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Over the Hill and far Away
Even if we have a fairly settled childhood, and I certainly didn’t, as soon as we leave school the realisation dawns that nothing is ever going to be the same again. Joining the army at the age of eighteen, I came home on my first leave to find that all the young men of my age had disappeared and all the girls had married, even the ugly ones, especially the ugly ones.
We tend to live in a kind of make-believe time warp where we try to fondly imagine that everything is as it always was, when we know perfectly well that it isn’t. I recall incidents where offspring have returned to this country from some far-flung corner of the Empire expecting that the Vicar who conducted the wedding of their parents fifty years previously would still be in post and looking not a day older.
Places change, people move on. The furniture removal business must be the biggest growth industry hereabouts. Scarborough is so attractive an area that people move in from all over Yorkshire and beyond, and promptly move out again when their illusions are shattered. Even the clergy, once semi-permanent fixtures, quit their parishes as soon as the Vicarage windows need cleaning. The rumour that the mass exodus began when I came here is a malicious one.
This instability, with friends drifting in and out of our lives, is very unsettling. Welcome new faces appear in our churches and familiar ones take off to pastures new. Sometimes it seems that it would be more practical if the secretary wrote the names on the church electoral roll in pencil.
June is a wonderful month for nostalgia. In it falls Trinity Sunday of blessed memory, with it’s obtuse and unfathomable sermons, Corpus Christi and those splendid processions, the Birth of S. John the Baptist, in this parish with its attendant birthday party, and the Feast of S. Peter, when many of us recall our ordination to the priesthood and wonder what happened to all those rather odd bods in misshapen cassocks who lined up alongside us. Places change, people decamp, but festivals stir the memories. Most importantly, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and for ever.
May God bless you all, Fr Allan
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