Slapdashness

I went to see my S.D. and told him about a funeral I did recently. It presented a few organisational difficulties in that the deceased gentleman actually lived in Kent and was being buried in Swanvale Halt only because he used to live here and his son, who died a long time ago, is buried locally. I met with his widow and talked through all the arrangements, and thought I'd got it all sorted. Then when they actually turned up, I discovered there were all sorts of things I should have known but didn't, such as whether the family wanted to follow the coffin into the church, who was doing what readings, and whether the biographical details I'd been given were supposed to be read or were covered by what someone else was saying. Someone delivering a tribute who I thought was the gentleman's brother turned out to be a friend. It meant it was all far more stressful than it should have been, made worse by matters such as a jamming CD, and not having much time to conclude matters before catching a train. 

'When you start out,' I told S.D., 'you dot all the i's and cross all the t's and are obsessed with getting everything right. Then once you've got it all more or less right for some time you rely more and more on your ability to wing it. But it's not just that: I think that because I don't find interacting with people very easy I'm subconsciously wanting to finish any encounter as quickly as is decent to do, and this leads to a temptation to cut corners.'

S.D. said, 'I think this is actually very common, and it relates to the priestly life. We do so many different things that we're never quite sure what's going to be happening next and what we're going to be asked to do or say, so we live in a state of constant mild tension, always looking ahead to the next thing. That leads to a desire to want to be free of that tension as soon as we can and go home and flop. That creates the risk of giving people less attention than they have the right to expect from us, and the kind of person you might be exacerbates the situation. I don't think this will ever go away; all you can do is try to counteract it, by going very deliberately back to dotting the i's and crossing the t's like you used to do. I observe quite a number of lazy priests, but there's a sort of spiritual laziness which is different from mere bodily laziness.'

He came out with this with such facility I suspect he's thought about it before ...