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Bus Pass at the Ready
For my much vaunted sixtieth birthday my eldest daughter put together a photomontage of my life. Juxtaposed are a photograph of me when, at the age of forty, I was ordained as a priest and a recently taken one. In the space of twenty years I have changed from a handsome young man with black hair to an ugly old geezer with a white beard and a bus pass.
This is what being a Vicar does for you. The stress of never being able to do the right thing has aged me prematurely. Years of choosing the wrong hymns, or the right hymns to the wrong tunes, of having the services at unpopular times, struggling with architects, builders, and diocesan dignitaries, desperately trying to raise enough money for the quota, having arguments with belligerent grannies who demand to have their grandchildren baptized on a Sunday afternoon, or the mothers of brides who want a royal wedding for their daughters have reduced me to a dribbling wreck of humanity.
Everybody hates me. It’s tough at the top. Or so I thought. For those of you who are near and those who are far off and read these letters on the Internet, let me tell you how wrong I was.
The Sunday of my birthday dawned. The numbers at the churches in the morning were fair to middling but not spectacular. The grandchildren and their parents arrived in the afternoon and I trudged off wearily to Evensong, leaving them behind, as is usual. Suddenly the small church of S. John the Baptist began to fill up. They came from all corners of the parish, and all parts of Yorkshire. A coach-load from my previous parish in Middlesbrough surged in. There was hardly room to move, let alone breath. I had been set up.
The Churchwardens had been making a collection to buy a present, and what a wonderful gift it was! Somehow, without my even suspecting anything, my wife had been organising a party. Over the whole of England the thunder rolled and the rain sheeted down but here in Cayton the weather remained fine as we celebrated in the Vicarage garden. For twenty years I have sought to serve my Lord as a humble priest
May God bless you all, Fr Allan
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