Walking the Parish

Trevor asked for some groceries and I set out to deliver them, not on my bicycle as I normally would – it’s too close to justify using the car unless it’s pouring with rain – but on foot. The bike would have been an awful experience in the icy weather.

Just along the road from the church I met Jack and Nancy who I married several years ago. They have lots of children and not a great deal of cash. They now also have a dog – not a ‘lockdown puppy’ but a canine purchased just a bit before the restrictions started and which had been suffering from mastitis so they’d just been to the vet. They were all right, Nancy said.

And on the opposite side, I spoke to Natasha who has a son with learning difficulties. He’s in school at the moment and doing pretty well, but can’t engage with his post-school groups online: it’s just not something he can cope with. Natasha and husband Ken, again, are a couple without a great deal of extra resources to draw on, but she’d got a couple of things to put in the trolley outside the church where items for the food bank are left (admittedly goods that they’d been given and couldn’t use!). Natasha is taking an Open University degree, never having had the opportunity to study before, which was news to me.

I passed a block of flats where I’d been asked to pray about some unusual manifestations last week. A group of dowsers had identified a suicide from the mid-1850s who’d been unofficially buried in the garden and my contact thought this lady was still spectrally present: not threateningly, but sadly. We don’t know if this is true, but it’s not impossible. I offered a prayer again passing the garden.

A little further on I realised I was passing Rick the verger’s house. He has precious little verging to do at the moment and so was engaged on his main hobby of writing celebrity obituaries. He must have hundreds, all neatly arranged in ring-binders. He’s warding off the cold with a Christmas jumper and a scarf: but I find myself wearing a scarf indoors at the moment too, and sometimes an old cassock which I inherited from Il Rettore. Not today, though, as I am double-trousered to venture into the freezing world out of doors, and that’s enough.

Natasha may have been putting things into the trolley at the church, but I’d noticed a young man with a backpack apparently taking something out. I saw him again on the way into Hornington, reading an information board out loud to himself. A rough sleeper, presumably: what was probably a sleeping bag was poking from the zip of his pack.

Trevor had a carer visiting. I am very grateful to these support workers as he calls me far less than he used to! His social worker is securing him a new bed after the one I arranged to be paid for by a local charity several years ago finally gave up. He had nothing much to tell me so it was a pretty brief visit.

By the time I got home I had a clear idea of what both my weekend sermons are going to be – not, in fact, anything to do with all these observations and encounters, as the Gospel reading is the Transfiguration. But the light of Christ shines on them all, as it did on the mountaintop that day.