Thursday 12 June 2025
St Thomas’s Church. Canterbury
I got up early, threw on some clothes, got into the car, and drove to Canterbury for the early service.
It was a beautiful morning. It was sunny enough for sunglasses and warm enough to skip the jacket. The city was quiet. There were a few people about. The type of folks who have jobs that start earlier than everyone else’s jobs. The people who unlock things, or clean things, or prepare things for others.
It was a lovely mass, with a reading from Corinthians about letting light shine out of darkness, read beautifully by a lady with white hair, who sat attentively in the front row.
I get a different feeling at St Thomas’s and Father A’s services show all the beauty of a priest who was ordained 50 years ago. Not better than my local church, but perhaps softer. Like the foot of St Peter’s statue in St Peter’s Basilica, polished by the reverent rubbing of passing pilgrims.
I was reminded as I stepped back out into the sun, of an entry in Henri Nouwen’s The Genesee Diary, which I’m reading at the moment, about the seven months he spent in a Trappist Monastery.
In it, Nouwen himself quotes a book, from Thomas Merton’s Conjecture of a Guilty Bystander. He mentions how on a trip to Louisville, the local town closest to Gethsemani, Merton became aware of being overwhelmed with love for everyone he saw.
“I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God himself became incarnate… There is no way of telling people that they are walking around shining like the sun.”
Nouwen echoes this statement, admitting to the same feeling when he leaves Genesee for his local town, Rochester.
“When I walked into a flower shop to buy some white and yellow chrysanthemums for friends in town I felt a deep love for the florist who, with a twinkle in his eye, told me that chrysanthemums were “year-round flowers”, not bound to the seasons. I felt open, free, and relaxed and really enjoyed the little conversation we had on flowers, presidents, and honesty in politics… It is all a gift, it is all grace.”
I felt a little of this as I said goodbye to some of the dozen or so people at the Mass. And as I saw people in my local town, walking along the King’s Mile, to start their day of work. The joy of having been to Mass and seeing that light reflected in others.