Strange Paths

You are used to me describing episodes which I usually characterise as passing through a cloud - the way it can suddenly come down and then as suddenly lift. The last couple of days have seen me feeling something linked to that experience, but distinct from it. It's been a peculiar sort of mild derangement - a sense of cognitive fracturing alongside a very negative mindset, which is unusually directed not at my situation but outward. A friend says something on LiberFaciorum and my first mental response is to pick holes in it, no matter what it might be, while I find myself unable to compose any positive, coherent thoughts or concentrate on anything beyond the immediate tasks I absolutely can't avoid doing. Having come across extracts from it for some time, I've just bought an old copy of CS Lewis's The Four Loves and have been finding myself getting to the foot of a page and having very little idea what I've read: it's CS Lewis, for heaven's sake, not Hegel. I faff about in the study, and in the middle of one task think of another but then in the middle of looking something up or finding an envelope or whatever can't hold on to either long enough to move forward on them. Am I ageing, mentally declining, or just tired?

Church life is part of this. Swanvale Halt faces the same challenges as any small community of English Christians and there are innumerable suggestions for what a pastor might do about them, or about themselves, a kaleidoscope of answers to a welter of ways of characterising the problem. A lot of the time all I can do is think of objections. I don't actually know what to do. There are projects I begin, and then conclude that they aren't going to work after all, which I suppose is no bad thing but it's difficult to see them as more than a waste of time.

I haven't seen S.D. for a long while. I called him this morning to fix a meeting before Easter. 'I suppose I can fit you in,' he said wearily. I related one of my favourite stories, of how the future Fr Joe Williamson went as a young man straight back from World War One to visit the notoriously sarcastic Fr Montgomery-Campbell at St Saviour's Poplar, who listened to this stumbling, nervous Cockney lad on his doorstep describing how he felt God was calling him to be a priest, and replied with 'Really? How interesting,' and then shut the door. 'That's how it should be,' put in S.D., 'none of this nonsense about feelings.' He put me in the diary and to cheer me up told me a story about how he and a disabled friend got stuck in a lift at a reception in an Oxford college recently and had to climb/be lifted out with the aid of two chairs. They both thought it was a hoot while the college is mortified and launching an enquiry. Funnily enough, it did cheer me up a bit.