Pastoral Lessons

It was a rainy day yesterday. It gave me the first chance to visit Miriam since she moved to a nursing home about ten miles away from Swanvale Halt. The last time I'd seen her, in hospital after her stroke, she'd barely been able to speak: now she was quite talkative, although she kept getting stuck in loops of very short phrases, which might have been a way of coping with the pain she said her knees were giving her. When she broke out of those verbal loops she appeared perfectly cogent. She remarked how warm my coat looked. The manager of the home seemed very concerned with her welfare, but the young care assistant who answered my call on the buzzer, made at Miriam's insistence, was unsmiling and ill at ease. I was there about half an hour. 

I drove from there to Hornington to buy a camping stove, and drop it off with Colin, who is helping to look after Karly, a troubled ex-offender who is now homeless and who I won't deal with directly after she made scarily personal remarks about me. Marion our curate and a couple of folk from the pastoral team (now we have a 'pastoral team') are dealing with her, but Marion was away and Colin said a stove would help Karly - he's lending her a tent and sleeping bag and has shown her the pitch by the river he used when he was sleeping rough. I dropped it off with him. 'I've told her how to catch rabbits', he told me, and I reflected that catching the rabbit is only the very initial stage in turning it into something to eat, and I don't know that I'd find the rest very easy.

From there I went to visit Tony who is looking after Mindy, a lady suffering with schizophrenia who, Tony says, has been abandoned by the mental health system, in so far as there is one. To my surprise, Mindy was with him in his flat, watching TV. I thought he'd taken her to East Anglia where her family live, but she couldn't find anywhere to stay there and came back. 'I felt much better there, but I couldn't stay', she said. I prayed with them.

Trevor called in the afternoon. He has no money at the moment having obsessively spent all his cash on audio equipment he doesn't need, to go with the keyboard he bought on hire-purchase which he also didn't need. I'd lent him some cash to buy bread and milk. Could I go to the doctor's to pick up his prescription as he didn't have enough petrol to get there and back? and had I any spare toilet rolls he could have? On the way out to collect his drugs I answered a tearful call from Julie whose situation gets no better and who asked whether I could give her a sub, so I took the cash I had, stuck it in an envelope and dropped it off at her parents' before driving to the pharmacy and then over to Trevor's. He greeted me at the door, disturbingly, in pyjama bottoms and nothing else. I handed over the meds and loo paper and refused his invitation to 'come in for a moment and look at something', fearful at what that something might be.

The only encounters I was planning to have were those with Miriam and Tony, everything else was a surprise. In between them I did manage to fit in some work.

I said a couple of days ago that I wasn't sure I learned any spiritual lessons this Lent, and I've realised that this isn't true. While I was at Malling Abbey back in February the holy Sisters prayed at Mass for 'those whose psychological issues make them impossible to help'; I can't imagine who they could be referring to, and I had said nothing to anyone, but it chimed with my situation and I took it as evidence of angels whispering in their ears, which I have no doubt they often do. I'll try to remember.

On my mind in Holy Week was something which occurred to me while I was reading a reflection at our Monday Compline service from the great Anglican spiritual director, Fr Reginald Somerset Ward. 'Join your trials to those of Christ, so that they may be useful and fruitful', he had advised, and I'd thought, Well, that's the kind of thing people say, but what does it mean? How are you to do it? Later it occurred to me that how you do it is to think how events in your life are reflected in events in his, perhaps in a less extreme form (few of us are called to be nailed to crosses, for instance), but like in kind if not degree. Does this help? Perhaps not instantly, not by considering that Jesus went through something similar makes your experience any the less bothersome, but slowly and gradually making you more patient and thankful.

So yesterday I thought about my feelings of spending so much time trying to assist people who in fact were largely beyond any kind of help that I can give. Perhaps I might feel all this activity is a diversion from what I should be doing. But Jesus may, too, have not been a stranger to the feeling that he was wasting his time, including on people who immediately slipped back into the same morass from which he was trying to extricate them. And don't I, sinful, weak and endlessly repeating the same mistakes, stand in exactly the same relation to him? Is this what Fr Somerset Ward means?