| The prayerful hour passes with little originality, and yet often something beautiful happens, though hard to put a name to. Usually the sermon, call it this, has been a brief literary lecture. Poetry and scraps of local history have wound through a collect maybe. Most of the hearers are old, old friends. And thus I imagine it has ever been, the familiar figure, voice, movement, the hug at the door, the platitudes that contain the concern.
This week, I watched Desmond Tutu on television, and, in case anyone should have missed it, he told this joke. “A plane was rocking about in the sky, and the terrified passengers shouted ‘Do something religious’ to a priest. So he began to take the collection.”
I once met this joyful archbishop. It was after a lecture at the University of Essex, in which his happiness could not be contained in one lecture-room, but had to be devolved on screens all over the building. It, too, as much danced as spoken, set a climate for prayer. Quite what prayer it was is hard to say.
George Herbert famously left us with an exuberant choice of definitions, each one of them dodging the simple answer where he was concerned, “Talking to Christ.” This was the most natural conversation he knew of. Access to it often unnerved him. It was like a poor man having the ear of his sovereign; so he would interrupt his flow with, to his Lord, superfluous apologies. But, as we know to our delight, Herbert was heard out.
The Wormingford worshippers are heard out. The united benefice is heard out. I am heard out. Especially when we are all not doing anything self-consciously religious, but are half-dreaming through the Benedicite, or the notices, if it comes to that.
I have been calling in the raspberries to their ancestral bed. Given a chance, raspberries will go AWOL. For years, I have allowed a few canes here and there to fruit in flower-beds, a hedge, an enormous clump of Hypericum, among the spuds. But no more. Home they are, and just in time for a nice rain. I transplanted them until a lopsided moon feebly lit the river mist and the white cat rose from a wall and retired to the warm bathroom, her current couch.
There were no raspberry prayers, so far as I can remember, but their soggy earth was surprisingly wet between my toes. Garden clothes go from old to useless, but I won’t preach on that. Dear old shoes, you who climbed the Cairngorms and trod the shores of Norfolk, who stepped through Sydney and into endless woods, you have come to grief in a raspberry patch. A lesson here, no doubt; but the oven has to be switched on.
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