Reflection, Hymns, Saints | St Wilfrid | 12 October 2026

From Ripon’s ancient towers we raise (LM)

1.
From Ripon's ancient towers we raise
Our song of thankfulness and praise;
For Wilfrid taught this northern land
To trust the Christ at God's right hand.

2.
Where Yorkshire's rivers thread the plain,
And winds sweep over moor and lane,
The Spirit breathes the grace anew
Of Christ, the faithful and the true.

3.
Beneath wide skies and changing years,
Through hopes and labours, joys and fears,
The Gospel first proclaimed of old
Remains our treasure still to hold.

4.
In market square and city street,
Where countless lives each day now meet,
May faith be voiced in word and deed,
And answer every human need.

5.
Not for the saints of former days
Alone belong the songs of praise;
The Lord who called Saint Wilfrid then
Still calls and sends his Church again.

6.
O Christ, give us that vision clear
To serve your kingdom now and here;
That Yorkshire's people yet may see
Your love revealed through ministry.

7.
So from the Dales to eastern shore,
Your name be honoured evermore;
And Ripon's witness still proclaim
The saving power of Jesus' name.

Thirty Years of Rhythm, Grace, and Saint Wilfrid

Thirty years ago, in September 1996, I arrived at the University College of Ripon & York St John (UCRYSJ). Nestled in the heart of North Yorkshire, the Ripon campus was where I first encountered St Wilfrid, and where my days became quietly anchored by the rhythm of Ripon Cathedral.

Looking back from Ireland, three decades later, and through the lens of my work with NeuroDivine, that year from September 1996 to July 1997 feels less like a distant memory and more like an early foundation for how I understand space, spirituality, and neurodiversity today.

It was a year when something that had long mattered to me began to take on a deeper, more enduring shape.

Six Cities, One Calling

When I applied to university in 1996, my choices were perhaps more deliberate than they first appeared. All six institutions were current, or former, Church colleges, and all six were in cathedral cities: Ripon, Lincoln, Canterbury, Winchester, Exeter, and Liverpool.

That mattered to me. I wanted to study somewhere with a living connection to the Church, where faith was woven into the place’s history and character.

And, as a bellringer, I had another consideration: all six cathedrals had bells. Wherever I went, I could find a ringing community, an almost immediate connection with people in a new and unfamiliar city.

Six cities, six very different cathedrals, and six different possibilities for the years ahead.

It was Ripon that became my home.

I arrived already familiar with church life, its traditions and its rhythms. But something changed during that year. What had previously been part of my life began to shape the structure of my days. ]

Morning Mass and Choral Evensong were no longer simply services I might attend. They became the familiar points around which the day turned. Prayer was no longer confined to Sunday or particular occasions. It became a daily practice, something to return to, something that remained constant amid the changing demands of university life.

I did not know then how much that rhythm would come to mean to me, nor how clearly I would recognise its importance thirty years later.

The Sanctuary of Daily Rhythm

During my time in Ripon, the cathedral became my sanctuary. I fell into a quiet daily pattern that framed almost every day: slipping into the stillness of the early morning Mass and returning in the evening for Choral Evensong.

That pattern felt deeply reassuring. Whatever the day might bring, the cathedral remained, and the familiar words of prayer continued.

For a long time, I lacked the language of neurodivergence to explain why that environment meant so much to me. I had not yet been diagnosed as autistic, and I did not understand the particular ways in which my mind experienced the world.

But looking back, it makes complete sense.

• Predictable sanctuary. The repetition of the liturgy provided an immense sense of safety. In a world full of social noise and sensory unpredictability, the familiar pattern of prayer offered a place where I could settle and simply be. I knew what would happen next. The words, responses, gestures and silences belonged to a rhythm that did not require constant interpretation.
• Sensory architecture. The cool stone walls, the vast vertical spaces, the softly filtered light and the rich acoustics of the choir created an environment where my senses could find a different kind of balance. The cathedral was not silent, particularly during Choral Evensong, but its sounds had shape, purpose and familiarity. Music and prayer filled the space without demanding the kind of social attention that everyday conversation so often required.
• The silent crypt. Descending into Saint Wilfrid’s seventh-century Saxon crypt was a different experience again. Beneath the cathedral lay a small, ancient chamber, a place that had survived centuries of changing worship, architecture and human history.

Entering a space so old and so simple felt extraordinary. Above were the great arches, the choir, the movement of visitors, and the cathedral’s continuing life. Below was the stillness of stone, an enclosed place where the passing centuries seemed almost to fall away.

In that ancient chamber, God was not loud or demanding. God was simply present.

And perhaps that is one of the things I understand better now. Sacred space does not always need to stimulate, impress or overwhelm. Sometimes its greatest gift is to allow us to be present without having to perform.

The Landscapes of the Mind

The hymn grew out of reflection on that year, connecting the rugged northern landscape with the internal landscapes that so many of us navigate.

Saint Wilfrid was a pioneer, a builder and a complex figure in the history of the English Church. His vision helped shape the Christian life of the north, leaving behind places of worship whose influence has continued across the centuries.

