A Thoughtful Gesture

If you happen to have friends who are clergy, or perhaps you may even be a Christian and therefore come into moderately regular contact with a priest or pastor, one way you can improve the quality of their life this Advent season, contribute to their well-being and elevate their spiritual state, is never, ever, to make any reference in your conversation to it being 'their busy time'. As usual with the first thing that pops into your head to say, you can be fairly certain that it's popped into the heads of lots and lots of other people too. The only way your clerical friend can respond to the statement is to affirm or deny it; for instance, I could say how yes, it is busy, but perhaps not as busy as it was once upon a time (I have only a handful of people to take communion to at home rather than about 30 like my predecessor in the late 1960s), and the really tiring thing is to sing the same carols and say the same prayers over and over again until their spiritual beauty and significance is hollowed out and you become dangerously desensitised to the whole Christmas event. And a clergyperson is very unlikely to say that, because it would come across as an ill-tempered rebuke, so they'll probably just use a vague non-committal sentiment of assent that doesn't really express very much at all. Besides, they're also unlikely to have the energy to get into much more of a discussion.

Actually, if you are a Christian, you probably won't be saying this kind of thing anyway, because you will almost certainly have some unspoken insight into the way your pastor actually feels about the festive season. 'It's your busy time', is usually a line spoken by people who don't have much connection with 'church'; I imagine it comes from not really having much idea what clergy do or the things they really deal with, and not really knowing what to say as a result. It's kindly meant, but it's hard to remember that it's kindly meant. At least I think it's kind: like many of the other clichés people use to clergy, it may be seen partly as a way of defusing their awkward presence, to hedge around the God whose demands they embody and assimilate them into something more domestic and controllable. I should think more creatively about how I respond to it - if I can summon up the will!