Homecoming

                   
                      The exterior of Theddlethorpe St. Helen's Church, Lincolnshire

Many years ago, a distant cousin on the Fowler side of the family researched and wrote a history of the family, tracing them back to Nansemond, Virginia, and someone else figured out that the William and Margaret Fowler who traveled across the Atlantic on the ship Abigail in 1621 almost certainly originally came from a tiny settlement called Theddlethorpe St. Helen in Lincolnshire, England.  As Lincolnshire just happens to be the county where the Wesleys lived in a market town called Epworth, I had hoped that I'd get to visit the spot for a homecoming of sorts, but given the difficulty of transportation, it didn't look likely.  However, my friend Louise Howard (mentioned prominently in another post) talked with the Rev. Stuart Gunson and his wife Marion who are very active at Wesley Memorial Methodist Church, and they took me on a whirlwind tour of the Lincolnshire countryside and into Lincoln itself.

Theddlethorpe St. Helen was originally built in the 14th century but was largely rebuilt in 1866, and it is located near Mablethorpe, not far from the coast.  Still in use, it offers a service of Holy Communion once a month and a service of Evensong the fourth Sunday of each month.  The interior shows inevitable signs of wear and tear from centuries of use, and there were tarps over some of the furnishings, but there were also fresh flowers in front of the baptismal font and paraments on the altar and pulpit.  We walked around and looked, and I took some pictures.

Then we went outside to poke around in the graveyard to see if we could locate any long-dead Fowler ancestors, but the headstones are so ancient that many have disintegrated into the earth or become impossible to read, but once we stomped down some of the high grass, we did find a couple of tombstones from the 19th and 20th centuries, so I figured they must be distant cousins and snapped a picture anyway.

Stuart offered to take one of me standing next to the church after jokingly asking me if I felt my heart strangely warmed, if I felt any sense of homecoming or belonging there.  I had to say that I didn't feel any particular pull towards the place, but it was undeniably beautiful in its faded Gothic splendor, set in the shade trees in a sea of green.  Even though I didn't find the graves of my great-great-zillions of times back great-grandparents or get some eerie sense of coming full circle, it satisfied a deep yearning on my part to stand where they might have stood, where they were probably baptized and almost certainly were married.

Everyone wants to feel part of a story bigger than her/himself, and this was more than likely a piece of my family history, a piece of ground into which my roots were planted, but you know what?  Even if it wasn't MY set of Fowlers, in a sense it doesn't matter because this was a church, a place of Christian worship, a sacred site where down the years, countless knees have bent in prayer, voices have been lifted in song, hands have been clasped in supplication.  These are my foremothers and forefathers, even if there is no genetic tie between us, and their faith is my faith, even all these centuries later in a land they could never have imagined.  And that is homecoming enough for me.