I wrote a catch-up post Saturday, and here I am again today doing the same. Yesterday I ran a good couple of miles (by my standards), had my coffees, fruit, toast, and hurried off to church. After the service, I gave the third of my talks on the liturgy, how it unfolds (practically) and how and what it signifies, to a surprisingly large group (who also stayed longer than I usually hold them because my LLM colleague Linda assisted me in walking them through the prayers, ceremonial, ‘ideology’, and mechanics of the central acts of the eucharist. It went beautifully, and we garnered some recruits interested in serving the Mass, an interest for which I’ve been praying for much of my stint here at St Helen’s (TBTG!).
On my way home from church, my right foot began aching. Now, I don’t think I’ve told this story online before — it happened before I started blogging, that long ago — but I broke my foot about thirty years ago, in Princeton, where I was teaching at the Theological Seminary (a wave to anyone from those days who reads this). How it happened: We had a massive snowfall, such that everything in the town was cancelled. We were still moderately recently moved back north from North Carolina and Florida, so the boys had never been sledding (‘sledging’). The snowstorm provided a fantastic opportunity, since the seminary sits on the brow of a good hill that bottoms out onto a golf course — nearly perfect for sleds/sledges, and a foot and a half of pure, fresh snow on the slope.
So I took our (plastic, alas) sleds/sledges and the two boys (about eleven and nine years, I estimate) to the top of the hill. At the top, I pointed out a few scattered trees toward the bottom of the slope, and a tiny stream running along between the hill and the fairway. ‘See these trees?’ The boys nodded. ‘If you find yourself headed toward the stream, or one of the trees, don’t be worried; just roll off the sledge, easy peasy, and you’re in nice, fluffy snow. No collision, just more fun in the snow.’ Boys nodded enthusiastically; enough of the lecture, old man, let’s start sledding/sledging. ‘Just let me show you how this all works. I’ll take one run down the hill, and you can take it from there.’
You may know the Chorus’s monologue from Jean Anouilh’s version of Antigone. It begins, ‘The spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil of itself.… The rest is automatic. You don’t need to lift a finger. The machine is in perfect order; it has been oiled ever since time began, and it runs without friction.’ From the way I’ve narrated events thus far, you can surely predict what will happen when the spring is released.
I settled myself into the sled/sledge, a bit small for me but adequate to get me down the hill to show my sons how it works. I pushed off, and began an exhilarating race down the hill, probably imagining myself in a bobsled or luge. As I picked up speed and got near the bottom of the slope, the sled/sledge began drifting toward a solitary tree in the hillside. As I was about to execute an elegant turn and roll, my right foot sent an urgent signal to my brain: ‘Don’t bother with that — I’ve got this, I’ll take charge!’ And as I sat on the sled/sledge paralysed for an instant, my right foot stretched out and took the full impact of my collision with the tree.
There’s not much else to the story. I made my way back up the hill and packed my foot in snow while the boys took turns going up and down the hill. After a while, probably a short while, the anxious boys escorted their limping father back home. As I stripped off my snow-caked outerwear and explained to a skeptical Margaret, I involuntarily curled up and experienced a brief interval of shock. She got me to our comfortable couch, stretched me out, and tried to induce me to go to A&E. I resisted; the roads were totally closed, by the time we got there everything would have settled down, you can’t do much for feet except stay off them when they’re broken, and so on. A few days later, the roads were cleared and I could have gotten to A&E, but by then it didn’t seem so urgent. We borrowed a pair of crutches, I stayed off the foot for a couple of weeks, gradually began walking, gently, again.
That’s the foot that started hurting yesterday after my run, after church. Later in the afternoon, my foot didn’t feel so bad, Margaret and I made our way in to Oxford for another celebration of the 700th anniversary of Oriel College’s founding, this time at the University Church. The choir was superb, as always, and the Very Revd Christopher Jamison OSB, Abbot President of the English Benedictine Congregation, offered a gently powerful sermon (it should be posted here eventually; I also posted it). I dropped my Bod card/bus pass outside the University Church, but a kind PG student picked it up and dropped it at Oriel’s Lodge, whence I’ll retrieve it tomorrow.
Today has been much less eventful. I didn’t run, for an obvious reason. I made my way to Morning Prayer and wandered around Abingdon for a while, till my foot began hurting. I have some odds and ends to take care of (including marking), and that should be that.