Northumbria Community

Sunday, June 10, 2012
Felton , England, United Kingdom
So, the first thing for you to know is that although this entry is listed as Felton, we were not actually in Felton. It's just that Felton was the closest town to: 

Nether Springs at Acton Home Farm, Mother House of the Northumbria Community
Bill and I undertook this whole trip because of plans we made before we left South Carolina with our friends Pam, Janet, and Michael. We are all part of a Celtic Christian home church community held at Janet's house monthly and wanted to check into the possibility of officially affiliating with the Northumbria Community. To that end, we all attended the Community Introduction Week, "a week outlining the history, vocation, and novitiate process of the Northumbria Community." We were all quite impressed, and as far as I know, will affiliate with them. 

At this point, I'm thinking that some of you might be wondering what Celtic Christianity is. A very quick answer: Christianity came to Ireland in the 5th century, and since Ireland had not been absorbed into the Roman Empire, the Irish church evolved along slightly different lines than the Roman church. Needless to say, this did not sit well with Rome. Things came to a head in 664 at the Council of Whitby where the Roman church won out. Celtic Christianity did not go away, but it lost its influence and became marginalized. I know this doesn't really tell anything about the Celtic Christian beliefs, but since this is a travel blog and is not meant to be a treatise on spiritual beliefs and religious politics, I am going to leave it at that. If you are really interested, I would suggest reading Listening to the Heartbeat of God by John Philip Newell as an introduction. I was introduced to this book in a Sunday school class at the Episcopal church I was a member of about five years ago. (I am still a member of an Episcopal church, just not that one anymore.) I found it a fairly easy, yet thought-provoking, read. 
 
Leaving that aside, our train arrived at Alnmouth Station at 15:00 and we were picked up by members of Nether Springs and driven to the Mother House so that we could get settled in our rooms before evening prayer and dinner. In our rooms, we found a paper outlining the rhythm of the day for our retreat, which included breakfast, morning prayer, retreat session, midday prayer, lunch, reflection time, evening prayer, dinner, and compline. The daily office prayers (morning, midday, evening, and compline) were from the book Celtic Daily Prayer: Prayers and Readings from the Northumbria Community. We began the retreat that night with introductions and found that there were people there from all over England, Northern Ireland, Canada, the States (our friends), and Croatia (us). I had one funny exchange with a man from Belfast about our trip that illustrates just how different Americans and Europeans think about distance. We were talking about how the plan for the five of us from Greenville came about, and I said, "Well, Janet, Michael, and Pam were talking about coming to this retreat, and Bill and I figured since we'd already be here, we'd come, too." 
   "You were already planning to be in the UK at exactly this time?" he asked.
   "No, I meant we were going to be in Europe. We're living in Croatia."
  He laughed and replied, "Only an American would say that."
  I guess to him, it did sound ridiculous to say that being in a country almost a thousand miles away was "being there", but to a person who lives in a country in which a flight from one side to the other can take six hours, a two-and-a-half hour flight is nothing. I really enjoy those kinds of spontaneous glimpses into the differences between us and people from other places. 

One other cool thing was that the Mother House chaplain, Catherine, was from South Carolina. She was quite excited to have other Southerners there for the week, especially people who knew exactly where she was from! We all spent quite a lot of time talking about things only Southerners would understand - like sweet tea. She and I even discovered that she was attending Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC, at the same time that my cousin Beth was the women's basketball coach. It is indeed a small world. 

At any rate, I am not going to go into detail about every little thing we did at Nether Springs. It was a retreat - prayer, socializing, learning, journal writing, spending time with nature, helping out at the Mother House, more prayer - but here are some pictures to give you an idea of what the Mother House, grounds, and surrounding area looked like.




 
The retreat ended on Thursday afternoon with a communion celebration. Most everyone who had driven left after that. We, along with a few others, stayed until the next day. Then we left for our next destination - Alnwick.


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