The First Steps...

I had never heard of Zbigniew Preisner until I became an ardent fan of the Tree of Life soundtrack. I did in fact only watch it last weekend, so I’m a little late to the party I know, and worse my feelings are entirely unoriginal in thinking it a little OTT and maybe just a touch too slow, but I really liked the music. So I put this up for little other reason than I like this man’s music and I’ve been listening more widely.

So I’ve been at the job a few days now. Term doesn’t begin until tomorrow but I’ve had my first Sunday in the parish church, I have been overcome with a great awful tide of humans all thrusting their hands into mine, a welter of names, jobs, occasional life-stories. It’s incredible, and I’m so bored, so very bored of telling people who I am, what I do where I’ve come from, why I’m here.

Not least because I don’t really have a clue. Well, most of it is fairly obvious at the level of smalltalk, but no I still have very little idea wha tI’m going to be doing this year. I’m tired of saying it, and I’m tired of the looks that range from puzzlement to suspicion from the staff who wonder what I’m being paid for. It’s nobody’s fault of course; my bosses have been away, I can’t get my email to work and it’s the weekend, what can any one man do when faced with such enemies?

But I must break the mould, I don’t remember anyone who I only know generic surface details about, I shall forthwith construct questions that will get a look at people’s souls, or else entertain me when I meet the students tomorrow. Perhaps rhetorical questions culled from the bible would be appropriate? ‘So do you think a leopard can change its spots?’, ‘Would you rather gain the whole world or keep your soul?’, ‘What is truth?’ ‘Would you spare Sodom for the sake of just ten righteous men?’, ‘Shall we go on sinning that grace may increase?’ It will be glorious. And yet, I need something, adults love telling people their name, I want to make an effort with the students. And it works. Although the gospel according to Simon Amstell has not quite made it into the next edition of the bible, I did try ‘Have you ever licked a battery?’ over coffee this morning and lo, I now remember the woman who has licked a battery. But not her name, but that was only, only because I didn’t hear it.

Upon joining the church community for Sunday worship I’m quickly remembering the challenge of living with community. One body of Christ, but as many minds as their are members, and all of them keen to share what they think the big priorities and concerns are. Community relations with the school? The deficit in the annual budget? The lack of a role for the MC? Maybe finding solutions for all of these to the satisfaction of all could be a task to stretch the minds of the next wave of new people I meet.

Still, whilst I in absolutely no way envisage my role as encompassing the grandeur of Preisner’s ‘Song for the unification of Europe’ above, it is a reminder at what is the source and the end of it, and that being that person who shows and lives the life of love, of the God who is love, in his called out community, is first and foremost my job. Not sure if that answer will go down any better with my educational colleagues mind, but it’s probably more challenging and encompassing than even the fullest of diaries and planners. 

Ok, perhaps maybe a bit of the pretension has evidently rubbed off with that last sentence.

Nevertheless, I guess I shall wait, and watch and listen like an oiled-up virgin (...) and maybe I will see what need appears, what can be done. And see if can be done with feeling, maybe even with love.