Day 4: Going Back in Time

January 16, 2018

15 January 2018

Today was less busy, as much of it was spent driving away from Scotland and towards England. Our first stop in England was Durham Cathedral, but we first heard a presentation from Jeff, Jackie, and Andrew about Music of the Methodist Church. We learned about some of the locations we would be visiting and how they influenced Methodist music; this included the City of Edinburgh Methodist Church, which we had already visited. We also learned about the contributions of John and Charles Wesley to Methodist Music in which Charles wrote almost 9,000 hymns and John Wesley wrote when it was appropriate to sing hymns during a service. We ended with a comparison of the Anglican and Methodist traditions and how music is incorporated in each one. We were given a challenge to find a Methodist hymn written by a Methodist writer, including Charles Wesley, and I had to say that my favorite hymn by Wesley is “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” Even though they included this fact in their oral presentation, I could not find a hymn that I enjoyed singing more than this one.

Because the bus was not designed to travel up some of the steeper roads in Durham, we had to walk up the large hill once we arrived in the city, and I’m happy that this happened because we were able to walk by some of the busy shops and feel how energetic an English city was. Once we arrived at Durham Cathedral, the view was simply breathtaking. The old architecture of the outside was unlike anything I had ever seen, and I was sure that it would be even more beautiful inside. Just like in St. Giles, we were not able to take pictures of the inside, so I only have pictures of the outside. We learned about the history of the cathedral, including how it took 40 years to build and that it was finished in 1133. The part of the tour that I remembered the most is the statue of the pelican near the Bible. The pelican had nails in its chest, and it was trying to take its blood and feed it to the young pelicans below. This symbolizes how Jesus gave his life to help his fellow people.

Our last stop was at the High House Chapel and Weardale Museum. This was a particularly cool experience because it was a place where John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, actually preached at 13 times. The volunteers who work at this chapel and museum split us up into two groups; one group visited the chapel first and the other visited the museum, which was the former cottage of the chapel owners. When I visited the museum, we saw many different artifacts from when the owners of the chapel lived there. We also saw many artifacts important to the town of Weardale, such as different rocks being mined and stitched murals with Weardale stories, and items important to the life of the Wesley’s, such as the hymn books written by Charles and clearly aged Bibles. In the chapel, we learned about the history of the chapel itself and John Wesley’s thoughts about his visits to the chapel according to his journal. We also learned a fun fact regarding a clock tax which lasted only one year (there was a fancy clock in the back of the chapel that provoked the story)! We ended the visit by singing two hymns written by Wesley, which were “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.”