Pastoral Letter for the Month

The winter months seem to drag on, don’t they. 

 Leaden skies and cold damp air hang over us with an unforgiving determination – the occasional bit of blue sky or rare sighting of the sun can take us by surprise, or trick us into imagining that spring is at last on its way– which it will be… eventually. 

 Regardless of the gloom though, I persist in one thing: hanging my laundry out in my garden. “If it’s not actually raining,” I explained to my friend Sandra, “my washing is going out.” 

 My wife’s grandmother had the same point of view. “It will get the thick out,” she would declare as she headed off to the garden to hang a cardigan out on the washing line while we rushed to close the door behind her before the cold damp air could get to us.  Hours later, after hanging limply on the line under a sky that looked like spilled grey paint, the cardigan would eventually return indoors. Generally it was not obviously drier than it had been when it was banished from the house. 

 Despite the fact that sometimes the washing seems to get actively damper by spending the day out of doors I persist in my efforts. Neighbouring cats eye me suspiciously from upstairs windows as I carefully peg jeans, jumpers and socks on to the line, while the hungry birds who want to get back to raiding sunflower seeds from the feeders sit impatiently in the hedge. 

The depths of winter are the worst, of course, because the daylight hours are particularly short. Hanging washing out in the cold damp air is one thing, but even I draw the line at hanging it out in the dark. Mostly. 

 For some years I have thought about the fact that laundry is one of the great shared experiences of humankind. Wherever you go in the world you will find people washing clothes. No matter how exalted, or elevated, the personage – their socks still need to get washed. Of course the most well heeled doubtless outsource their laundry to someone paid to care for their clothes, but the vast majority of the world has to take care of their own shirts and underpants. 

In his book ‘After the Ecstasy, the Laundry’ the writer Jack Kornfield reflects on the way that even when we have what we might think of as ‘profound spiritual experiences’ we still have to return to everyday life. You might have just had a deep revelation of the nature of God, but you will still have to put your socks in the wash afterwards. There’s a deeper truth there, isn’t there – about the nature of our lives. Life is made up of small things, ordinary things, normal things. It’s not about the rare experiences and the ‘big moments’– they’re exciting, sometimes even life changing, but they are the merest moments in a life full of normality. 

The first of March is the feast of St David. The famous phrase of St David is ‘do the little things you have seen me do,’ which I think is a profound piece of wisdom. Life is full of little things, it is full of brief meetings and momentary encounters. If we are thoughtful, it can be full of small kindnesses, and a life full of small kindnesses is surely a life well lived. 

 Simon