Change

Not this sort of change

The life of a Vicar, at least in the measure of that I have enjoyed to date, is characterised by the whole issue of change. There are, it seems, different ways that things are changed in the first phase of an incumbency. First, there are those things that need changing in a hurry (in the spirit of person and parish preservation) and that have to be made immediately. Then there are those things that need changing in the course of the movement of time and as seasons change. Those are changes that take more time, require consultation and deliberation with a wider gathering. Then there are the Grand Changes that concern whole-parish direction, its mission and vision. Those sorts of changes are brought about with wide consultation and over a longer period of time. 

The common characteristic in all matters regarding change is that people seem not to like it. The whole idea of change is not, of course, about the matter at hand. That the Hall WC is that colour or this is of no significance per se, but in parish life nothing (and I mean nothing) is that wasn't put there for a reason (and often by someone long dead). 

To move a chair from a place of hazard to a place where it may be sat upon seems like a process of the obvious, until you discover that Mrs Miggins RIP 1942 used to sit in that spot and on the chair she donated. To change locks because seven million copies of the door key exist and are in the hands of nameless masses seems like a sensible thing to do until you discover that someone was given a key by the vicar back in the 20s to let in the drayman once and therefore has rights to new keys. 

People acquire things. People take on little jobs around the place. People, with a good heart, dedicate themselves to things. We ask them to do it. We enable with one hand and disable with another because we have to. What we are not taught in Vicar School is how much people attach significance to things that exceed the original significance. A key to one person is to open a door and an onerous duty, but to another it represents affirmation, authority and even a sense of power. Often, we change things (even through specific need) that people regard as 'theirs', even when they are not. 

The lesson I am learning is simple. I must make the changes that are required as it is my role to lead a community from one place to another in all senses. The end result is almost always peaceful, but the liminal space - the moment of transition - is hard for most if not all of us. It is the case that we identify ourselves as who we are in many external things - and in church life at least, those things are the ones oft changed by new Vicars. 

Silly Little Things That Hurt The Most

Today has seen an event that demonstrates how the smallest thing can cause the greatest pain. I am writing this post in part to exorcise some very negative feelings in the style of Blog Self-Counselling. Don't read on if you don't fancy it. 

The thing is, I lost my beautiful and beloved Dad a few years ago. It wasn't a tragic death in the sense that he sort of went when it was time, and he went peacefully - but he was my dad. I cannot adequately find words to express my love for that funny little man, a person who gave up so much to take my mum and her young family into his life a while after my birth-father had died. He would have told you that he gained much more from being our dad than he lost by sacrificing his retirement peace and quiet (he was appreciably older than mum, but they still enjoyed over twenty years of marriage). Daft old bugger died on mum's birthday too - silly old sod. 

Due to many factors, chief among them being good old procrastination probably, only recently did we inter his ashes and in his memory plant a young tree. It would have been just what he would have chosen too, so we felt proud. 

The thing is with such 'shrines' (and we see them in abundance at roadsides these days), is that while they are in themselves simple and not of the living, they become the place where we pour so much of our latent grief. That little tree became important not just it was a little tree, but because it was dad's little tree. If I had courage to say or believe it, that tree became the next nearest thing that we had to dad. 

Until that little tree was vandalized and snapped. Killed, murdered, defiled, desecrated. To me, my mum and probably to my brother and sister, it isn't the murder of a tree that would have grown strong and proud over decades, but of my dad and his memory. 

I am left unable to get breath. Yes, it was only a bloody tree, but it was my daddy's tree. I live my life to help others and love them into the Kingdom, but there are bits of me that would commit a crime at the moment. Of course, the vandals did nothing to my dad, and probably didn't even know the tree meant anything - but it doesn't feel that way, not a little bit. I am now languishing in the darkest mood I have known for some times, and better for those vandals that I live two hours away. Perhaps it is my job to forgive, like good Christians should, and maybe I will.

But I can't do it now. Not yet.