England Pilgrimage

[NOTE: The article link in ComplineUnderground has now been updated since we got back from the Pilgrimage with the articles “Men at Canterbury, Women in Seattle,” and “A Week at Salisbury.” ]

The Compline Choir, in which I have sung since 1964, is making a pilgrimage to England from August 10-26, 2019. We’ll be spending a week each in Canterbury and Salisbury, singing all the music at both cathedrals. To find out more about it, I invite you to read my post on the Compline Underground.

This will be, as I reckon it, my seventh trip to England, and the third of what I would call a “pilgrimage” – the other two being with Cantores in Ecclesia from Portland, Oregon, in 1987, and with the Compline Choir in 2000. Of the other four trips, one was purely a “choir tour” (1966), one was an extended stay for singing and musical study (1976-1977), one was a three-week road trip (1983), and one was a business trip for the software company that I was working for at the time (1999).

It was a tough decision to put my post about the current England pilgrimage in the Music or the Spirituality category, but I chose the latter because that is mainly where my mind is currently. I am currently preparing for a day-session that I am giving at St. Placid Priory in Lacey, WA on November 9 called “A Musical Journey in Faith with Julian of Norwich,” and I’ll be writing more about this in the months ahead. Julian was almost an exact contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, and so my mental focus (while I’m not making music with the choir) will be on understanding the lives, times, music, spirituality, and theology of 14th-century people, while living at these two sacred places.

May it truly be a “bon voyage!”