Scottish Catholic Observer

Although warmer weather has returned to the Bow, there are vestigial traces of our battle with ‘The Beast’ dotted about the place, in the form of piles of dirty, unmelted snow. As I caught up with my visits to the housebound of the parish, delayed a week by our Siberian visitor, I was gently reminded that my couple of days of being stuck in the house is a daily fact of life for some of my parishioners.

Although I find our term ‘housebound’ to be a little kinder sounding than the North American ‘shut-ins,’ the latter term does capture the pretty grim reality of being a prisoner in your own home.

While they were grateful to see me, most had already been visited, even at the height of the storm, by nurses and home-helps.

Disregarding the warnings, these brave souls had walked to work to ensure that vital services could be maintained. As last week’s Observer coverage showed us, this was a time when people pulled together as ­communities and actually showed us what compassion in action looked like.

One of my ports of call during the thaw was to celebrate Mass in St Margaret’s Court, a supported living complex just round the corner from our Church of Scotland neighbours.

Given the number of Catholic residents, it should really be called ‘St Joseph’s Annexe.’ It’s this density of Catholics which makes the weekly distribution of Holy Communion and (roughly) monthly celebration of Mass a viable option.

I always get a great welcome from the residents but I reckon if my PA (pastoral assistant) Margaret were in a position to say Mass for them they would be just as pleased. For them, she is the regular face of the Church. She’s the one who keeps me informed of who’s well and who’s not, who might benefit from an individual visit or who is going into hospital.

Something which strikes me about the celebration of Mass in St Margaret’s is the way in which the new and the older translations of the Roman Missal tend to rub up against each other. When visiting ­someone who has been housebound for a number of years, it’s to be expected that they instinctively make the responses which were in use when they were still regularly attending Mass. As a priest, you go along with that.

Our group Masses in St Margaret’s, however, bring together those who have been unable to get to Church for some time together with those who may have been to Mass just the Sunday before. At various junctures, therefore, you get two different versions of the same response being given. And, as they’re all very good Catholics, they like to make these responses as loudly as they can, especially to overcompensate for those who appear to be ‘getting it wrong.’ This can, at times, create the impression that the decibel-busting actor Brian Blessed has slipped in for this ‘quiet’ wee Mass.

I’m tempted to just have the Mass in Latin, as I’m pretty sure most would be of an age to offer the responses in the language in which they were first exposed to the sacred mysteries. Then it wouldn’t matter how lustily the responses were being made, as they would all be singing (or speaking) from the same Missal.

Even as I type this, I can envisage Margaret switching on the laminator to make some Mass response cards for the good folk up the road. Where was the Catholic Church before laminators?

The word Catholic means ‘universal,’ and I never fail to be touched by the Catholicity of the Church, not to mention the far-spreading roots of the Green Oak Tree. Our unofficial sister parish of St Joseph’s in Bracken Ridge, Melbourne, is regularly in touch.

The link goes beyond a shared patron saint to the fact that Netta, their social media person, originally hails from the Venice of the Clyde—although she went Down Under many years ago. The distance in years and miles notwithstanding, Netta has not lost her ‘guid Scots tongue.’

When she comes on the phone, you could swear that she had just popped round the corner for milk rather than to the other side of the planet, decades back.

Her last phone call was to wish us well in the face of the approaching winter storm. I blithely assured her that we had seen nary a flake and it probably wouldn’t trouble us much this far west. All I can say is that the weather forecast in Melbourne must have more accurate than the one I had been looking at. A day or so later and I was eating humble pie (along with everything else in the house).

She has just tweeted to ask how we are marking St Joseph’s Day, March 19, and to invite us (or me, at any rate) to their parish ‘Sausage Sizzle.’ I have never been to a proper Aussie barbie before—indeed, our own barbecue set looks as though it was last used by the good Lord himself (John 21:9)—so the prospect of throwing some shrimps or a tinny on the barbie would be most welcome.

Unfortunately, we have already made arrangements to celebrate St Joseph’s Day with the bishop, so I’ll have to pass this time. I do hope Netta isn’t merely trying to point out that the weather in Melbourne should be around 25C on that day as opposed to our projected 5C. That would be just mean of her.

I also recently received a lovely letter from an 84-year-old gentleman ‘down south’ who had come across a slimmed down version of a previous column which had appeared in The Catholic Herald.

Tony lived in Greenock from 1940 to 1943, not so much escaping the London Blitz, as to be close to his father, whose destroyer, when not accompanying convoys to and from Scapa Flow, was often docked at the Tail of the Bank. I find it both remarkable, as well as touching, that such random connections are made by way of a frequently silly column such as this.

I suppose it’s akin to what is frequently said about homilies. The preacher might ascend the pulpit in fear and trembling and step back down again wondering if it was worth the effort, when someone comes forward to say how much those words meant to them. So long as we try to be agents of the Spirit, who knows what good our own faltering speech may do for someone who is earnestly seeking a word of comfort or the prompt they need to take action?

Words can be very subjective things, and people are wont to take different things from them: just as those who heard the Father’s voice in this Sunday’s Gospel attributed it to different causes or sources.

I guess it’s true that what the world regards as ‘random,’ Christians should merely consider ‘pleasantly surprising.’ What God’s providence arranges is both necessary and touches the heart, whether that be a gentle caress or spiritual CPR.

Although we put our Faith in the accuracy of the words and deeds recorded in the Gospel, I have been having a bit of difficulty with the parish answering machine. Back in the day, when we had live-in housekeepers and clergy aplenty, the telephone was almost always answered by another human being. Nowadays, however, priests rely on their answering machines to be there when they can’t.

Unfortunately, the digital quality of our machine has become a little hit and miss—and it may not be helped by the quality of the caller’s phone either—with the result that I am routinely losing a digit or two from mobile numbers when people leave a voicemail.

This leaves me having to play a message a dozen or so times, trying to guess what the fuzzy number(s) might be. Then I have a go at dialling those numbers, some of which go dead straight away because they don’t exist, or else I get an angry response from someone wanting to know why ‘the Hell’ (other expletives are available) they are being cold-called by the Catholic Church.

I need to get a better answering machine, or at last leave a new message asking callers to declaim their numbers in the manner of Brian Blessed (or a resident of St Margaret’s Court).