ALL HALLOWS, SOULS, SAINTS, BORIS AND HIS SEAL PUP EYES
He looked so woeful and ashamed with his drooping, doleful eyes last night – peering into a future world he didn’t understand, and never has done. But how did I come up with
the metaphor of the seal pup eyes? On the first day of every month Deirdre reverently and ritualistically turns over our Countryfile Calendar and for November we have a baby seal, half hidden behind a rock, looking out fearfully and unable to face a dark and bewildering world. It seems an appropriate image for this November. I urge everyone to buy their Countryfile calendars so we can see what 2021 holds for us.
This afternoon we walked along the Tors, with the wind squalling around us and sunshine and drizzle vying for precedence. In the valleys the damp grey clouds were swarming below us and then we came up through a stile and beheld the most perfect rainbow gathering the whole of Crich into its arch. You could hear the coins clinking in Dowie Way and Culland View where all the rich leprechauns live, collecting up their pots of gold. In church this morning, All Saints Day, we thought about a community of saints and here was Crich haloed and crowned in a rainbow. This as we enter another period when we need to be kind and look after each other and when our businesses, organisations, neighbours and ourselves will be called to sainthood. For a while we admired the rainbow as it stood astride the village with all its symbolism of hope and promise, but then I trod in a very succulent cow pat so it would be better not to extend the symbolism too far and rein in my semiotic extravagances. Anyway, I assured Deirdre, the shoes would wipe clean on the bedroom carpet.
I started my original lockdown blog last March issuing blessings on so many local people who quite unknowingly and routinely brought pleasure and support to our community. So here we are again thinking about those little acts and moments of saintliness that carry us through. Last time we ‘vulnerable and at risk’ oldies were encouraged to be passive recipients of the goodness of others. I’m glad there has been less emphasis on that this time – it frees us to have the odd saintly moment too, masked, sanitized and distanced of course.
Gerard Manley Hopkins dedicated a sonnet to St.Alphonses Rodriguez who achieved sainthood simply for being a door-keeper. I looked him up just now and would you believe it – his saint’s day was yesterday, October 31st. He seems to have been a very ordinary, unambitious, uneducated bloke and on admitting him to the Jesuits he was told he couldn’t become a brother or a priest, but he could become a saint – and he did, just by caring for everyone who came to the door.