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The Bishop of Southwark blesses Our Lady of Lewisham
A new icon of the Mother of God, with the holy well that named Ladywell painted into the Christ Child's book, was blessed at the Sung Mass on 7 June — with the priest of St Peter's, Ghent, standing alongside.
· The Parish Office
On Sunday 7 June the Bishop of Southwark came to St Mary's to bless the parish's new icon of Our Lady of Lewisham, painted by the iconographer Helen Dejean and delivered to the church last December.
The icon shows the Mother of God enthroned with the Christ Child, both of them Black. It is the second of its name. The first was made in 2015 for Trinity Church of England School in Lewisham and designed by its own pupils, who were determined that Mary and Jesus should be properly African in face, skin and hair. This one, commissioned for the church by Fr Steve Hall as he left the parish, repeats the two figures and lets go of everything that belonged to the school.
Everything except Lewisham itself. In the school's icon the holy well that gave Ladywell its name lay at the very bottom of the picture, on the ground, between the Quaggy and the Ravensbourne. In this one it has moved: worked into the cover of the red Gospel book in the Christ Child's hand is a gold ring around a cross, with four springs of water curling out of it.
Ghent came too
Standing with the Bishop was Fr Jürgen Francois, priest of St Peter's in Ghent — the abbey church that owned this parish for four hundred and ninety-six years, from a gift by Alfred the Great's youngest daughter until Henry V took it back.
The two parishes visit each other in alternate years. Ghent came for the induction of the present vicar last year and again for this; St Mary's goes over in July 2027. There is more on the Ghent connection, which is eleven hundred years old and is not a memory.
Where it will hang
Not yet where it will live. Helen Dejean's advice to the parish is that it should go on the east wall of the north transept, by the Lady Chapel, so that seen from the nave it stands to the left of the sanctuary — which in an Orthodox church is the place of the main image of the Mother of God, and which puts her, from where the congregation stands, at the right hand of God.
That needs a faculty, the permission required before anything is fixed to the wall of a listed church. The plan is also for a dark blue curtain to veil it in Lent, which turns out to put a Lewisham transept at the modest end of a very long tradition.
In the meantime it stands in the church with a candle burning in front of it, and anybody is welcome to come and light one. There is a fuller account on Our Lady of Lewisham.