The Difficulties of Leaving

One of yesterday morning’s tasks was to deliver a letter to a parishioner and to drop off a CD played at a funeral a couple of weeks ago at the deceased’s house so their family could pick it up. I trudged along the rainy roads and reached the house, only to realise the CD wasn’t in the case as I thought. It was just about worth while to make the journey back to the church and try again …

While on my progress I saw someone who turned up at the church for a little while and even came to Morning Prayer on a couple of occasions, and then disappeared. They are just one of a vast company of souls in the same kind of situation and who almost certainly outnumber the folk who actually do remain as members of the congregation. Sometimes people turn up on a Sunday morning to dip their toes in the spiritual water, speak very positively about the experience, and you never see them again. Others come for a time: there was a young couple who turned up almost every week at our 8am mass for about 18 months, a period which included the woman being baptised, and then stopped. They never said why, or responded to gentle enquiries about their welfare, so I have no idea whether something bad happened in another aspect of their lives, whether they became dissatisfied with their experience with us, or what. Those occasions are the tougher for a pastor to deal with: you have come to care about these people, and they vanish.

Of course Jesus envisages this situation in the Parable of the Sower, but it doesn’t completely wipe away the frustration and sense of failure. I inevitably think of friends who have disappeared from my own life too, including more than one potential partner who closed the process down with no clear explanation of their thinking, leaving the dump-ee to imagine the worst: if the reason was good, you can’t help feeling, if they felt confident about it, they’d tell you. I suppose it speaks to the difficulty we have in sharing truths we fear may be unwelcome, and we’d rather just avoid the conversation completely; and also to the fact that for most people, I fear, involvement with a church community is a nice add-on to life but not something which it hurts much to leave behind. But leavers may not even be facing the fact that they have left: people tell themselves they are going to come to worship long after they’re practically able to, or determined enough to set aside the time from the many other demands they have. It's all a cause of sadness, and I would rather people were happy. Including me!