Pastoral Letter for the Month

“There’s a pigeon on that tree that looks like a small vulture,” I say to my

wife, “it’s making me feel uneasy.”

The pigeon is leaning forward, its head bent at an angle that means its

silhouette is like that of a vulture – but not just any vulture – one of the

cartoon ones. I watch it, perched on a leafless branch. Eventually it flies

away in a hurry, presumably it has remembered an appointment.

The changing seasons are marked by the falling of leaves and the growing of

new ones.

And through them all, the grumpy cat trudges with bleak determination.

One evening the grumpy cat tries a new trick.

“It’s just sitting at the door,” I say, “looking at us.”

The grumpy cat is as close to the glass of the back door as it can get.

“See what happens if I go toward the door,” I say.

As I do the grumpy cat retreats, scowling.

I go back to my place, and shortly afterwards so does the cat – silently

watching us, judging us.

“What is it doing?” My wife says.

“Being a weird little cat,” I say.

I’ve decided that this year I want to focus on hope, I want to look for, and

ideally find, traces of hope everywhere I go.

‘Where is the hope?’ I ask myself, whenever I read a Bible passage.

‘Where is the hope?’ I think, whenever I read the news, ‘no, I mean,

seriously… where?’

A lot depends on what you’re looking for, of course – often you have to be

looking for the hope to find it. One way of seeing the grumpy cat is to see it

as a weird little cat who has an unfortunate resting expression. Another way

is to see it as an astute, if slightly melancholy and introverted, animal who

hopes to find an alternative source of food, in case its owners abandon it.

“I suppose the grumpy cat hopes that we would just leave the door open, so

it can come and go as it wants,” I say, “without having to interact with us at

all.”

“Some hopes are destined to remain unfulfilled,” my wife says.

“I suppose that’s the nature of hope,” I say, “because otherwise they’d be

certainties rather than hopes.”

“What are you working on, a sermon?” My wife says.

“I think it’s more likely to be a newsletter thing,” I say.

“What’s the basic idea?” She says.

“Well…” I say, “I suppose I want to say that hope is always risky, it’s not like

certainty, it’s not a sure thing, but we can’t do without it - it’s the thing that

drives us on. Hope keeps us going, we need hope. We need to keep looking

for it, even when it feels risky.”

We lapse into a moment of quiet.

“We do need hope,” she says.

“Yes,” I say.

From the other side of the glass, the grumpy cat scowls at us, and gives a

long, hopeful, blink.

“We’ll still be here when you open your eyes,” I yell.

 Simon