Match made in heaven
ON EASTER Day afternoon, I marked the resurrection of our Lord by falling asleep in front of the snooker. This is a personal tradition, enacted wherever Easter falls in the second half of April. But, when I woke from my doze, I continued watching, as I did for much of the following week.
My congregation — and, indeed, most of my friends — remain largely uninterested in the game; so I have disappointingly few conversation partners with whom to compare notes about the progress of the World Championship.
This is a shame, because, temperamentally, Anglicans and snooker should be ideally suited. There is the church-like hush at the Crucible Theatre; the building of a break has the feel of a litany, the silence interrupted only by the ball contact, and the referee enumerating the score; and there is a mesmeric beauty in watching, say, Ding Junhui plotting his course through a pack of reds, with a series of stuns and screws, minimising distance, and conjuring patterns of near Euclidean geometry. If plainchant were a sport, it would be snooker.
In terms of the hours of delight afforded me through my life thus far by a single activity for so little expenditure (it’s always been free to air on the BBC), watching the World Snooker Championship has few rivals.
Sic transit
GOING up the churchyard path, I pass great swaths of fallen blossom, left like confetti after a wedding. The cherry tree was planted some time in the 1980s by Roger and Robin, then churchwardens. I buried Robin seven years ago, and Roger has moved to Wales for his final years, but I think of them both every year at this time, and thank them for their vision.
The tree must be eight metres high now, and almost twice as wide; and this spring’s blossom was particularly spectacular. Normally, the budding process takes about a week, but this year the blooms seemed to explode overnight in cluster after cluster of pink. Eventually, of course, the tree, too, will die, but for now it is in its pomp, albeit its glory lasts only a week or two.
A friend who has just visited Japan described the celebrated displays of cherry blossom there. Now that I have more or less given up flying, I doubt that I will ever see them for myself; but the pleasure that the St Mark’s cherry tree has given me, just yards from my study window, would be hard to beat anyway.
Hole at the heart
LATER in Easter Week, I took a morning trip to the Lee Valley Hockey and Tennis Centre in London’s Olympic Park, where my son’s team was playing in the finals of a school hockey competition.
I had not visited the park since the 2012 Olympics. Curious to see what the area now felt like, I took a wander, both before and after the match. Before the Games, the talk was of long-term regeneration of a run-down area, and part of the space is now lovely: green pedestrian paths, lined with increasingly mature trees, down which people were jogging in the morning sunshine. Cafés were doing decent business selling fancy coffee.
Another part still seems unsettled: there are a huge shopping complex and blocks of high-rise flats, but no kind of in-between. If there is a church, or indeed a school — and I guess there must be both — I did not see them. Busy roads scythe through the area, at short intervals, making it hard to locate any “centre”.
My sense was that the development was neither a triumph nor a disaster: a curate’s egg of a community. But perhaps we should accept that it is often so: not many projects are blinding successes, but not many are total duds, either.
New beginnings
IT WAS the saddest baptism I ever did, though everyone wanted it to happen. Not many were present: three-year-old Jack, with his mother and father, Marie and Sam (all names changed), his foster carers, a representative from social services, and a very small congregation. A fortnight later, Jack was to leave his foster carers to be adopted.
His mother and father — both present, but struggling — had acknowledged that they couldn’t look after him; they each had their addictions and demons, and they could not support him. The love was there; the capacity wasn’t. But they wanted him christened, and everyone — including the foster carers and the future adoptive parents — was happy for it to happen. Which it did: a baptism that was also a valediction.
From time to time, since then, I have thought about them all: the foster carers — lovely people, fostering for the first time, whose heart would no doubt break when Jack left them; Sam and Marie, their eyes filled with tears and regret at their failure properly to care for their son, but hoping someone else would do better by him; the woman from social services, going the extra mile to help it to happen; Jack himself; and also the adoptive parents — whoever, and wherever, they were — stepping up to offer a for-ever home to this beautiful boy, who would always carry some scars from his chaotic early years.
That was six years ago. On Low Sunday, Sam came through the church door. At first, I could not place him, but, after a reminder, it all came back. His eyes are clear, now; he has a steady job; and he overcame his addiction three years ago (he even has the blood tests to prove it). And, in a few months’ time, he is going to visit Jack, for the first time since the adoption — not to take him from his adoptive parents (he knows he cannot do that), but just to visit him and assure him that he was, and is, loved.
If he plays a part in Jack’s life now, it will be a small one; but he hopes that it is going to be positive. I believe him. It feels like a ray of resurrection hope.
The Revd Robert Stanier is the Vicar of St Andrew’s and St Mark’s, Surbiton, in the diocese of Southwark.