Sunday Suffolk, Autumn morning, Church and Breakfast

Sunday has a particular feel to it. And an Autumn Sunday especially so.  We wake up a bit late after a cheery family dinner to a damp morning.  The Church, just over the wall from the cottage is being opened for Communion at 8.00 am.  We get a move on and join 3 other communicants in the choir stalls.  This is the only service in the village today and the kindly vicar who, with his wife, looks after 5 Churches on the Deben peninsula, comes in on the dot of 8.00 am having rung the chancel bell just in case there is anyone else waiting to hear it.  The Church is full of light and the light shows up the curtains of cobwebs up the stained glass windows and in the corners of the high high walls.  This is a Church which had ambition!  or the people who were priests here, who built it, enlarged it and worshipped here must have been ambitious because it can take up to 200 people in the long straight nave. On wet days when we were here with the children (who are now grown up), I used to send them in to the Church with dusters and spray polish.  Its great expansive space absorbed them for hours and accepted the spray polish without a murmur.  This morning, we 6, with the vicar are wrapped in its light, we notice the care that the few take of it, the tapestried kneelers, the embroidered altar cloth and the vestments the priest puts on which are fit for an Archbishop.  We have the old words of communion which have been spoken in this place for centuries and which have a particular effect.  They communicate the continuous message of God within, God without, God who loves and forgives us when we don't notice that we are walking round in a created universe which is testament to its maker.

We come home for breakfast and the day begins. Steaming cups of coffee, toast, bacon and eggs.  Not only churches hold traditions, breakfast patterns hold them too.