Il faut cultiver notre jardin

 

 

Somewhat guiltily I have to admit that due to various commitments in the parish (four and a half parishes in fact) I had to miss the Glastonbury Pilgrimage this year. Bishop Edwin has an illuminating post about the pilgrimage here, at the same time as gauging the current (disappointingly very mixed) response to the offer of the Ordinariates. I've only one comment to make on that - don't despair! The world we have known is falling apart - everything is now provisional. The liberals have been fond of tellling us rather smugly for years that we have to learn to live with provisionality. They can't now complain if that is precisely our attitude towards Anglicanism itself. And one provisional response could be this:  "we'll go when we are ready, and when we can take as many people with us as possible." To continue the shipwreck analogy of a recent post on the Anglo-Catholic blog, it may be necessary to stay in the water a little longer than one might wish in order to encourage others to get into the life-boats.
My advice to the establishment who, despite tongue-in-cheek assurances to the contrary, can't wait to be rid of us?  Live with it. A temporary loss of face and a bit of patience is cheaper than fighting a case for constructive dismissal, and very much cheaper than losing one (or fifty)

 

 

 

But for me it was been a weekend of gardens: an excellent  lunchtime parish barbecue in a very well tended cottage garden belonging to a former churchwarden, and a garden opening for parish funds in a  lovingly restored arts and crafts garden with spectacular views over the Usk valley towards the Black Mountains. And on the way back, by way of flying the flag, a visit to another open garden in my parishes - this time one exhaustively written about in the national press.
Gardens by their very nature are provisional, ephemeral almost. They change from season to season and from year to year, they fall into decay and are restored. Sometimes they disappear altogether and are reclaimed by the wildness of the surrounding woodland, and spectacular new gardens are made in what was previously a patch of wilderness. That's a strangely comforting thought.