Blob Thing Has An Ecclesiastical Adventure In St. George's, Jesmond

We've just come back from a little holiday.  We went to Manchester again to see my creator.  She was very busy because she's a very busy person with a very busy life doing lots of work to help lots of people.  When we're there she helps us too and especially helps my sister Winefride.  We spent three whole days in Manchester.  On the first day my creator was busy so we went into the city centre with my person.  She spent most of the day in a special reading room doing some writing.  It was good for me because I dictated my blog to her.  But Winefride got a bit bored.  We should have taken some toys for her to play with or some of her favourite things for lining up.  We did have paper and a pen so she did some drawing so that was okay.  On the second day my person took us to Bolton but the weather was very horrible indeed so Winefride and I chose to stay hiding in my person's bag where it was dry and at least a bit warmer.  And on the third day we went on the exciting V bus to a place called Leigh.  My person says she used to live near another place called Leigh and that the two places aren't pronounced the same way.  We had some fun adventures in Leigh with a motorbike, a bus, a horse, Peppa Pig, and even some very friendly giant soldiers.  Leigh was nice and we'll go there again and ride on the exciting bus too.

Today I want to talk about a little adventure I had a long time ago.  Winefride hadn't been born then so it was just my person and myself going out adventuring.  We were having a bit of a random walk that day.  Okay, I will admit it.  It wasn't just random.  We were lost.  We had been walking to a specific place and we hadn't arrived in it because the streets just didn't go in the right direction.  Naughty streets.  They should have gone the right way and I think they just reorganised the map in order to confuse us that day.  We've been back since though and they obviously got stuck in the reorganised map version because they never changed back.  It serves them right for tricking us so badly!

We managed not to panic though and decided to see what we could find after we had been tricked so cruelly by the streets.  I hope the people who lived on the streets weren't too confused when they got home that night.  What we found was a very big building.  We saw it again a week ago on our final day hunting Snowdogs.  We passed the building.  It was quite close to one of the dogs too and I'll be blogging about that on my special project Snowdog blog quite soon.  So far I have blogged about seven dogs and a little Snowdog pack and the dog I'm talking about was number thirteen and was in front of a big sign all about kindness.  I liked that sign a lot.

But the Snowdog can wait.  I want to talk about the building.  Here it is.

Isn't that grand?  My person saw this place - it's a church - and said that we should go and explore inside if we could.  My person likes going in churches and exploring.  This one is called St. George's Church and it's in a part of Newcastle called Jesmond.  My person says that she had wanted to visit St. George's for a while because she had heard that it was pretty.  The things that she heard weren't wrong.  I'm going to write two whole blog posts about it and she's going to write one too and either post it on her blog like this one or post it on her new little project at Niume.  Or blog.  Because we took ever such a lot of pictures.

Before going into the church we walked in the grounds and it was there that we met Jesus for the first time.  At least, for the first time when visiting St. George's.  This was a very special Jesus.  With a very special talent:

He was levitating!

Now I know that Jesus could walk on water, which is a very clever trick.  But I didn't know he could levitate.  I thought that was just something magicians did in shows when creating pretty illusions.  My person is telling me that in the stories Jesus could do it for real, without the use of wires or stagecraft or props or whatever else the magicians on television and the stage use.  My person says that Jesus didn't levitate very often but did rise up all the way to heaven once in what people call The Ascension.  She says it's the final mystery of a prayer she used to pray a lot called the Rosary and that it's written in the Bible.  I don't think anyone on television has done a trick like that.  Jesus is impressive.  I think that's just a story though and I don't think Jesus ever did such a thing.  I don't think that heaven is up there anyway.  If it is then it's a very long way away.  And I don't think that, if there is such a thing as heaven, travelling through space would be the most efficient way to get there.

If heaven is the ultimate reality I think that no part of space is closer to heaven or further away from heaven than any other part so crossing the universe wouldn't help in journeying to heaven.  If there is heaven, you are just as close to it where you are sitting or standing now than you would be in any other place.  It doesn't matter whether that place is the top of a mountain, the bottom of the sea, a church, a shrine, a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas or in some distant galaxy.  You are as close to heaven now as you ever were or ever will be.  And in terms of physical distance that's zero metres and zero centimetres and zero millimetres and zero tiny little subatomic specks.  Physically you share space, or non-space, with that which is heaven.  Physically you are there now and so am I.  It doesn't matter whether you call it heaven, or nirvana, or ultimate reality, or realisation, or the ground of being, or anything else.  You and I are there now.  Because it is here now.

