A letter from Bewcastle – August 2024

Dear Friends,

Young families are the heartbeat of our communities. Wherever there is a young family there is vibrancy of life – often noisy, hectic, untidy, but exuding energy and fun and exploration and mischief, pushing boundaries and causing trouble. And then there’s the children as well! There’s crying and screaming, laughing and shouting, eating and sleeping, playing and running and jumping and falling over and crying again. When you’ve been visited by a young family you feel like a whirlwind has passed through, and you’re ready for some peace and quiet once they leave! But for the parents it just never stops, and for mums especially, the energy and patience required is Herculean. They pour themselves out day by day looking after and running around for their children. They constantly need feeding or entertaining or sorting out or changing or washing or putting to bed. And when they’re older its school, then after-school clubs, reading with them, getting meals down them at break-neck speed, arguments over vegetables, bickering among siblings, getting homework done, taking them here, there, everywhere, it seems. Its constant and its exhausting. Sometimes its rewarding, sometimes exasperating, and sometimes you feel like you’ve reached the end of all you can give and you want to sit down and cry. And then you have to give some more. Being a parent is the hardest work that anyone can do.

But these families are an extraordinary gift to our communities. They wake us up, recall us to times we had long forgotten, bring freshness and colour and future and hope.

Our primary schools are the melting pot where all these families meet. They are the hubs around which family life revolves, where parents make new friends and children learn how to learn and grow. The friendships extend into networks of relationships and these networks are what makes a community. The schools operate as a kind of extended family, and the environment in each school is shaped distinctively by the character of its headteacher. The staff, too, work so hard to give each child an individual and enjoyable learning experience, encouraging, coaxing, stimulating; it’s a very long way from school as I remember it – ‘he could do better’!

These schools, then, form the backbone that sustains our communities. Without them families wouldn’t be able to live here and the community would fade. We have three of them in our benefice and we need each and every one of them. Each is unique: Fir Ends in Smithfield is the largest with around a hundred children; Shankhill serves the Stapleton parish and has around fifty children; Bewcastle is the smallest with around 20-25 children. Shankhill is the only church school, but I go into all three of them on a regular basis, usually fortnightly, to do assemblies or collective worship (in Shankhill). In this way, every child that grows up in the benefice will know their parish priest, hopefully as someone to whom they can relate, friendly and welcoming.

The pattern of what I do is always the same: we have an interactive time of talking about birds or the seasons, sing a song together, and then I tell a story. It’s the story they love every time. How do I know? Because there is absolute silence as I tell it. The concentration on the children’s faces, from the age of four up to eleven, is straining – their imaginations are alive with the moment! Sometimes it’s one of the great bible stories, like God creating Adam out of the mud by the great grey-green greasy Limpopo river, or Noah and the ark, Daniel and the lions, or Jonah and the fish; sometimes a story about our local northern saint, Cuthbert with the otters or the sea eagle; sometimes a Christian folk story, perhaps about a babushka; but most often its about Jesus and his disruptive antics and tales, always unexpected, frequently unsettling. And then I finish by inviting them to join me with a short prayer that includes the Lord’s Prayer, if they would like to. And mostly they do.

My hope is that these stories, songs and prayers will stay with the children as they grow up, nestling somewhere in their subconsciences, gently prodding them at unexpected moments towards the mystery of who they are and why they are here – a restless and intriguing memory of God. And that once they have grown through the turbulent adolescent years (during which I rarely see them), they will come out the other side and remember those mysteries, perhaps with renewed inquisitiveness, and find the face of familiarity and welcome from their earlier years waiting for them. And for you.

Your friend and priest,

Robert