Sorrow...

...not everyone who appears on these pages is entirely real, though none are completely fictitious. I trust you realise this.

There is not, though, a one whose real name features - as a matter of due discretion and courtesy.

So let us call him Z.

Z is a madcap friend who sadly has gone quite mad. Z and his wife with two children - now it seems his soon-to-be ex-wife - are godparents to E, as I am a godparent to theirs. They have lived - emigrated - Down Under for more than a decade, having decided the good life was to be found there not here. And who could doubt the chances they were right?

Contact has been intermittent over the years - generally just a madcap Z card at Christmas, written in prose to make dear Eddie Izzard proud. Then the year before last there was news of dire if unclear events. Z's good job had vanished, and along with it came hints of more and fundamental distress. What quite that more was we could - and did - only speculate.

E-mails were sent but not replied to. Finally a postal letter to a given address has provoked a reply. Z is alone. Z is bereft of house, home, family, job and very sanity. He lives in a Catholic mission for the fallen; and far, far has he fallen. He rants like Lear and he raves quite like Job.

There is - just - enough of the gallows humour to his writing to give some hope that a mind is functioning at some recoverable level. But he is filled with pain and with a terrible rage. I pray he can let go of the anger to ease his pain. I wish I could fly to him for whatever comfort a man could bring. That only perhaps of a man who understands just how fragile is our hold on the life we have built and on the sanity to which we cling.

May hope be the dawn of healing for poor Richard.

There, you have his true name. Pray for Richard and his family if that is your way. My monks are praying for him. They too have his name.

As does the Lord. Ours is a Lord of sorrows and one acquainted with grief. He holds him now, I am sure, in the palm of his hand.