We're just back from a couple of days in Cheltenham Spa. No bathing or racing - two activities for which the town is famous - but a different sort of cleansing perhaps!
In the late 18th century medicinal spa waters were discovered in some fields to the south of the town of Cheltenham on a site where a girls’ public school now stands. The town became a leading English spa where the waters were claimed to be beneficial to a whole range of illnesses.
We’ve been there this week because, the town holds a special place in our hearts with positive associations both past and present. For many years, we went every August Bank Holiday to the racecourse, not to watch the racing but because it was the site of our beloved Greenbelt Festival before it moved to its present site in rural Northamptonshire. As our regular readers wil know this festival of Christian ideas, arts and activism has helped to shape and enrich our spiritual quest. But there’s another long-term reason for enjoying a trip to the spa town!
Helen went to Cheltenham first as a student. It was and is the home of Moy, her university flatmate, who has remained a close friend for 60 years. Happily Mike and Moy’s husband, Alan, – also Cheltenham born and bred- have always shared a love for cricket and enjoyed each other’s company. So for over half a century the four of us have remained friends. We’ve been through births, children’s issues, empty nests, losses and gains of all kinds, and now the ups and downs of retirement. Either at their home in Cheltenham or ours or in many other places, we always talk about people and events in the news, the books we have read, plays and programmes we have watched. We talk about family and friends and relationships. We don’t always agree by any means. Politically and religiously we are not in the same camps but somehow it doesn’t matter. Comparing notes and reactions and responses has offered us hours of genuine, pleasure and amusement – and, like all good friendships, has, we believe, has changed us!
In the Cheltenham Greenbelt days, we would always retreat to their house at the end of the Festival to be cross-examined on what and who we had heard at this Christian Festival. Both of them are somewhere on the continuum between agnosticism and atheism and so the conversations were lively, and for us it was a valuable check on our festival enthusiasm. After hearing excellent speakers over the weekend airing all sorts of ideas it was important for us with their help to submit them to scrutiny and see if they held water outside the Christian ‘bubble’. It was an integral part of the weekend.
Even without a festival post-mortem, we have been happy this week to spend a couple of days in Cheltenham, see familiar sights in this interesting Regency town and have a good old catchup with our friends who, as always, offer their slightly or radically different perspectives on different parts of life.
As two people with clear political or religious convictions, it could be quite easy for us to withdraw into a comfortable echo chamber and have our ideas reinforced without any serious challenge. But that way we would be likely simply to have our prejudices and false ideas confirmed. And, worse, not know that this is what is happening. Exposing some of our cherished ideas and being obliged to find responses which are at least plausible, and finding that criticism does not always prove fatal to our ideas, has meant that, to some extent, we have sifted out value in what we continue to hold on to as faith.
The philosophers call this process ‘falsification’ as opposed to ‘verification’ – a way of coming to ‘truth’ about all sorts of things. Opting for complete ‘belief systems’ where it’s easy simply to meet or read people who agree with us, is one of the illnesses of today’s uncertain world. A Cheltenham Spa friendship, where one’s preconceptions are tested and sometimes washed away is a gift. It’s one for which we are particularly thankful!
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