The Church is much more than a building. According to scripture, the family of believers makes up the body of Jesus and thus is the church. We were reminded of that in several ways today.

We started the day off by walking a few blocks to City Church, a small church in Llangollen. As we walked up to the building, we heard an alarm going off, and as we entered, it became quite deafening. It turns out the fire alarm was going off, and it took a good twenty or thirty minutes to get it turned off (I note with a little, um, alarm, that no firefighters ever showed up). Rick, a member of the church and the guitar player/singer, kept us company outside the entire time, making small talk. That was kind of him.

Once the alarm was off and after some initial setup, church got underway with a good thirty minutes or so of singing. The pastor (Brian) then got up and told us he felt led by the Holy Spirit to shelve his prepared sermon and to turn the service over to prayer. It turns out the little church of just twenty or so members has been going through very tough times. The pastor’s fifty-year-old daughter-in-law just recently passed away from her heart stopping beating, with the doctors not able to answer why. A long-time friend of the pastor had turned on a propane grill, and the tank exploded, killing the woman. Another member of the church was watching online because he was home with terminal cancer, and there were other illnesses for which to pray. So we spent a good long time praying for each other, and the pastor came and prayed over me and Meredith even though his own heart had to be breaking. This was the body of Jesus in action, and it was moving. We finished the service with more music, and Mer and I were invited to stay for coffee and fellowship, but we had to get on the road to get to another church.

After three and a half hours of driving on good but not-highway roads, we pulled up to Tintern Abbey. Several years ago, when we were on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, I was driving us to see the “Fairy Glen,” which was supposed to be where the fairies lived. Mer had asked me if we would know it when we got there, and when we turned the corner, we saw all of the fantastical cone-shaped mounds of earth with ringed tracks all around them. It was obvious we were there.

Much the same happened today – my GPS said we were at the abbey, but I didn’t see it. I reprogrammed the GPS for the last of three listings for the abbey, and drove on for another quarter of a mile, wondering if we’d see it. We came around the corner, and one of the biggest and best-preserved ecclesiastical ruins I have ever seen hove into view. It was magnificent and gorgeous.

We parked and paid to get into the abbey, although the views from the road were very fine. Because of the time, we only had about forty-five minutes to wander the grounds, and the south wall of the main church was blocked off by scaffolding for restoration efforts. Since Henry VIII had stripped the abbey of its roof and windows (and anything else he could sell), the interior walls have been exposed to the elements for the last four hundred and fifty years, and they are starting to deteriorate to a point that parts of the site could be dangerous if not treated and repaired.

But still, what a structure. The two huge window frames were still largely intact, and the arched ribbing of the building survives. The southern part of the church has more of the original structure standing, but the northern part is scenic with stone against sky. There was information about the abbey and the monks who lived there, and we learned a few new-to-us things:

– The Cistercian monks were excellent water engineers, and had piped water throughout the abbey complex.
– The monks were expected to tolerate the cold, with only one fire allowed in the “warming room.”
– They only got one meal a day in winter and two per day in summer. They drank about a gallon of mild beer each day, and that provided them with twenty-five percent of their calories.

Once we were done with the abbey, we found out from a guide how to climb up a proximate hill to a small church to look down on the abbey. She directed us, but warned we might not see much because of the leaves on the trees. She was right and wrong. When we got to the church, we couldn’t see the abbey, but we could see some of the countryside, including some rising smoke, just as Wordsworth mentions in his poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” That made Mer very happy. But what was also quite a scenic delight was the fact that the small church to which we had climbed was also a shell – the church had suffered a fire in 1977 and was left derelict. My, how quickly nature acts! We walked into the church, and much of the interior space was filled with fairly good-sized trees. Most of the church walls were covered in ivy, and the back of the church was hard to make out from all of the growth. And all of this has happened in less than fifty years. Wordsworth and the other Romantics would have loved the church and its setting, so Meredith was even more delighted. While we couldn’t have claimed to have seen the exact spot where Wordsworth composed his poem, we were definitely “feeling the vibe” that Wordsworth would have felt. It was a very fine stop.

From there we drove on to our hotel in Cardiff. Mer had warned me that it was a chain hotel on the edge of town. Although Mer had made reservations back in February, she couldn’t find rooms in the city. She was confused about that and eventually found out that the very popular pop singer Pink is starting her world tour in Cardiff on Tuesday, and so hotel rooms are all booked up. I didn’t think too much about the chain hotel, though – I’ve stayed in chain hotels before, and they are fine. I was looking forward to wandering around a suburban neighborhood of Cardiff as we went to find supper.

Then the GPS pulled us into a rest stop. Just the other day, I had seen a hotel at a rest stop just off the highway and had wondered who would ever stay there. It turns out we would. The hotel is just off a major road, in the middle of a business park. So much for wandering around. We did find a British buffet chain on the far side of the rest stop, so we ate there. It seemed better than Burger King or KFC.

We conferred and decided to get an early bedtime tonight with the goal of getting up and out efficiently tomorrow. In the scheme of things, a hotel that requires a car to get into the city is not a big deal. At least we have a roof over our heads and we’re healthy.