Thieves may have stolen my optimism, but not my defiance
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Version 0 of 1. I’m in the parish office, discussing – as so often – our church’s complicated relationship with solvency, when a hand is forced through the letterbox from the outside. Someone is after our car-park money again. I bang on the window and the face of the culprit suddenly appears inches from mine, staring straight at me. He smiles, his face flickering between shame and hostility. But he doesn’t try to run away. I recognise him, of course. I know them all. A few months back he appeared at the vicarage, obviously twitchy and desperate for a fix, aggressively demanding money for a trip to Reading. I didn’t give it to him. After 20 minutes of bargaining he stomped off, banging the fence and angrily cursing me and the church for our lack of Christian sympathy. But today he was much calmer. We talk. On methadone now, he says, stable, and full of remorse. And the more we talk the more he uncoils. He is a Christian, he tells me. His grandmother would have been ashamed to know he had been stealing from the church. But his need for drugs was/is so all-consuming that it made/makes him do things he wouldn’t otherwise dream of. Was this past or present? The grammar is a bit shifty. Could he do some weeding for us as penance, he asked? I agreed. Last year our problem was more with the druggies and their disgusting habits Then he usefully advised how to make our letterbox thief-proof. Take the bag off, he suggested. At present, the letterbox is attached to a fire-proof bag as a precaution against people trying to burn the place down. But removing the bag won’t be enough, he said, because if the fivers fall on the floor people will still be able to pick them up using a stick with Blu-Tack on the end. We shook hands. And off he went. In this mood, I rather liked him. Later he returned and spent a few hours digging, arranging a line of rocks to mark a border around the church bins. This felt like a victory to me. The earth was turned over beautifully. And all was swept up afterwards. It wasn’t a token job, reluctantly undertaken. I suppose people will think me foolish – but this is why I do the job. That patch of earth feels more important to me than all the stuff we do on Sunday. Later, the police arrive to question our new gardener. Apparently, there had been an altercation with someone on the street. I decide not to get involved. Redemption is a game of snakes and ladders. After midnight my doorbell rings. Flashlights surround the church. It’s the police again. Someone has smashed a church window and maybe broken into the church, they say. I wearily pull on my jeans to take a look. It seems that my gardener’s anti-thief advice was so successful that the thieves now have to break the window or smash through the door in order to get to our car-park money. There wasn’t even any money there. God, I’m bored with this. Last year our problem was more with the druggies and their disgusting habits – months of cleaning up needles and revolting diarrhoea are enough to drain you of the milk of human kindness. How do you explain to your kids why a man is sitting on the church step, genitals exposed, with a syringe stuck in his groin? So we cordoned off the area that they used with an attractive metal fence. Not that it solved anything for them, of course – they just moved elsewhere. And I feel the fence is a symbol of failure. Now I am contemplating a stronger door for the office. Soon the place will look more like a fortress than a church. The temptation, in a place like this, is to think in terms of solutions. And people are continually offering them. But experience has taught me that faith in solutions just leads to disappointment. Christian hope is not some false sunny-side-up optimism, it is a bloody minded defiance. A stubborn refusal to give in. Better to think in terms of endurance than optimism. Yes, I know this feels like a counsel of despair. But I’m not going to conclude with some false theological up-speak. Apart, perhaps, from that garden. And the gardener. Who has now gone missing. @giles_fraser |