Pastoral Letter for the Month

There haven’t been too many sightings of the grumpy cat recently. “I think it’s too cold,” I say to Kelly, “that cat’s a softie.” 

 As if to prove me wrong the grumpy cat appears again shortly after I’ve called it a softie – scowling as it walks purposefully across the garden. 

 “Where were you when we needed you?” I call after the grumpy cat – a few days before hand a mouse had found it’s way up into the roof cavity of the dining room extension. There’s not enough room to get up into that space, all I can do is stick part of my head through a small hatch and glare balefully around. Whenever I do, I see nothing – partly because it’s dark. 

 “You had one job!” I shout as the grumpy cat’s tail disappears around the side of the house, “one job!” It’s not clear whether my stinging rebuke hit home, or whether nature simply took it’s course in some other way, but we didn’t hear the mouse again after that. Back at the end of the 2000s I spent several enjoyable months researching a book about people who live in Christian communities. Some of them lived in large communes, others in small households – for some it was a short term thing, for others it was a lifelong commitment.

 “What you have to understand,” Ian, a resident in the Darvell Bruderhof, said, “is that the most annoying people always live just down the hall.” The Bruderhof is an international group which bears some small resemblance to the Amish. They don’t drive horses and buggys, and not all of the men have beards, but there are definitely ‘Amish vibes.’

“It’s like Little House on the Prairie,” one of my kids said after I took them on a visit to Darvell, a community in Surrey. One thing is for sure, they know what its like to live together. “The thing is,” Ian said, “that the people who live on the other side of the community aren’t annoying, you don’t see them all the time, they don’t get in the way, they don’t do annoying or inconvenient things. It’s the people just down the hall, the people you see all the time, the people you can’t get away from, they’re the ones who are hardest – you can’t escape them.” 

I don’t mind mice,” I say to Kelly, “except when they try to come in my house– at which point I’m basically ready to declare war on them.” It’s true – I can be quite sympathetic to mice who are just living their lives in the hedges and fields. I got to be quite fond of the mice I used to find sheltering under feed troughs when I walked the fields with my dad as a child. But if they try to come into my house? I switch from benevolent to malevolent. I’m ready to exterminate. 

 There’s something there for all of us – there’s a reality about the people who we have to work alongside, the people who we see each week, for years at a time. They can be some of the hardest people to be nice to, we don’t always give them the benefit of the doubt like we would for others. “The grumpy cat is popular with the people who read this newsletter, you know,” I say to Kelly. “But then, they don’t have to put up with it scowling at them all the time.”  “There must be a lesson in that,” she replies. “Yes, if only I could think of it,” I say. 

 Simon