A Day In The City Searching For Wild Wisdom
Wild Wisdom Community Day, Exeter.
Sunday 20th March 2016
The cityscape; Costa coffee, Marks and Spencer, KFC, Paperchase, people in black coats and shopping bags walking determinedly….This could be anywhere couldn’t it? Any city in the Uk…but look a little closer, just scratch the surface and there’s more. Here, take my hand, let me guide you.
There’s a little alley way just opposite M&S, now the street is cobbled and Exeter Cathedral unexpectedly rises up at the end of the alley. There is a gathering of people, quite a mixture; men in ties, young women with babies, women in big boots and bright flowers pinned to their coats. It’s an Easter procession. The Wild Wisdom gang gathered here, mingling easily with the local church goers. We followed the procession around the close and in through the main entrance to the cathedral. I felt a prick of tears in my eyes as I was handed a palm cross by a smiling woman and the magnitude of a public ceremony opened before me. Choirs of singers on either side of me ( all boys, I sadly noted) but flowers and great high arches and hundreds of people. It wasn’t what we’d planned but somehow we’d been swept along in the tide and we went with it. We were treated to a theatrical enactment of the Easter story, read from the Gospels but by different voices, with passion and vibrancy. I felt that I’d been given an unexpected gift!
It’s getting a little chilly in the Cathedral now, so come with me. We’re going to the museum…you haven’t been there before? It’s wonderful! You can journey through the landscapes of our wild wisdom course! First we started at Pre- history, touching rocks and watching videos, then into the realm of the Celts before jetting off to Ancient Mesopatamia and Egypt. All of these historys are displayed sensitively and in a way that is easy to digest. After lunch in the museum café we made our way up the busy high street, past John Lewis (lovely café at the top where you can look right across the city and into the hills, but not for today, dear traveller through time) where the city walls once stood and onto the slightly scruffy street of St Sidwells. On your left you’ll see what looks like a modern church but follow the path past the Yew trees and if you are lucky the little chapel will be open. For our gathering I’d made arrangements to ensure that we could get into the chapel as it felt like a key part of our pilgrimage.
Susan, who works at the St Sidwell centre, as the church now is, showed us around and told us some of the history. 
Then she left us and we had the chapel all to ourselves. There was a moment of hush as everyone took in the enormous, vibrantly stained glass window. Then I told the story. It’s a story that has haunted and puzzled me since I first moved to Exeter, fifteen years ago. And it is vividly told in the window; a young girl, a jealous step mother, fields of corn, a sickle and a beheading. In the story as the girl is beheaded standing there in the corn field, a fresh water spring bubbles up in the place where her blood hits the earth. The water will not be covered and the people are scared. They go and stand on the city walls (John Lewis – remember!) and they watch and after three days Sidwell picks up her own head and walks to the place of the church (where we are) and puts her head back onto her shoulders!
Although I’ve told the story many times, there is a poignany telling it, here in the chapel to this group of people. Sam points out the Christ figure at the top of the window, looking down on the scene – he’s green! Like the Osiris, who we met in ancient Egypt! We discuss the Devon tradition of ‘the crying of the neck’. Very thoughtfully we leave the chapel and in silence make our way down to the site of the ancient well (which is currently being restored). When we get there the atmosphere changes; there is a lot of humour and a lightness that stays with us as we walk back through the city centre, giggling and a naughtiness that seems to dance in and out of the regular shops.
Our last stop was St Pancras church. The doors shut, right in the middle of the Guildhall shopping centre, and it’s quiet…so quiet, like stepping into another world. There is another Green Christ in here! A crucifixion but surrounded by very green vines. Janet told us a Green Man story, rich in myth and legend, folklore weaving in and out of history, the story of the true cross and many others. We finished with a blessing, I remember it as a blessing of seeds, which Jan had sent for us. It fitted so perfectly into our day – sacred synchronicity!
As Beth and I walked away from St Pancras, arm in arm, we reflected on our carefully planned day. We’d had fun creating the day together, that had been one story, and now here another story had beautifully and wisely unfolded.
Written by Clare Viner, April 2016
times in solitude, these were people also dedicated to a simpler way of life away from the temptations of greed and power that gripped religious orders in the cities. Reading sayings that we have from them, I felt such alignment and companionship. I was struck with a sense that the spiritual community I relate to is not only contained to those I share space with today, but with those who have trodden a similar path of the heart right through the ages. I have often felt sadness that I don’t feel a particularly strong connection with my ancestry, something I think that plagues our culture as a whole. Reading the words of the Desert Mothers and Fathers pulled me into my ancestral lineage. These are my ancestors – my heart knows theirs.
travelled to the Egyptian desert and spread the desert traditions throughout Europe in the 3rd and 4th centuries. During our quiet time together in the afternoon I chose to delve into the forest of books Sam generously offered to the space. I read further about John Cassian and discovered that his great work ‘Conferences of the Fathers’ was commissioned by an Irish bishop for the purpose of providing a methodical representation of the teachings of the desert wisdom. This Irish bishop was anxious about the unruly way these teachings, transported initially via their sayings, were being taken on by people of his land. The resulting manuscript that he commissioned formed the basis for monastic life as we know it today. It was picked up by St Benedict who based his monastic rule on this desert model while adapting it to western conditions. In fact, it wasn’t only a major shaping force for monastic life in Europe, but for European civilisation as a whole. The rule of Benedict inspired and sustained an alternative model of life. It was one of hard-working, economically self-sufficient communities conscious of their responsibilities to the world around them but practicing a gospel form of the radical detachment exemplified by the desert traditions. It was a model of life not taught by dogmatic uniformity, but rather through the power of example. And they were communities respecting difference with prayer and contemplation at the heart.
