As the parish church of Sawston, Cambridgeshire’s largest village, situated on the River Cam seven miles south of Cambridge, St. Mary’s is part of the Diocese of Ely, which is one of 44 dioceses of the Church of England, with more than 300 parishes in the county of Cambridgeshire, together with the western quarter of Norfolk, and a few parishes in Peterborough, Essex and Bedfordshire counties in the East of England.
The Church of England belongs to that part of the Christian tradition known as the Anglican Communion, representing those in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury and deriving their forms of worship and the orders of their bishops, priests and deacons from the Reformation settlement in England.
The 44 Church of England dioceses are divided into two Provinces, the Province of Canterbury (with 30 dioceses of which Ely is one) and the Province of York (with 14 dioceses). The archbishops of Canterbury and York have pastoral oversight over the bishops within their province. The structure of dioceses within the Church of England was inherited from the Roman Catholic Church. The See of Ely was created in 1109 out of part of the Diocese of Lincoln.
In the centre of St. Mary’s lies the memorial slab to William de Sawston which was probably put in place between 1325 and 1340. Around the edge it reads ‘Here lies Sir William de Sawston for whom whoever passes by may say a Paternoster (Our Father)’.
The Black Death came to Sawston in the middle of the 14th century and killed at least 28 peasants, probably considerably more. After the Protestant Reformation and the visit of Puritan William Dowsing, inscriptions, stained glass and crucifixes in St. Mary’s were destroyed in 1643. Restoration wouldn’t come until the Victorian era of the late 19th century. In 1963, two memorials to Jesuit priests who had served at Sawston Hall were rediscovered during further renovations.
C.S. Lewis’ essay “On Forgiveness” was written for the parish magazine of St. Mary’s and sent to Father Patrick Kevin Irwin on Aug. 28, 1947. In the short essay, which runs around 1,350 words, he wrote about the phrase in the Apostle’s Creed, “I believe … in the forgiveness of sins.” He distinguished between forgiving and excusing, calling them almost opposites, neatly drawing out the difference between asking God’s forgiveness and merely asking Him to excuse our behaviour:
“I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different,” Lewis wrote. “I am asking him not to forgive me but to excuse me. But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing. Forgiveness says, ‘Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology; I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.’ If one was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive. In that sense forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites. Of course, in dozens of cases, either between God and man, or between one man and another, there may be a mixture of the two. Part of what at first seemed to be the sins turns out to be really nobody’s fault and is excused; the bit that is left over is forgiven. If you had a perfect excuse, you would not need forgiveness; if the whole of your actions needs forgiveness, then there was no excuse for it. But the trouble is that what we call ‘asking God’s forgiveness’ very often really consists in asking God to accept our excuses. What leads us into this mistake is the fact that there usually is some amount of excuse, some ‘extenuating circumstances.’ We are so very anxious to point these things out to God (and to ourselves) that we are apt to forget the very important thing; that is, the bit left over, the bit which excuses don’t cover, the bit which is inexcusable but not, thank God, unforgivable. And if we forget this, we shall go away imagining that we have repented and been forgiven when all that has really happened is that we have satisfied ourselves without own excuses. They may be very bad excuses; we are all too easily satisfied about ourselves.”
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