From the Vicar

As a student I was privileged to have singing lessons with the late Wilfred Brown.

One of the things we worked at were the settings by George Butterworth of poems by A.E. Houseman. Little did I think that as I sang these words,

The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair,

There's men from the barn and the forge and the mill and the fold,

The lads for the girls and the lads for the liquor are there,

And there with the rest are the lads that will never be old,

that they would be flooding back into my mind forty three years later.

But inevitably they did, because the weekend we moved in was the week of the Ludlow Fair – but no doubt a very different occasion with its hi-tech rides from what Houseman had in mind.

It is a reminder that our lives are never in a straight line – there are circles that come and re-connect with us in all sorts of ways.

When I moved to Harrogate, a lady turned up who had pushed me in my pram when I was a baby. When we moved to Chobham we found that one of the Pastoral Assistants had taught Pippa at school.

Coming to Ludlow, we find the assistant organist at church is the person who played for our wedding. The past is never entirely the past. Time is not a straight line.

All this is an echo of those words that we often say in church – ‘as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be’., or the words of one of my favourite Psalms – Psalm 139 where the writer says that God has known him from before he was born.

So as I begin a new part of my life, I am aware that the past comes with me, and with it many memories. But it is also about living in the present moment, and living each day to the full, and about knowing that the future is in God’s hands.

Houseman was writing about young men who whose future was very uncertain, because they were going off to war, and many would not return. The glory of faith is to know that past, present and future are all safe in the hands of God, whose presence with us is in whatever has been, whatever is, and whatever will be. As another Psalmist said ‘Underneath are the everlasting arms.’

St Lawrence and St Saviour

Here to celebrate,

worship and serve

One more step along the world I go... and to Ludlow Fair

Coming to Ludlow, we find the assistant organist at church is the person who played for our wedding.

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Our Faith

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It is eight years since our recently-retired Vicar, Andrew Body, launched the parish on to the internet by commissioning our first website, and he has been sharing his thoughts online in this page ever since. He sent his final thought from his new home in Ludlow, Shropshire.

Farewell to Andrew and Pippa.