Fr. Yenda's Monthly Letters 2010

January 2010

I can remember when I worked in a supermarket that there was a new manager in the store; he had to spend some time on all the different departments as that was how it worked, and as I was usually on the tills, I was most concerned if he were sent to work there.

All the staff on the shop floor were interested to know what this new manager would be like – would he be ok? Would he treat the shop floor staff with kindness and at least respect? We needed to find out a bit about him.

A day or so later, the shop steward came into the staff canteen and sat down with her coffee, cigarette and newspaper (you will realise how long ago this was when you realise it has been some years since people could smoke in staff canteens!)

“Well,” she began

“ we’ve just found out he’s an educated idiot!” we all gathered round, pulled more chairs up to the little round table, and looked eagerly as we drank our coffees!

“we’ve just found out that he has got a degree in Marine Biology… I wouldn’t mind, but here, we haven’t even got a fish department!!”

There is something about being educated which at times can be of use – after all no one wants their children taught by a teacher who can’t do the subjects themselves! No one wants to be represented by a solicitor who hasn’t got the necessary training; but sometimes the insistence on qualifications goes just that little bit too far.

Towards the end of last year I heard the most ridiculous stipulation come from the commons; that all nurses should be enforced to have a degree education.

I had been under the misapprehension that there was a shortage of nurses, and hence we needed to encourage more, rather than deterring many good nurses.

It has to be said that nursing is a job that very few of us could do – I know I couldn’t – and I have such admiration for the men and women who devote their lives to caring for people. And that is the crux of this, they are people who care and the essential thing for nurses is that they are able to relate to people, go out of their way for people, and be the kind of people that patients can have confidence in. Yes, of course they have to be educated to a certain level – after al they have to administer medicine. But if they have to be educated to a degree level, how is that going to instill the essential characteristics of caring and personability? I am not sure that it will.

If it means that genuine caring people who would make good nurses are going to be prevented from joining the profession because they don’t have the academic ability to do a degree, then the country will very soon see a rapid shortage in the number of nurses we have – and actually in the quality of the ones we do have! The brightest people aren’t always the ones with the greatest personal talents.

There are many people who do jobs which are so essential to us, and what is more, they do them with a heartfelt concern for those they interact with – and that is so important.

As we enter a new year, I wanted to think about those men and women whose contributions to our lives and the lives around us are so vital. Those people who put other people’s lives and wellbeing before their own. People who work in hospitals, people who work in the armed forces. People who do jobs that most of us could never do.

As we begin 2010, let’s keep these valuable people in our society at the heart of our prayers, as we give thanks to God for them, and all that they do.

I wish you all a very happy New Year – and as always it remains my very great joy and immense privilege to serve as your parish priest

With all good wishes
Fr Yenda

February 2010

My dear people of S Mary’s.

Last month I had the great joy of a visit to Berlin. It is a city I have for a long time wanted to visit, with its chequered history, and its culture, and of course its architecture – I have never really understood why I have waited so long to go and see it.

So, with the aid of the net, and cheap flights by Easyjet, and a very cheap hotel, off I went. I did not, however, expect to end up in one of the places that I did; I fell over on the snow and ended up in A and E in Berlin. Not quite what I had expected – but to cut a long story short (the first time ever a Vicar will do you that kindness!) nothing was broken, and after a day on crutches, I progressed to one crutch and decided to carry on touring round.

The first tour I made was around the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. People so very often say to me ‘I could never go and look around somewhere like that – it must be horrid and depressing; how can you go to such a place?’

Well I have to say that it is the 3rd concentration camp I have been around, and this time the tour guide was the most informative I have encountered anywhere. It was freezing cold – thick snow – and to add to this I was hobbling around behind everyone else only just managing to keep up – and sometimes not quite managing it! But that gave me a very different perspective to what I might have had if I had gone on a lovely spring day, with sun in the sky and at full usual speed!

Looking around Sachsenhausen I was aware that for those people who had been imprisoned there any cold would have made their lives dreadful given the thin clothing they were wearing, and any injury would in many cases be the beginning of the end. As we were shown the more unbelievable aspects of concentration camp suffering, I was aware also of how privileged our group were to see this dreadful place having not had to see it in full operation.

