St Mary's Church, Melton Mowbray

It was my pleasure to call at Melton Mowbray this month, not just to taste the fattening delicacies for which it is famous, but to see (what else?) the churches there. St Mary’s, the parish church, even warrants three stars by the parsimonious Simon Jenkins in his England’s Thousand Best Churches. He rightly focusses on this large church’s extensive clerestory windows. These are sets of panes positioned high up, running along the tops of the transept (the side areas) and the nave (the main body of the church). I called on a bright winter's morrning when they were the most effective:

They allow light to flood into the spaces below. Dating from the Perpendicular period (roughly the 1400s) they illuminated what might otherwise have been a typically dark place of worship. As Jenkins warbles:

“It lifts the Decorated arcades and aisles upwards as if determined to deposit them in the sky”.

I wonder if this is the ultimate purpose of any church building, hymn, song, service and sermon: to deposit us in the sky. I do not mean to catapult us away or fling us into space but lift us into the very presence of God as we worship and ponder things of eternal value. That which is navel-gazing, gutter-dwelling, self-extolling and world-reflecting take us further from the divine presence; that we might draw close to Him when we gather for worship and receive reminders of our future home: that is the objective of each Christian gathering, building and enterprise.