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Now is the Month of Maying
My mind has the ability to sieve out information which it thinks is surplus to requirements and to keep data which may be of help in the future. This can be quite useful. It means that I can read detective novels again and again and not recall the ending. My long-suffering wife has to endure watching endless repeats of television dramas because I have forgotten what happens, although she has not. She usually ruins it by telling me. On the other hand, I can recite most of the periodic table, the formulae for calculating the volumes of bizarrely shaped objects, and chunks of obscure poems which I learned for my O Level English Literature examination in 1959.
Being a clergyman, I have travelled, and on the way I have lost many precious things. One of these was a book which I pored over as a child. It was a Little Grey Rabbit story by Alison Uttley and in it I vividly recall a hare smoking a pipe and saying “a little learning is a dangerous thing”. How apt that is in this month of May.
Easter is far away and, in the eyes of the secular world, long gone. Judging by the fact that two out of three of the Parish Councils in our parish held their annual assemblies in Holy Week, and expected me to be there to liven up the tedium of the proceedings, most people have scant knowledge of what the Pascal season is all about. Try as we might to push the message of the crucified and risen Lord, by mid-May it, like the plots of those who-dunnits that I read, has disappeared into the dark recesses of the minds of the majority of the population.
Mention Ascension Day and a look of puzzlement comes to their faces. The little knowledge about Easter becomes a total blank when the Ascension is spoken of. One might almost assume that S. Patrick invented Guinness, judging by the promotion of the Patron Saint of Ireland in English pubs, but the Ascension of Our Lord into heaven, surely much more important, is hardly marked at all, except by the faithful, and not many of them, either. It is always on a Thursday, which doesn’t help as it interferes with the bingo or the television soaps, but we will be there in church, rejoicing, won’t we?
May God bless you all, Fr. Allan
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