After visiting the hospital yesterday to get my oedema looked at, I sat for a while in the small church of St. Bartholomew-the-Less, conveniently located on the way out of the hospital on the way to the bus stop. I am not a religious person, and I can not even claim that it was an oasis of calm, as the sound of construction work blasted past the big wooden doors and bellowed around the nave. But I fancied a ponder on matters theological.
Barts-the-Less is a chapel of ease, meaning a church building that is accessible to parishioners who can not make it to the proper parish church (in this case, St. Bartholomew-the-Great). The clients and residents of Bart's hospital, and their visitors, surely qualify. For clarity, there was one St. Bartholomew, who had one great church and one lesser one; rather than two St. Bartholomews, one greater in some important respect than his lesser namesake.
It is, as are most places of worship, rather beautiful - unusually light due to its strikingly large windows, and its walls adorned with resolute plaques memorialising some of the Bart's hospital staff through the centuries who saved many lives and then lost their own. I sat on the crimson cushion on the wooden pew. The only other person there was, I think, praying.