Yesterday I
had no evening meetings and was looking forward to a quiet night. It wasn’t to
be: I had a message from someone I’ve been dealing with for some years and who
has said she wants to escape a controlling partner. ‘He’s put a knife to my
throat.’ I said unless I heard back from her I’d call the police. I set out
into the village and, funnily enough, found the road already crawling with
police vehicles – three cars, two vans, paramedics and an ambulance – attending
some incident or other, but as I was debating what to do next and had actually
dialled 999 she called, begging me tearfully not to bring the police into it.
What should I do then? We’d already agreed to meet the following day so she
could call refuges and services. Did she want to leave tonight? She changed her
mind a couple of times via texts and calls. Eventually I ended up at the flat,
waiting for her to emerge. She and her partner threw counter-accusations at
each other. A couple of weeks ago I bought her a hair dryer to make her feel a
bit better about herself: she says he smashed it up, he says she did it. He
alleges she hit him, she says he threatened her with a knife and then cut
himself to make it look as though she did it. I got her out with a bag (‘if I
leave he’ll smash up all my stuff’, hence her reluctance to go, she said) and
into a hotel which, along with a sub to her to replace the cash she says he
stole from her, cost me £90. I’ve already tried to put her in touch with a
parishioner who escaped from a controlling relationship, but really I can’t
pick through the truth and falsehood in this situation.
As well as,
usually, three conversations every day with Trevor which notwithstanding their
wearyingly repetitive nature may at any moment degenerate into shouting and
rage, a tiny group of vulnerable people absorb a considerable part of my time
and I don’t even seem to be achieving anything for them. Added to this is the
frustration that I’m flying blind most of the time, both in terms of my own
inexperience and incapacity and the complete lack of response from the statutory
bodies who deal with vulnerable people on a legal basis. I write letters to
mental health teams and doctors laying out the problems as I encounter them and
have never had so much as an acknowledgement back. I never know what’s really
going on. I thought that one of my regular ‘hard cases’ had been quiet lately,
and then on Sunday our curate Marion, who is on the chaplaincy team of a nearby
prison, told me that she’s been incarcerated
for a couple of months, which would rather explain it, but I had no idea
that was the case. We now have no local beat PCs who might have kept me
informed about the situation: the police parachute in to deal with specific
problems and then disappear. The professionals have a more relentless time of
it than I do, but they clock off and leave their work behind: I never know what
time of day or night I might get a phone call entreating my help with some
intractable situation. It’s taken years to stop Trevor calling me before 8.30am
or after 8.30pm and he often pushes that envelope even now. I get no guidance,
no assistance, no co-operation. I think, on reflection, that washing my hands
of this kind of thing in future is probably the most productive response.
Another priest of my acquaintance could, I reckon, have written his own version of this troubling post. (Some of his experiences were drawn on for the TV series "Rev.") Are you being hard on yourself when you say you have not achieved anything for these distressed and difficult people? Who knows what might have been the case had you not been there. Hard to hold a balance between helping others and looking after yourself, I'd guess.
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