Some Quiet Contemplation

After about nine days of running around, I was ready to be quiet before heading to spend the weekend with my cousins. I knew that the perfect place for this was the incredible Tewkesbury Abbey in the small town of the same name.

The former Benedictine Abbey is now a parish church, and the building of this Norman-style church started in 1102! The stone was brought over from Normandy and floated up the nearby Severn River. Just think of that for a moment. The idea that the people who started building places like this knew they would never see it finished awes me. What a leap of faith.

When I arrived, the Good Friday services were still going on, so this gave me some time to walk around the perimeter of this church and see familiar spots. My family had spent a summer in this town and the abbey was right around the corner from our house.

The abbey is so massive that it’s hard to photograph the entire thing from the ground. That’s the Severn River in the background. The front of the church gives a good idea of the scale of the place.

There are so many details in the stone-work, and it takes a few minutes to start seeing them.

It’s when you enter the abbey, you really feel the scale of the space.

There are side chapels and niches that hold sarcophagi, including this one where someone left a gift bag for their ancestor.

The abbey had been stripped of all the Lenten finery until Easter, and a massive stone, along with carvings and pieces from the abbey were set up to mimic the tomb.

I can’t tell you how much I loved the non-traditional colours of these stained glass windows.

While the abbey is Norman-style, you can see the Victorian updates, especially in the floor tiles,

and the massive furnaces that attempted to warm the huge space.

I just loved the way the afternoon light filtered through the windows and reflected onto the walls and into the niches.

I stopped for a quiet moment to think about my father and light a candle in his memory. He loved this abbey and went to services there when we lived in the town. They had actually extinguished all of the candles for Good Friday, but the vicar made sure there was one for me to light.

In the walls surrounding the abbey, you can see fragments of stone from the building being recycled. I had remembered seeing these, and made a point to find them.

Soon enough, it was time to leave and meet up with my cousins and have a pub night with their friends.

A couple of quick pictures later, and I was off, my soul quieted and my mind set on making the most of the last five days of the trip. It was just what I needed.