Graffiti at Sedgeford Church

At the Norfolk Church of St Mary the Virgin, Sedgeford, is a wonderful graffiti collection. It’s a theme about which I have blogged before and my love of such wanton vandalism may come as a surprise.

 

Some it dates back to the civil war;

 

Some to Cromwell’s time.

 

Others to a couple of years after the terrible Clarendon Code and its persecution of the puritans. It was evidently acceptable to carve one’s name into the church’s wall, for parish clerks and possibly vicars themselves set about the practice.

 

An earlier generation, less literate, drew spiral-like circles with petals (above). Others drew little boats, bows & arrows and pentagons:

 

Sometimes they even drew each other:

Encased in stone, the strange, quiet whispers of the past speak to us. Why they carved, we cannot tell. What they wished to communicate, long lost. They themselves lie buried in the churchyard, well decayed, all forgotten. Apart from the divine hand at Belshazzar's feast and the making of the Ten Commandments, there are few scriptural occasions when stone is written upon. Yet Christ Himself is likened to a stone by Peter and others, and the believers are called stones likewise:

Coming to Him as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious, you also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 2:45)

As stones and building blocks go, many of us are chipped, worn, cracked and graffitied. Our lives have not always been lived as glowing trophies of divine grace and the failings of yesterday are written upon us with a shameful celebrity. Yet the Lord takes the rough, the crude and the sullied and makes us fit for inclusion in His divine masterpiece. Stop thinking of what you were; consider instead what you shall become. 

And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Cor 6:11)