Should the Mayan Apocalypse come to pass on Friday it will, I fear, play right havoc with the Christmas rota as ordained and published. Not that we of St Boniface Parva are not at all times - as good scriptural virgins lamps a-trimmed - ready and waiting for the return of the Good Lord at the right and proper End of Days. We do know full well that the Last Trump will finally indeed sound in due season - a matter for some of serene sanguinity, for others of nightly terrors - but when one is gearing up for the Last Great Push before Midnight Mass there simply isn't the time to be fretting over any final smiting or eternal rapturing.
H has gamely promised to tackle Mrs Fairclough and her simply lethal mince pies, Curate Cuthbert is making as decent a fist as any a man could of Choir with its inexorable habit of going flat during the anthem, and I am deep into frantic final revisions of the Church cleaning and polishing jankers to ensure both sides of the 'Great Feud' are content that their conflicting and competing contributions have been properly welcomed and fulsomely rewarded. (No brawling mass of Coptic and Catholic monks in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity can compare with the hissing pit of vipers that inhabits our Sanctuary should Miss Marchbanks's altar flowers appear on stage before Miss Frobisher's troops are done with polishing the Communion Rail!)
As for the homily du jour please don't ask! Where does one simply begin? With the Gospel of course, and would that one could stop right there. One's favourite Bishop was that St. Petersburg Patriarch of blessed memory, who promptly exiled three of his best priests to Siberia for the duration for having the temerity to sermonise one word beyond Holy Writ. If only Bish Tom would so ordain! But no, ever the command is to get up on one's hind legs and preach, preach away.
A generalised 'That Was The Village Year That Was' is often the safest line to take, though requiring as it frequently does a good glossing over of some of the lower lights of the past twelve months: the unseemly fisticuffs outside the Legion on Lammas Day; that time 'Bilko' Biggins was so cut sailing back into the marina on race day that he rammed his fore-spar clean through the Club Captain's best genoa! And so forth. 'Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.' Quite so.
A more firebrand pastor than one's own eirenic self might well hijack the occasion of a packed house for a spot of hellish haranguing - 'Pull up or be sent down' - but it does so jar the Happy Holy Birthday mood of a good sentimental Midnight Mass, which they always tend to be; not to mention the large portion of one's audience come for their annual roar-along-a-carol neither wanting nor willing to be hectored, especially after an evening's preparatory ale at The Dragon.
Above all, it having been such an unmitigated stink of a year all round for so many, any banging on about anything other than the hope eternal in the birth of a saving child would be mean spirited in the extreme. Hope they - the theologians - say is the Cinderella virtue: faith and love get all the positive press, hope hardly a mention. I had, indeed, hardly hoped to be so buggerated about this year what with blocked arteries and lower limbs in periculo mortis; nor indeed had there been much evidence of anticipation of good things when laid stretched out on the cold theatre slab with one's surgeon opining "I doubt this will kill you..."
But one has pulled through despite the odds and plain in the face of dire alternatives. Be charitably baked pies never so inedible, be Choir always just below the note, be feuding factions never ever at peace one with the other - we shall survive, Mayan Long Calendars or no Mayan Long Calendars.
See you on the other side of the Apocalypse!
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Wednesday, May 02, 2012
Best Foot Forward...
"As for new shoes, dear boy, I wouldn't bother just now if I were you."
- Thus one's ever humane surgeon opining (many years now ago) how best to proceed all tests completed, all options considered, all the latest bookies' odds taken into account.
Does that sound all a bit callous, somewhat blasé, rather too nonchalentamente all together? Dropped out a clear blue - dark thunderous in truth - sky of course yes, it would. The tone, though, of such potentially portentous prognostic discussions is one to be set by as much the patient as the medic in question. If the fellow about to be carved like the finest Christmas turkey has a mind for flippancy in the face of possible extinction, then the appointed carver-in-chief is well advised to follow his lead.
A certain utterly bearable lightness of being is, indeed, a perfectly reasonable reaction in such circs., trust me. Not exactly an 'easy come, easy go' view of one's own existence, but rather a deep acceptance that to live is, at some moment and from some cause inevitably, to die. That depth is then not necessarily to be borne heavily, but taken in all lightness for being the natural and the supernatural order of the whole ens & esse case, the proper accomplishment of The Four Last And Inexorable Things.
