LINKPeter Stanford is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. His books include biographies of the Labour Cabinet minister, Lord Longford; the Poet Laureate, C Day-Lewis; Bronwen Astor; and Cardinal Basil Hume. His writings on religion range from The Devil: A Biography, Heaven: A Traveller’s Guide, The She-Pope: The Legend of Pope Joan to Catholics and Sex. His books have been translated into ten languages.
A former editor of the Catholic Herald (1988-1992), he writes for papers including The Independent on Sunday, Observer and Daily Telegraph. He presents television and radio documentaries including the award-winning Channel 4 series, Catholics and Sex, BBC 1’s The She Pope, Channel 5’s The Mission and has appeared as a regular panelist on the BBC's The Moral Maze, Vice or Virtue? and FutureWatch. His biography of Lord Longford was the basis for Channel 4's 2006 multi-award winning drama, Longford.
Born in 1961 and raised in Birkenhead, he is chairman of the spinal injuries charity, Aspire, and director of the Longford Trust for penal reform. He lives in London with his wife, Siobhan Cross, and their two children. He is currently working on an illustrated Life of Jesus and a book about Britain's sacred places.
He writes a monthly column in the Tablet, the Catholic weekly, about home life which is reproduced here on the website.
April 25, 2009
The school curriculum is packed full of excursions and trips that take children, as the phrase goes, out of their comfort zone. Whether it be nine-year-old Orla going off, next month, on a week-long school visit to York – she’s packing and unpacking her suitcase already - or her older brother, booked in for a trip to Prague with the school choir and unlikely to think about what to take with him until five minutes before, they have opportunities a-plenty to experience other places without parents guiding them and telling them what to think. Which is, of course, an important part of growing up and walking away.
What about seeing another side of religion, though? Where are the opportunities to develop their own independent view of faith, points of contrast to their daily diet of bedtime prayers, Sunday mass in the parish, RE lessons and the regular visits of the school chaplain? As I list them, they sound enough in themselves. As I had assumed they were until – for the entirely practical reason of a clash of school holiday dates and a consequent childcare crisis – I took my 12-year-old son with me on a work trip to Holy Island.
I’m halfway through researching and writing a book on sacred places in Britain. The idea is to visit these holy sites when others are there so as to see what sort of spiritual exploration is going on today. I had therefore timed my visit to Lindisfarne to coincide with the annual pilgrimage by the ecumenical Northern Cross organisation. Five separate groups walk, carrying a cross, from various points in the north of England and southern Scotland and congregate on Beal Sands, on the mainland, facing Holy Island, on the morning of Good Friday. Together they then wait until low tide allows them all to set out across exposed mud flats to Lindisfarne, following the wooden poles that have for centuries marked the safe route across quick sands for pilgrims on their way to the island of Saint Cuthbert.
My son and I were allowed to join Northern Cross for this last leg. It felt a bit like coming on as substitutes and not really deserving our cup winner’s medal. We really ought to have done the whole of the previous week’s walking to get the true flavour of the pilgrimage, as more than one of the group pointed out. They said it, I should add, not in the spirit that we were shirkers – though seven days of sleeping on the floor of church halls and washing in cold water is certainly well outside my personal comfort zone – but rather from concern that we were short-changing ourselves of a unique and sustaining spiritual experience. The pilgrimage is about putting worldly concerns to one side and, because we all seem nowadays to carry so many worries and responsibilities about family, home and finance, it requires a good few days walking to banish them from our thoughts.
The other thing this particular pilgrimage is about, of course, is witness. People carrying a cross through the English and Scottish countryside is not an everyday sight. Those who do it are marking themselves out in a society that treats people of faith, in Tony Blair’s phrase, as ‘nutters’.
Joining the party of around 75, young and old, Anglican, Catholic, and even one Moslem from Turkey - ‘I have been in England for two years,’ she explained, ‘and I haven’t seen any sign of your faith until now’ - to walk the three or so miles across the sands that morning was a new experience of public witness for my son – and a long overdue refresher for me.
There were a few people gathered at Beal Sands to watch us set off, barefooted and singing hymns, in what was still hazy light, but most were photographers who managed to get a suitably moody pictures of the five crosses and their bearers into the next day’s national newspapers. Once we arrived in Lindisfarne, though, the day-trippers, who come there via a road which takes a different route across the sands and is only open at low tide, stood around and stared unabashed. One or two of the teenagers looking on even sniggered. I remembered at that moment the 50 plus per cent in a recent poll who had no idea of the Easter story. In their shoes, at their age, I could imagine sniggering at the sight of hymn-singing, bare-footed adults carrying crosses whose significance was utterly lost on me. It only made me feel more certain that this was something worth doing – a sign of contradiction, as John Paul II was fond of remarking.
But what of my son? 12-year-olds are particularly prone to peer-group judgements. Was he feeling okay, I asked as casually as I could as we walked up the main street of Holy Island. ‘Fine,’ he replied, breaking off from a chat with some of the teenage children of parents who had been doing Northern Cross for years. I mentioned the odd looks we were getting. ‘But did you see that woman at the hotel?” he asked. As we had passed a small B and B on the island, he’d seen a cleaner hurry out and stand as we passed, hands joined in prayer, lips moving with the hymns we were singing. We had touched her, and she in her turn had touched my son.
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© Peter Stanford 2007. All rights reserved.
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