Oops.  Sorry.  I got sidetracked there.  Where was I?  Oh yes.  Jesmond.  I'd like to thank my person for typing all that for me even though her finger is hurting quite a bit from when it got broken years ago.  She should be registered disabled for that.  A writer with a finger that makes typing hard.  My person says she used to know a person like that.  A person who was a writer with a thumb that made writing hard.  Not too hard though obviously because that person was able to write eighteen pages of writing in a three hour exam which is far more than my person could ever do even at full writing speed.  That person was registered disabled because of her thumb even though it obviously wasn't a very disabling thumb.  Nowadays things are much harder.  Today is the one year anniversary of my person applying for a disability benefit because of all the difficulties that come through her autism and all the other things her head does.  One year.  And the process still isn't over.  After a year.  I think that's pretty horrendous and it's just lucky that she's got someone to look after her otherwise she would have ended up in big trouble.

We went inside St. George's Church and discovered that it's an amazing building inside.  If you ever get a chance to walk round it then do.  Here I am on a pew at the back of the church.  The altar is in the far distance.

We took loads of pictures.  I said that.  Lots of them don't have me in them but they're not quite so exciting so I'm not going to share them.  My person can share them herself and you will see for yourself that photos are made much better when one of three things happen.  These three:

1. I am in the photo.
2. My sister Winefride is in the photo.
3. Both me and my sister are in the photo.

All of those things make a photo better.  Of course Winefride hadn't been born when I went to St. George's Church so only the first of those things could happen that day.  When my person writes her blog about the church you can judge for yourself and find out that I am right.

Here I am at the back of the church by a big candle that's been partly burned.  My person says this is called a Paschal candle and the church gets a brand new one at Easter.  In the Catholic Church it gets introduced at a very special mass on Easter Saturday night and has pins squished into it to represent the wounds of Jesus and then it's burned through the whole of the year.  My person could talk more about this candle but I am not going to let her.  I just like the picture.  I think my person misses all the church things in some ways.  They provided some form of central cohesion in her head.

We walked to the front of the church and I decided that I would like to try my hand at being a preacher.  I'm not sure how well my sermons and homilies would be appreciated in the church.  The services there are of the Catholic Anglican tradition - very traditional and possibly with lots of smells and bells as they say.  I like bells.  My person has got to write a story about a bell soon.  It's in her head.  But she also wants to publish at least one blog post a day for the rest of the year.  Either one I dictate to her or one of her own.  That's quite a challenge.

Here I am on another pew, with the camera pointing towards the back of the church.  I nearly said "looking towards the back" but of course I was looking towards the front.

One last picture for today.  Here I am again.  Near some prayer things.  It might look like you have to light candles and then throw them in a bowl of water in case you burn the church down but that's not the idea.  To be honest I can't remember the idea.  I think you were meant to leave the candles burning which is a nice tradition but not one that could affect the efficacy of prayer in any way whatsoever unless a flame and a tiny bit of heat in some way travel up into heaven and then God sees them and then waves their magic finger and changes the world.  But that can't happen because heaven isn't up there and no God really works like that.  I think the flame just affects the people who light and see the candles.  They don't affect a God.  Nope.  Nope.  Nope.  That doesn't mean lighting them is a bad thing though.  It doesn't mean that the signs we create aren't significant.

I think the bowl of water was another sign.  Not for washing your hands.  Not for washing in any way.  There's another bowl of water in lots of churches for that.  And that's not even for washing with soap and water like after you go to the toilet.  My person still uses that bowl in churches sometimes.  I'm not quite sure why she does it.  You would have to ask her.

I think there were some pebbles nearby and you could choose a pebble and drop it into the water.  I can't remember why.  I think it was something to do with prayer again.  There are lots of things to do with prayer in churches.  Another sign.  People like signs.  I like them too sometimes.  I like signposts too.  And my person likes number plates.  We saw some good number plates on the third day away that I was talking about.  Winefride and I had our photo taken with one of them too.  We sat ourselves on the front windscreen wipers of a bus to have our photo taken.  The number plate of the bus was BUS 1S.  My person got quite excited by that.  She's a bit weird!

I'll tell you more about my visit to St. George's, Jesmond next time.  I met a couple of new friends there who live in the church and help to entertain little children who don't want to listen to the sermons.  A worthy job.  That's next time.  I'm looking forward to talking about it.  Probably more than my person is looking forward to typing it all.

[2173 words. That's rather a lot. I hope Blob talks a bit less or a lot less next time.]