of forever.