Pastoral Letter for the Month

There haven’t been many sightings of The Grumpy Cat around here in the last few weeks – I did find it glaring at me from the front step one morning when I’d had the bad manners to leave the front door open while nipping back in the house to get something. “Were you born in a barn?” It seemed to say, before stalking off when I started walking towards it.

Sometimes I catch sight of it scowling at me from beneath a hedge, or occasionally on top of a wall, but generally it’s not been around much. There are seasons for all of us, after all, even cats. Times when things are busy, times when we have a bit more time on our hands – as the writer of Ecclesiastes, a wise man known as ‘Qoheleth’, which means ‘the teacher, might have put it.

Ecclesiastes is one of many strange books in the Bible – the writer says that he is son of David, king in Jerusalem,” which has led a lot of people to associate him with the biblical king Solomon. Most scholars believe, though, that the book was written during a far later period and uses Solomon as a literary persona.

What these days seems like outrageous fakery (making out that you are someone else) was a perfectly respectable way to write a couple of thousand years ago – it allowed authors to convey wisdom through an authoritative voice while preserving their own anonymity. In the same way there are a number of ‘letters’ in the New Testament which are attributed to Paul, even though they are written in quite a different style, and advance ideas that aren’t found in the letters which are generally regarded as Paul’s work.

What these writers were doing was finding a way to place themselves inside the story of the Christian, or Hebrew, traditions. Aligning themselves with someone like Paul, or Solomon, was a good way to do that. Those who were at the Methodist women’s lunch last month heard me talk about how I think we’re all made up of stories. I illustrated that with a strange tale from the flatlands of Lincolnshire – where people became convinced that a UFO had attacked, or perhaps crashed into, a wind turbine.

For a short while there was a nationwide focus on this unlikely occurrence -Fleet Street journalists and BBC reporters descended on the marsh lands ofthe east coast to listen to tales of strange lights in the sky on the night of the unexplained incident.To cut a long story short, though, it turned out that there was a more mundane and mechanical explanation for the damage to the turbine, and that the strange lights in the night sky were explained by the fire works set off at a birthday party. Still, it made for a good tale.

Watching the lights from Hull Fair recently reminded me of the time when, asa teenager, a group of friends and I were working on a holiday camp on the Scottish coast during the summer holidays. Late at night, when the kids we were responsible for were asleep, some of us would gather on the beach to chat and relax. One night we lay on the dunes watching what we thought were the northern lights dancing on the night sky to the north of us. It was only later that someone pointed out that the lights were coming from a place where a steep hillside road opened out, and we realised that we’d been marvelling at the sight of vehicle headlights reflecting on clouds.

Stories are the way we try to make sense of the world we’re part of – a world which is often strange and deeply inexplicable. The words and stories we use are at best only partially able to explain things– it’s just not realistic to hope that we can, using our own limited vocabulary, grasp the full strangeness of the world we live in. “Trying to understand God,” someone once told me, “is a bit like trying to explain television to a dog.” Or perhaps trying to make friends with The Grumpy Cat – in other words it’s a worthwhile endeavour, it’s certainly worth trying, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that we’re going to get it right. Perhaps the best we can do is remain open to possibilities.

Simon