I was rather slow getting started this morning, as I needed to made a bereavement call and arrange a visit, but made it to St John's for the Eucharist just in time. The visit will be tomorrow morning in Llandough.
When I got back from church, I decided it was time to pay my contribution to Parish funds, and went on line to our bank account. I was rather annoyed to find that I can't find a way to produce a record of all my previous payments, to figure out how much I should be paying, and had to hunt through the paper version to find the previous entry, among hundreds of transactions great and small.
The bank keeps nagging me about going paperless. If only clever people on big IT salaries realised it's easier to scan a sheet of paper in hand than scrolling a screen when identifying a single item with no search facility in this section of their website, and do something about it, maybe I could be persuaded to comply.
It took me a while to check my figures and work out how much I should pay. I tend to do this only two or three times a year, rather than use a simple standing order. This allows me to adjust the amount we give to take into account rising running, and the need to contribute for special purposes. So far, I'm in a position to give more as I earn extra from locum duties. I'm happy that's how it is for the time being.
We had a tofu stir fry with rice for lunch, one of Clare's specialities which I helped her prepare. She went to the CRI for an x-ray after lunch. I followed her into town, to bank a cheque, and we met in John Lewis' for a drink before returning together on the 61 bus. I was going to buy a discounted Lumix GX80 camera, but when I enquired about it, found that the packaging and accessories were no available, so the displayed item could not be sold to me.
The same thing happened with another discounted Lumix camera several months ago. Why on earth display the camera when no stocks are left, no more are expected to arrive in-store and the display camera is deemed unsaleable? Something's wrong here. It's bad enough that the sales person knows nothing about cameras and tries to sell you one that's totally different from the one you've stated that you want. No wonder 'The Partnership' doesn't do as well as it used to when service standards are lowered.
After supper I made a few phone calls to contact bereaved families. Mother Frances asked me to cover yet another funeral this afternoon so I'm preparing one a week in the next three weeks. That's eight altogether since returning from Spain. A consequence of full time clergy shortage. My friend Rufus is far sighted in retiring early from his part time job to develop a specialist pastoral ministry to bereaved families outside the church in areas barely covered by understaffed Parish clergy with many other duties to cover. If only it were possible to establish a guild of ministers, lay and retired clergy which trained to the same standards, and were willing to be deployed over a wide area, to wherever there was a need, and funeral directors find local clergy are not available. It would be necessary to have a protocol so that working clergy and guild members treat each other as partners and share information so neither rivalry nor resentment can arise.
It's a problem that established churches often see themselves as proprietors of the realm of pastoral care, and fail to acknowledge the depths of the gulf between themselves and grass roots secular community. In his early days as Pontiff I recall Pope Francis expressing fraternal warmth towards religious leaders of the Anglican, Protestant and Pentecostal communities in Latin America, valuing their missionary enterprise and seeing them as 'Partners in the Gospel'. Many would agree with him, but there are still some people in leadership, quietly dissenting and disregarding changes that have taken place in the past half century.
News of the return of the Pacific 'el nino' ocean current phenomenon threatens to exacerbate the impact of global warming in the next couple of years. The rate at which polar ice caps are melting increases faster than predicted, suggesting we are now past the feared tipping point after which damage to environment and species loss is irretrievable. Yet another case of people in power dissenting and disregarding well documented changes and insisting on interpreting them differently (for their own economic benefit). The ancient biblical truth that unless we repent of selfishness and greed we'll be punished and destroyed is as relevant today as it was two and a half millennia ago. For half my life I have been preaching about this possibility to deaf ears, sad to say.
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