Pastoral Letter for the Month

 “I can see you,” I say, looking over at the door that goes out into the garden. Looking through it is the grumpy cat from next door who both hates us, and also wants us to let it in our house. 

 “And I know,” I say, “that if I open that door, you will run away.” The cat just stares in at me, pretending that it doesn’t understand what I’m saying.

“Why do you always do this?” I say. “It’s not as though you even like me.” 

 It’s true. The grumpy cat, who is one of three cats that live next door, clearly does not like me. If I happen to be hanging out washing when it makes one of its patrols through the hedge into our garden it gives me a filthy look and then runs away. Image created by Joanne Young and reproduced with permission 

 “If that cat was bigger,” I say to my wife, “I’d be dead meat.” “If that cat was bigger,” she replies, “we’d all be dead meat.” “It must like someone,” I say. “Surely…” When I was growing up we had two cats. One of them was a large ginger cat who was very calm and laid back and generally nice natured. He liked to play with me, and to curl up in a warm ball on my lap. He was generally pleased to see me. The other one, though, was not like that. 

A small, grey, cat, my parents chose her from a litter of kittens because they felt sorry for her. She looked a bit scrawny and pathetic. Even though she got the same love and attention as the other one, she didn’t have the same temperament. We didn’t have a cat flap, so if she decided that she wanted to come into the house she would leap up on to the living room window ledge and paw frantically at the window. If you didn’t go to the door immediately she would fly into a rage. On one memorable occasion, when I was a little slow in opening the front door for her, she stalked in haughtily and then, pausing, raised a paw and slapped me as hard as she could on the leg before marching off. 

 “I just don’t understand it,” I say to my wife. Why does the cat sit there, outside our door like that? What does it hope to achieve? What does it want us to do?” “Perhaps the people who used to live here gave her food,” she says. “I draw the line at feeding other people’s grumpy cats, just to try and make them like me,” I reply. 

 Sometimes when it comes to writing pastoral letters I think that perhaps I should be more like the apostle Paul, or someone like that, who wrote deep and poetic pieces of theology that would go on to be pored over for thousands of years afterwards. Instead, though, I find myself writing about grumpy cats, laundry, or dishwashers. 

 I don’t know about you, though, but I find that the small, ordinary things in life: getting a grease stain out of a shirt, or trying to work out why a cat hates me, can still be meaningful. They can still tell us something about ourselves, about God, and about the world around us. Because our lives are made up of small things. They are made up of ordinary things and moments. They are made up of the idle thoughts and funny ideas that come into our minds. We who call ourselves Christians are, after all, ordinary people. 

We live in a world full of ordinary people, some who are grumpy and some who are easy going, and some who might be either, depending on the day. And it is this strange collection of ordinary people that is, somehow, the location of God’s love. 

 It is the same group of people who look out the window and wonder if they’re going to have to water the lawn, or why they haven’t seen any blackbirds for a while, or what time the shops shut on a Bank Holiday, that is, somehow, the ‘body of Christ’. 

 Simon