Being church at the Glastonbury Festival
In this parish, one of the early signs of summer is the fence. The fence is enormous and solid, visible from far distances, as if you were looking from space at the Great Wall of China.
Actually you’re looking from the opposite hillside over at Worthy Farm. The fence is the beginning of a city that will be built over the next few weeks, slowly at first; then in the last few days the green fields inside the fence disappear under a tide of blue tents. The people have come. They haven’t come to settle but as pilgrims to a festival. They make their own city to celebrate their own values and purpose; and they can build their own houses. So the tents appear where the people want to live. It is built in a few hours. It has its people in their low- roofed jumbled houses, its guilds and specialists, and its great buildings, the stages. They rise above the tents like medieval cathedrals. They are the places where the pilgrimage reaches its end and the festival begins. The planning doesn’t plan this: the people, who build the city, create it.
So, suddenly, here in the parish, is a community – like the church – that exists to enliven and challenge the way we usually live. People come there to celebrate and take risks and make new discoveries. If the music stages are the cathedrals of this city, where is the church?
On the site map, the church is at the top of Church Lane, exactly as you would expect. This is the church tent, Sanctuary, provided by the Festival organisers and run by a group of volunteers for Somerset Churches Together. Sanctuary exists to provide a safe space for festival-goers. At night it offers sleeping space and a blanket for people who are lost or – in wet years – rained out. In the daytime, there might be face-painting, music, water for passers-by, people talking quietly in the evening sun, early morning prayers for the volunteers changing shift, or the community Eucharist. Sanctuary began as a night shelter and has developed over the years, building up experience and awareness of the possibilities of this time and place, into an exploration of what it means to be church at the Festival.
This means more than staying in the safe space at the top of Church Lane. The church is present across the site: the Iona Community, the Coracle tent, and Elemental, all in different areas, engage with people’s ideas and offer their own gifts. At the top of the hill, in the Sacred Space, there is the quiet shrine of the Bridget garden. It is present among the festival-goers themselves. A bishop
gives a five-minute talk between acts on the Pyramid stage. The local vicar thanks people, very much as he would at the local flower show: everyone applauds.
This is not such a strange city. It is not a continuing city, either. It is time to take down the fence, and for those of us who have been church at the Festival to take something of this city’s quality back into the other places where we are church: its joy, its openness, and its willingness to pitch a tent anywhere at all.
Elizabeth Thomson Assistant Curate of Pilton, Somerset
www.arthurrankcentre.org.uk
5
rural worship
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32