So, indeed, a consideration that one in all likelihood had sufficient footwear for the rest of the journey was perfectly in order at the time. And oddly enough, it has stuck as almost something of a shibboleth ever since, much else changing not least the length of the path ahead now much advanced from the original proposal.
Cometh though the hour - some twelve years on - cometh the shoe shop. A certain tramp-like look to the boots - not quite soles flapping in the wind with twine holding the piece as one, but not far off - could not forever be ignored. Certainly wasn't by parishioners many and by Parish Council all it seems. Hadn't really noticed, but apparently murmurings were abroad that Rector was turning 'scruffy' - not a good look in rural settings. Scruffy is not plain raiment suited to one's station. Workaday rough-hewn is splendid: the shepherd's best smelly old tweeds dripping with sheep-dip perfectly at home in the Snug Bar. Scruffy, rather, is 'letting oneself go', a lack of private concern and - worse - a tugging at the binding public thread.
Fascinating really on what one is judged. Be he never so holy, be his soul never so pure.... No, wait. The reef of cheap puns is looming. Let us just recall Great Aunt Norbertina's nostrum, who on being introduced to any gentleman took in first his boots and then his gloves. Either failing inspection, the case was lost and the man spurned. (Hats and handbags for the ladies one recalls.)
And thus a long-standing duck has been broken, a drought (apposite contemporary thought) assuaged. After a two-day striving with ill-mannered and inept sales personages, shops shut when they should darn well be open, sizes not in stock and prices beyond any remembering; after all such labour and toil Rector finally has new boots. Huzzah! Just hope I've not broken some potent charm or spell laid back in the days. Hard not to be a tad superstitious. They tell me these fine crafted pieces will last 50 years. Heaven help my dotage if I make it half as far!
- Thus one's ever humane surgeon opining (many years now ago) how best to proceed all tests completed, all options considered, all the latest bookies' odds taken into account.
Does that sound all a bit callous, somewhat blasé, rather too nonchalentamente all together? Dropped out a clear blue - dark thunderous in truth - sky of course yes, it would. The tone, though, of such potentially portentous prognostic discussions is one to be set by as much the patient as the medic in question. If the fellow about to be carved like the finest Christmas turkey has a mind for flippancy in the face of possible extinction, then the appointed carver-in-chief is well advised to follow his lead.
A certain utterly bearable lightness of being is, indeed, a perfectly reasonable reaction in such circs., trust me. Not exactly an 'easy come, easy go' view of one's own existence, but rather a deep acceptance that to live is, at some moment and from some cause inevitably, to die. That depth is then not necessarily to be borne heavily, but taken in all lightness for being the natural and the supernatural order of the whole ens & esse case, the proper accomplishment of The Four Last And Inexorable Things.
So, indeed, a consideration that one in all likelihood had sufficient footwear for the rest of the journey was perfectly in order at the time. And oddly enough, it has stuck as almost something of a shibboleth ever since, much else changing not least the length of the path ahead now much advanced from the original proposal.
Cometh though the hour - some twelve years on - cometh the shoe shop. A certain tramp-like look to the boots - not quite soles flapping in the wind with twine holding the piece as one, but not far off - could not forever be ignored. Certainly wasn't by parishioners many and by Parish Council all it seems. Hadn't really noticed, but apparently murmurings were abroad that Rector was turning 'scruffy' - not a good look in rural settings. Scruffy is not plain raiment suited to one's station. Workaday rough-hewn is splendid: the shepherd's best smelly old tweeds dripping with sheep-dip perfectly at home in the Snug Bar. Scruffy, rather, is 'letting oneself go', a lack of private concern and - worse - a tugging at the binding public thread.
Fascinating really on what one is judged. Be he never so holy, be his soul never so pure.... No, wait. The reef of cheap puns is looming. Let us just recall Great Aunt Norbertina's nostrum, who on being introduced to any gentleman took in first his boots and then his gloves. Either failing inspection, the case was lost and the man spurned. (Hats and handbags for the ladies one recalls.)
And thus a long-standing duck has been broken, a drought (apposite contemporary thought) assuaged. After a two-day striving with ill-mannered and inept sales personages, shops shut when they should darn well be open, sizes not in stock and prices beyond any remembering; after all such labour and toil Rector finally has new boots. Huzzah! Just hope I've not broken some potent charm or spell laid back in the days. Hard not to be a tad superstitious. They tell me these fine crafted pieces will last 50 years. Heaven help my dotage if I make it half as far!
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