Finding our Middle – 40 Days with Anna

Day 3 – Friday after Ash Wednesday

To Read:

About ten-thirty that evening, whilst she was sitting between my knees having an earnest conversation with Maggie, her rag-doll, I said, ‘Come on,

Tich, it’s about time you , were in bed.  Where do you live?’

In a flat, matter-of-fact voice she exclaimed, ‘I don’t live nowhere.  I have runned away.’

‘What about your Mum and Dad?’ I asked.

She might have said the grass is green and the sky is blue.  What she did say was just as factual and effortless.  ‘Oh, she’s a cow and he’s a sod.  And I ain’t going to no bleeding cop shop.  I’m going to live with you.’

This was no request but an order.  What could you do?  I merely accepted the fact.  ‘Right, I agree.  You can come home with me and then we will have to see.’

One thing about Mum, she was never fussed about anything, she took everything in her stride.  Bossy, the cat I brought home one night, and Patch the dog, eighteen-year-old Carol, who stayed with us for two years, and Danny from Canada, who stayed about three years.  Some people collect stamps or beer-mats;  Mum collected waifs and strays, cats, dogs, frogs, people and, as she believed, a whole host of ‘little people’.  Had she been confronted that night with a lion she’d have made the same comment – ‘The poor thing.’  One look when she came through the door was enough.  ‘The poor thing,’ she cried, ‘what have they done to you?’  And then, as an afterthought, to me, ‘You look a right mess.  Wash your face.  With that, Mum flopped on to her knees and put her arms around Anna.

Being embraced by Mum was like tangling with a gorilla.  Mum had arms like other people have legs.  Mum had a unique anatomical structure which still puzzles me, for she had a fourteen-stone heart in a twelve-stone body.  Mum was a real lady and wherever she may be now she’ll still be a lady.

A few minutes of ‘ooh’s’ and ‘aah’s’, then things began to get organized.  Mum heaved herself upright, and with a passing shot to me to ‘get those wet clothes off the child’, flung open the kitchen door, yelling, ‘Stan, Carol, come here quick!’  Stan’s my younger brother by two years;  Carol was one of the waifs or strays that came and went.

The kitchen and the scullery suddenly erupted – a bath appeared, kettles of water on gas-rings, towels, soap;  the kitchen range was filled with coal;  and there was me trying to undo sundry hooks and eyes on Anna’s clothing.  And suddenly there she was, sitting cross-legged on the table as raw as the day she was born.  Stan said ‘Bastard!’  Carol said ‘Christ!’  Mum looked a bit grim.  For a moment that little kitchen blazed with hatred for someone;  that poor little body was bruised and sore.  The four older people in the kitchen were ready to bash someone and for a time we were lost in our own anger.  But Anna sat and grinned, a huge face-splitting grin.  Like some beautiful sprite she sat there, and I believe for the very first time in her life she was entirely and completely happy.

From the Scriptures:

[Zacchaeus] ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. ⁵ When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.’ ⁶ So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him.  (Luke 19v4-6)

To Reflect:

As we move towards retirement one of the things that we will miss most about living in a vicarage is that we have almost always had more bed space than Dotchins to fill them.

This has led to a career long habit of ‘entertaining angels unawares’, and across more than 40 years of ministry and 10 vicarages we have lost count of the number of people we have sheltered.  Some have been planned, friends needing a holiday, ordinands on study projects.  Some we have had to encourage; one we had to physically lever out of their flat from which they were due to be evicted the next day.  Occasionally there has been friction such as the time our eldest posted a note on his bedroom door proclaiming ‘Caution!  Bishops squatting!  Well if the bishops of Kigali and Butare from Rwanda arrive on your doorstep what are you supposed to do…?  And we even had an ‘Anna’.  Someone one of our guests found whilst they were out late at night and brought them back to the vicarage in the supreme confidence that there would be room for one more.

My beloved wife and long-suffering children have done a fair imitation of Fynn’s mum and extended family in gathering around those who need shelter and succour.  Meals have been shared, treasured pocket money has been given away, and endless amounts of laundry and clothing washed.  And, if we were offered the choice of doing the same again I suspect that all five of us would jump at the chance.

Anna, once the fear about spattered sausage had been replaced with giggles, worked out very quickly that in Fynn’s home there would be a welcome that she had not received from her own and as mum bathed her and tended her wounds she found weal for her woe.

If the parable of the Sheep and the Goats teaches us anything it is that we are called to help first and ask questions later.  Our lifelong challenge is that we worship a King who goes about in disguise.  We, like the goaty people in Matthew 25, cannot make any conditions or presumptions about the needy who come our way.  We are not allowed to judge motives and pick and choose those who come to us for help.  We are to treat everyone who is in need as if they are the Christ saying to us, ‘hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.’  No ifs, no ands, no buts.

Sometimes we have no resources ourselves, in which case we help the best we can by pointing people to those who may be able to help more fully.  But whatever we do we dare not slam the door on anyone for they may be the representative of the One who opens the Gate of Heaven for us.

Please Note:  These reflections are also published on my blog: suffolkvicarhomes.com on Bluesky as @suffolkvicar.bsky.social, and on my public Facebook page  Suffolk Vicar – Rev Andrew Dotchin.  If you would like them as a daily email please send a request to revdotchin@gmail.com

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