A Hospital for Souls

Cultivating Place is a column considering our relationships to the varied places we have been planted. As followers of The One who became flesh and made his dwelling among us, who wept over the earthly Jerusalem, we will explore the unique opportunities each of us has to seek the good of our place, wherever that may be.

The year is 1132, two generations on from the Norman conquest of England. The setting is the leafy southern county of Hampshire. Stephen of Blois, grandson of William the Conqueror, is walking north along the banks of the River Itchen, toward his bishopric of Winchester. As legend has it, Stephen encounters a peasant girl in a riverside meadow who begs him to help her starving community. Moved by the girl’s plight, the ambitious and wealthy young bishop commits to founding a church and almshouse to serve the community, fitted for housing thirteen destitute men, and providing daily meals for one hundred more. Whether the origin story is legend or not, the fine complex of buildings Stephen built remains to this day; nestled on the southern edge of Winchester, beneath the Iron Age fort of St. Catherine’s Hill. Anchored by the church of St. Cross—a perfect pocket-cathedral of honey-coloured Caen stone—the “Hospital of St. Cross and Almshouse of Noble Poverty” lies quietly beside a meandering stretch of river which, seven hundred years after Stephen of Blois walked its banks, would inspire John Keats’ ode “To Autumn.” 

This site on the edge of Winchester, once the capital of the Saxon king Alfred the Great, itself built upon the Roman settlement of Venta Belgarum, has a particularly timeless quality. Positioned atop such a dense layering of the strata of history, it seems a perfect setting for what the Old English evocatively names “dustsceawung” (literally “contemplation of dust”); a reflection on deep time and the finitude of all things, prompted by one’s presence amongst the ancient. Except that the Hospital of St. Cross is not—unlike so many historic English buildings—a melancholic monument to bygone days. Remarkably, almost nine hundred years after its founding, the medieval almshouse still provides charitable lodging for a community of elderly widowers and bachelors, who still meet for morning prayer together in the beautiful Norman church. There endures a living institution, where bodies and souls are still cared for, and where passing pilgrims can still ask for and receive free of charge the “Wayfarer’s Dole” of bread and locally brewed beer.

It has been said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while hoping for a different result. Yet, so often, wisdom means doing the same thing over and over again, in the hope of building something enduring.

The Hospital of St. Cross is an institution bearing the fruit of almost a millennium of repeated decisions to keep doing the same good thing: to welcome elderly men in need of lodging and community, and to care for their souls and bodies until they go on to glory. It is a simple manifesto, but one whose promises have been kept continuously for a duration unconscionable to the lifespan of any political movement. Nine hundred years after setting out on its distinctive path of Christian charity, the Hospital of St. Cross is somehow still walking in it. Step by step, year by year, this small community has kept walking in the same mission. 

It has kept walking as the Templars rode off on crusade, as Magna Carta was signed, as the Hundred Years War and the Black Death ravaged the continent, as the Wars of the Roses and the Civil War fractured the nation, as the Reformation shattered the Western Church, and as the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution transformed a civilisation. It has steadfastly continued the same medieval mission right up into the present day, standing firm on its founding charter as all around it have flowed tides of unceasing change. This small, unassuming institution has performed a feat of time travel, taking virtues from time immemorial and carrying them as a torch into the present, providing irrefutable proof of their unchanging goodness. 

Fortitude has classically been seen as one of the four “cardinal” virtues—alongside prudence, justice, and temperance—which together form the central crux on which all the wider constellation of classical virtues depends. Whereas other virtues inform the shape of the goods to which we should orient ourselves, fortitude enables us to actually live them out. Fortitude prevents other virtues from atrophying as mere armchair expertise, insisting that they are exercised in our daily walk, whatever the cost. It is only by fortitude that we can start out doing, then keep on doing, the good but difficult things we know we ought to do, yet which temptations and trials urge us daily to abandon. 

Fortitude is a vital virtue, but one largely alien to the fashions of our modern age. As I write, the UK is in the aftermath of a national election. The new governing party, flush with a huge majority, has eagerly grasped their mandate, embarking on a project of promised national renewal. In the months to come, there will be much undoing of the previous incumbents’ political project, there will be shiny pledges and proposals, laws will be made and unmade, new faces will arrive and old ones will depart. Nonetheless, the wind will blow to the south and turn round to the north, the months and years will slip by, and a weary electorate will eventually realise—yet again—that there is nothing new under the sun. Whilst the Hospital of St. Cross has endured in its simple, understated mission for nearly a thousand years, it is hard to envision our new government’s much-heralded programme of change enduring for even one-hundredth of that span. 

Yet, possession of a singular, unchanging purpose offers only part of the reason for such disparity. I stumbled on the rest of the answer one morning a few weeks ago, while sharing morning Eucharist with the brothers of the almshouse in their beautiful Norman church.

As we proclaimed the creed together, “…we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come…” I became aware of the forty or more generations who had broken bread in this same space, and whose eyes had been lifted heavenward by this same indestructible hope.

I realised the Hospital of St. Cross and its mission of charity could never have endured so long were they not married to a hope transcending this world. 

Throughout a millennium of national upheaval and change, continuing in earnest to the present day, the central hope of this community has never rested in earthly princes, but in the Prince of Peace. As individual brothers have come, lived, worshipped, and gone in time to the eternal city, the strength of the remaining community to keep walking in its mission has been nourished and sustained by the same promise Jesus made to His disciples in the upper room: “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33 ESV). 

In a culture beguiled by novelty and innovation, the Hospital of St. Cross is an icon to, and living embodiment of, the innate virtue of walking resolutely in an ancient and transcendent understanding of the good, the true, and the beautiful. This subversive witness is vital, for in our day-to-day lives—in our parenting, our marriages, our friendships, our vocations, our churches, and our institutions—true fruit is never found in the endless pursuit of novelty and reinvention. Rather, it ripens slowly as we turn up every day, pursuing the same small set of difficult yet valuable priorities, while resisting a plethora of easy yet destructive alternatives. 

Unwavering pursuit of an unchanging vision of the good is rarely fashionable to our secular age, particularly when that good is distinctively Christian in character. Yet as the Hospital of St. Cross and its unassuming yet beautiful mission walks toward a second millennium in a meadow south of Winchester; so across the globe, individuals, families, and institutions are quietly answering their own call, fixing their eyes on Jesus amid uncertainty and trial, and overcoming the world step-by-step in walks of battle-tested faithfulness. In every unheralded, unfashionable decision to follow the narrow rather than the broad path, to serve rather than be served, to stay rather than to leave, to seek reconciliation instead of revenge, to fight rather than succumb to temptation, each of us looking for the life of the world to come raises a “Yes!” to the greater hope of future glory, and walks a step closer to the unfading beauty of the eternal city. 

The featured image, “Dew Kissed Dogwood,” is courtesy of Amelia Friedline and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.

Sam Keyes

Sam is a poet, essayist, photographer, and songwriter, who explores the interspace between imagination and reason, faith and doubt, the physical and the transcendent. He’s inspired by the examples of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, G.K. Chesterton, and George Steiner: rare thinkers who chose to dwell in the often painful yet fruitful tensions of these ‘in-between’ spaces.

Sam lives with his wife Colette and his two young daughters in the cathedral city of Winchester; UK. A recovering academic in the natural sciences, Sam now mixes science and semantics as a Patent Attorney; but by night, he returns to his first love of crafting stanzas and songs.

In addition to Cultivating, Sam’s work has been published by The Gospel Coalition and Ekstasis.

samuelkeyes.com