Holding On To Both Ends

Partway through the morning’s printing and copying, I discovered that we had no white copier paper in the church office. For heaven’s sake, it shouldn’t be hard to keep stocked up with such basics, I chuntered to myself, and headed out to the Post Office to buy a ream of 80gsm white. In the church I met Karly, who I’ve seen in and out over the last seven years. ‘I’ve got terminal cancer, I’m so frightened’, she blurted out. We sat for a bit while she unloaded some of the hurt. ‘I’m only 32 and I’ve got nothing to show for my life … I came out of prison and was really going to turn things around. I hadn’t had a drink for 14 months and now I’m drinking again. I don’t even like it. This is my punishment for everything I’ve done.’ Karly had to see the doctor that afternoon and then tell her family. ‘My mum knows there’s something wrong. How does that happen? I’ve got to try and do something good so people remember me well’.

I feel no more confident at dealing with these emotions than anyone else would, apart from making it clear to Karly that what she’s undergoing isn’t a punishment. I’ve told her to come back again and we’ll speak to try and work out what she might do with the time she has left, but I don’t know whether she will. For some reason this strikes me very hard, harder than when my lovely college friend Sean had the diagnosis which led to his death at 38. How do you even begin to assimilate news like this? How would I?

In the evening it was the annual Christmas service at Smallham Chapel (as in the photo), part of my routine even though it’s outside my parish, having taken the service, shockingly, for six years now. For some reason there were more people there than ever, and about 8 souls had to stand at the back. Lots of people told me it was their first visit, including a family who’d just moved into one of the farmhouses on the estate who all solemnly crossed themselves at the blessing, always a good sign. Two small girls played clarinet and flute for the quiet carols. ‘As a lapsed Catholic with a lapsed vocation,’ one man said to me, ‘that service and what you said had more real religion to it than many a cathedral’. And I hadn’t said anything earth-shattering, just the usual kind of thing about God coming to take part in all the mess of human life, born in the less-than-propitious (or sanitary) surroundings of an animal stall. But you somehow have to hold together children petting a sheep to the sound of a clarinet on the one hand, and on the other a young woman being told she’s going to die: otherwise religion ends up far from real, far from true.