Reflection

There are still in our country, towns where churches and town halls are the tallest and grandest buildings, towns where people are connected through friendship and family.

 One such town is Todmorden. 

Yesterday the town stopped in memory of one of its own, a butcher. Wayne was part of a Tod family, working, since leaving the towns grammar school, in his dad's butcher shop on the main road. He was born and bred in the town, a cheerful, jokey bloke, a good mate, a good and loving husband and father. The sort of bloke everyone expects a yorkshire lad to be.

His death was sudden, a result of stupidly dangerous driving, his life ended on on a Sunday night after a dominoes game crossing the road outside the butchers shop he and his brother now ran.

Yesterday the town's parish church was full, and more, every seat taken, none even for the vicar and the other ministers, the churchyard was full, listening on the speakers, the road outside the church lined with mourners.

 Wayne was remembered by his wife, his friends, the vicar, and we had time to light candles, hug each other. Every movement of the coffin was greeted by applause. As it arrived in church, as it left. After the service as the hearse moved off to the crematorium in Burnley, the road was lined by the mourners who surged across the road blocking all the traffic applauding as the undertaker walked in front of the cortège.

 My neighbour asked "When will we see the like again". In my 30 years in Tod I have seen or heard tell of one like this funeral. I hope there is not another, this was a Tod bloke, tragically cut down in the middle of life, needlessly, the long time between his death and funeral due to the legal process. We don't want that again. It was all this that fed into the communal grief that was expressed yesterday.

 Todmorden is not a special town, it is just a town, with ordinary folk, mixed between locals and 'offcomdem'. It is a town where there is community, I am an offcomdem, married a local girl, I knew many at the service and knew many at the hustings last week which had more ofcomdems than the funeral, we are a community where all the churches are part of churches together (where else??) a place where people plant herbs and vegetables in help yourself planters, where a Muslim mayor was celebrated as a Tod lad, where there is a secular harvest festival but also where the churches are bound into the dna of the town, where children in mosque caps run around in the street coming back from the madrasah.

 Hmmm Maybe we are special after all. It is not perfect, there are the disaffected, the druggies, there are those who bitch about the Food bank (a joint enterprise between the church and other locals and ofcomdems), some who hold themselves to themselves but they are the minority.

 I hope that when in the fullness of time, I go to meet my maker, an old man that a few folk will come to say goodbye but that they will say that was a lovely service and he was a decent bloke, and Tod will carry on!

Good Friday 2015

I have returned to this abandoned blog after 3 years, and have decided on a different approach, more words - yes exciting I know!
Good Friday 2015 in our Town. The churches in our town have for many years met together at the catholic church and walked down the road, past the market and to the Peace garden by the Town hall behind the cross. This was different in that it was raining – not hard, but slowly, damply, wettingly. It was my task to ensure the mobile PA was ready at the peace garden.
We started at St Joe's , the statue of Christ in their Apse had changed – no longer Christ in glory but now a crucifix, it was appropriate for the day really, a model, an image but one which with imagination took you back there.
We processed out in the last hymn and out onto the main road – the police now advise us to walk on the pavement, I slipped away and walked quickly to the garden to set up the PA, greeting friends in the Community Brass Band who play every year accompanying the hymns.
The first reading was John's account, it always strikes me how simply the gospels, state the fact. “They crucified him” , so spare , so unemotional the words to describe the horror of that barbaric act. They talk about everything else that happens around that perhaps they could bear to dwell on what happened.
The rain continued to fall, our hymn sheets became softer, but we sang well and the band played strongly, the prayer this year were more High Anglican than before, but that is part of the celebration of our Christian life together.
On this occasion, all the churches in our town meet together and worship, all the churches catholic, baptist, C of E, Methodist, the Fellowship all. That is part of what makes this town a good place to be.
On Sunday we will be all in own separate buildings but we will together and in our many differently similar ways celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. After when it all said and done, that is the hope for our world.