A loss and a gain on Christmas Eve

This story relates to Christmas Eve 2017. It is indelible in my memory. My brother had died late afternoon. My sister in law and I eventually returned to her/their home early evening.

We decided at the last minute to join the late Christmas Eve service at around 11 pm. We arrived at the small, old, village church (Stoke Abbott, Dorset) as the doors were closing.

Approaching the church was breathtaking. It is on a little bluff and the windows blazed with light against the darkness both of the surroundings and at that time in my heart. Inside, the church absolutely shone with the light of hundreds of candles.

My sister in law whispered to a member of the clergy at the door, that her husband had died earlier, and the doors closed behind us.

We sat in numbness but enveloped by candlelight and the warmth of all those local people, of whom I knew nobody and my sister in law slightly knew just a few.

The service, the singing, the tradition and the solid beauty of the church interior were reassuring, calming and restoring, even though I am not a regular churchgoer.

At the end, despite not a word visibly exchanged anywhere on the subject, the vicar quietly offered words of comfort as we departed.

This comfort and sustenance must be repeated thousands of times over thousands of locations, hundreds of years, and with thousands of people, but will largely go unrecorded.

This is just one glimpse of the huge worth of our parish churches that is totally negated online. It’s value can’t be quantified, priced, or accounted for yet this is what a parish church is about. Humanity.

Technology or a remote ‘Hub’ cannot ever replicate that warm, often invisible but strongly felt, quality of humanity found at its best or worst but played out and relied upon over centuries in our community focus, the parish church.