Nitty If Not Gritty

One of the reasons I had for starting this blog, many years ago now, was to describe something of the reality of parish life from a priest’s point of view. I was prompted, especially, by a blog started by someone I was at theological college with and which, I realised, told the reader absolutely nothing apart from which feast day was coming up and how glorious and wonderful everything was. Not long after I began my own, that erstwhile colleague’s stopped with an announcement that he had joined the Roman observance and was leaving his parish. Not a hint of anything untoward had appeared beforehand, nothing that suggested his state of mind or even gave any insight into the life of the parish he looked after. It seemed so – forgive me – fake.

Sometimes, I know, trying to deal with reality means a reality that’s a bit granular, and also grappling with the minutiae of my own reactions to things, in the hope that some of it might be enlightening. That was uppermost in my mind yesterday. Putting up the lanterns for Pentecost (as we had last year) was a bit fiddly on Saturday, and I thought I had a way of making it easier next year, but arrived at church yesterday morning to find that Rick had already removed the lanterns. He'd intended to be helpful but had done it – to summarise – in such a way that caused more problems than if he’d left them alone. After doing assembly at the school, and then returning to the church to tidy up, I went out to the newly-established Community Store with Greg the churchwarden to meet the volunteers and hear about their work, and then got back home to an-almost-immediately ringing phone. It was Harriet, whose Parkinson’s has advanced to the point where I, at least, often find it very hard to work out what she’s telling me over the phone, when the conversation has ended, or distinguishing whether she’s talking to her carer rather than me. A face-to-face conversation isn’t straightforward, but it removes a lot of these problems so yet again I set out yet again on the bicycle so I could speak to her in person (and going virtually anywhere from my house means a steep journey uphill when I return home). I’d just put the spoon in my bowl of lunchtime salad when the phone rang again – it was a gentleman whose pastoral needs I’d been alerted to by a parishioner and whose door I’d put a note through a few days ago.

Now all of these are perfectly normal and not particularly stressful events, even added together. Yet I was a bit shaken by my inability to respond very well. I didn’t snap at Rick, but my inarticulacy in response – I just couldn’t think what to say – told its own story. All morning, in fact, it rather felt that my brain was in fragments, and I don’t mean scintillating and glittery ones. It was as much as I could do to marshal any coherent thoughts at all. At the Community Store I asked a question of the staff and realised as I did so that my sentence was getting so tangled that it would be very hard to answer (and so it turned out). Realising I had no option but to go and see Harriet almost reduced me to tears. Anything I hadn’t actually planned to say presented an almost insuperable mental challenge.

This may be simply tiredness. I have a bad habit of recovering from having a lot of things to do that make demands on my social or mental resources by building in more down time than is sensible, setting unreasonable targets for the non-work as well as the work day, and getting to bed much too late as a result. And that’s what the life of this parish priest, at least, is like for the moment! Will more sleep really be the solution?