The crypt at Ripon is one of the most tangible surviving expressions of that vision. It was built for a particular purpose in a particular age, yet it continues to speak to people whose lives and experiences Wilfrid could never have imagined.

That is part of the remarkable character of sacred places. They are inherited from the past, but they do not belong only to the past.

In my work on NeuroDivine, I often return to the need for spiritual spaces that recognise and accommodate the diversity of human minds.

We do not all experience God in the same way.

Some of us find the Divine in the quiet rhythm of ancient chants; others in the wild wind sweeping over the moors or bogs; others in deep, focused reflection. Some need silence, while others encounter God through music, movement, colour or the company of others.

For some, the predictability of liturgy is liberating. For others, a less formal expression of worship offers the freedom they need.

None of these experiences is inherently more holy than another.

The Holy Spirit is not confined to a single way of processing, understanding or praying.

Looking back at my younger self in Ripon, I can see that I was finding ways to inhabit the Church that made sense to me, long before I understood why some environments felt welcoming and others exhausting.

I chose a cathedral city because I loved the Church, its history, its music, and its bells. I discovered that its daily prayer offered something more: a way of living in which faith was not simply an activity, but a rhythm.

That discovery has stayed with me.

From Cathedral Prayer to Benedictine Rhythm

Thirty years later, I can also recognise something else in that year at Ripon.

The daily return to prayer, the familiar cycle of morning and evening worship, the sense that the day itself could be shaped around the praise of God: all of these have a distinctly Benedictine resonance.

I would not have described my life in those terms in 1996. I was a university student, finding my feet in a new place, enjoying the life of a cathedral city and gradually developing habits that felt natural and sustaining.

Yet the foundations of something enduring were being laid.

Today, as a member of the Community of Saint Benedict, I recognise in that earlier experience the beginnings of a spiritual rhythm that continues to shape my life.

The circumstances are very different. Life in the Irish Midlands, with its responsibilities, interruptions and physical limitations, bears little outward resemblance to student life in North Yorkshire.

But the underlying invitation remains much the same.

Prayer is not simply something to fit into the gaps between other activities. It can become part of the pattern through which we understand those activities.

At its best, the Benedictine tradition reminds us that such a pattern must be humane. It must recognise the person’s needs, the body’s limits, and the particular circumstances in which a life is lived.

A rhythm of prayer should sustain life, not become another burden imposed upon it.

For me, that understanding is inseparable from both my faith and my neurodivergence.

The Church That Continues to Call

Saint Wilfrid’s witness belongs to history, but the Church’s calling does not end with its history.

That is what I wanted the hymn to express.

The Christian faith cannot live only in admiration of what earlier generations built, however magnificent their churches or remarkable their achievements. Their witness must invite the present.

The Church is still called to serve, welcome, teach, listen, and make the love of Christ visible in the lives of those around it.

And that calling includes people whose ways of experiencing the world may not fit comfortably within conventional expectations.

A genuinely welcoming Church must do more than open its doors. It must consider what happens when people come through them.

Can someone who needs quiet find it? Can someone who processes spoken language differently participate without embarrassment? Can the person who finds comfort in familiar liturgy be allowed that familiarity, while another finds a different way into prayer?

Can we recognise that belonging does not always look like sociability, and that stillness is not the same as disengagement?

These are not peripheral questions. They are questions about the nature of Christian hospitality and the dignity of every person made in the image of God.

The Church Saint Wilfrid helped build was rooted in particular places and communities. Our task is not to reproduce his world, but to continue making Christ known in our own.

Thirty Years On: Still Breathing, Still Grace

Three decades after walking those market square streets, hearing the hornblower at nine in the evening, and sitting in the cathedral for morning Mass and Choral Evensong, the memories remain remarkably vivid.

Some places we visit and eventually leave behind. And some places continue to shape us long after we leave.

Ripon belongs to the second kind.

I went there to study in a place connected to the Church, in a cathedral city where the bells could offer a familiar point of contact and belonging.

I found those things.

But I also found something I had not fully anticipated: the grace of daily prayer, the quiet reassurance of returning to the same sacred place, and a rhythm that could hold both faith and everyday life together.

I did not know then that I was autistic. I did not know that thirty years later I would reflect on how liturgy, sensory experience, and sacred architecture might offer particular gifts to neurodivergent people.

Nor did I know that the pattern of prayer I discovered in Ripon would later find expression in Benedictine spirituality.

I simply knew that I wanted to be there.

Perhaps that is enough.

We do not always understand the significance of the places that form us while we are living in them. Sometimes their meaning becomes clearer only with the passing years.

Whether beneath Yorkshire’s wide skies or here in the Irish midlands, the Spirit continues to breathe grace anew.

And somewhere in that continuing rhythm, between the sound of cathedral bells, the familiar words of evening prayer and the ancient stillness of Saint Wilfrid’s crypt, I can still recognise something of the person I was becoming.

Hymn information

First line: From Ripon’s ancient towers we raise
Text: Michael McFarland Campbell
Metre: LM
Tune: Tallis’s Canon
Theme: Yorkshire, St Wilfrid (12 October)
NDH-0357

© Michael McFarland Campbell. 2026. 
Permission granted for local church or parish use with attribution. Not for commercial reproduction.