The next day I went on a tour entitled ‘Red Berlin’ which took us around parts of the former East Berlin, showed us parts of the Berlin Wall which were still standing, and again an informative guide gave us some of the history and information about the Communist times in the city. Seeing the wall itself, and seeing where cars can now pass and people can now walk over where the wall once stood is incredibly moving, and some of the stories that people can recount is almost unbelievable. How a city was divided in that way, and people locked behind a wall never able to leave just sounds now like something out of a novel or a horror movie – yet it did happen.

One of the most interesting things was that the U-Bahn – or the metro – passes from the West to the West but goes through the East – for the years when the wall was up, those stations in the East of the city were simply ghost stations, where the train would not be able to stop – with a security guard there to make sure that no one tried to board a train from the East to the West. The idea becomes even more unbelievable, because at the opening of the station thee would be 3 solid at either end, so no one could get there – and also the guard himself would be locked in his little booth, so that there was no chance of him escaping either!

Yet what really brought home to me the actual suffering for the people was a taxi driver I was chatting to (who fortunately spoke English) who was telling me that he grew up in West Berlin, but his mother’s sister lived on the East. In all the years that he was growing up, he and his mother went only twice over to the East – just for a day each time – to see his aunt. His mother, in short, might just have well been living at the other side of the world, for all that she was able to see her sister, but her sister was simply a few streets away yet they couldn’t visit each other. I found this incredibly humbling to listen to.

As we begin the season of Lent with Ash Wednesday, I am aware that Lent is the sombre preparation for Passiontide – the time of Our Lord’s greatest suffering, which we have to live through before we get to Easter.

Thinking about the plight of the people who suffered in the concentration camps, and those who were divided from their families, and who were unable to enjoy the freedom which all mankind should be entitled to gives us the opportunity to see great suffering and to understand during Lent, how we can identify more closely with Our Lord’s suffering on the Cross.

As always it remains my tremendous privilege and immense joy to serve as your parish priest,

All good wishes,
Fr Yenda

March 2010

My dear people of S Mary’s.

Well we are right in the heart of Lent now, and I was thinking about the idea of Lenten sacrifies, and giving things up and even taking extra things on. Funnily enough I remember at theological college one year, one student (not me, I hasten to add) decided to over-do it over Lent.

It was a rare thing in the college to have vegetarian students…I remember about only one or two, and their food wasn’t exactly interesting! It was the case, however, that if you were a meat eater, you were not allowed to pick and choose that you might on some occasion prefer a vegetarian option. So on the days that liver was served (yuk!) I merely had to make do with onions, gravy and mash!

Anyway, one student was adamant that during Lent that year he was going to go vegetarian…not so much as a rind of bacon would cross his lips. Fair enough, but at that time the college was adamant that it would not permit a student to change his diet or get any kind of preferential treatment (this, I hasten to add was not in the 1920s, this around 1998!!)

After a few weeks, the lad was not as well has he might have been, and I remember one evening he knocked my door in college, and said he didn’t feel at all well – that I could see with the evidence of my own eyes, given the state of him. I asked the acting principal to look at him, and he telephoned the doctor. What happened next was perhaps a bit dramatic, but also went down in college history.

Up the fire escape came a team of ambulance men, and duly carted the lad off to the local hospital; seated and carried on what looked very much like an NHS equivalent of a sedan chair.

A short time later – an hour or two – he returned in much better condition than he had been when he left – he was perhaps a bit embarrassed about the drama of having had to be lifted down the fire escape, but probably not as embarrassed as he was at the amusement amidst the rest of us students!

But there is an important thing here with Lent, and it pertains really to all of us regardless of what we give up. And that is to be sensible. Because the purpose of Lent is not to make ourselves ill, or to make ourselves so miserable that no one wants us near them – it is simply that we have an opportunity to grow closer to God through some kind of personal sacrifice, or some kind of effort.

Doing a good turn for a neighbour, attempting to leave out the sugar in tea, may not sound like massive things, but if they are done with a good heart, and in the knowledge that we do them for God and neighbour, then that is every bit as good – if not better – than making ourselves ill by trying to do too much!

As always it is my very great joy and privilege to serve as your parish priest.

With all good wishes
Fr Yenda.