Sometimes the best priest is one who comes with an off switch

DURING my rural stint in the Boland and Klein-Karoo, the Sunday morning services required frugal time management and the capacity to pace oneself.

I would leave St Joseph The Worker in Ashton after the 8am mass to attend to the worship needs of the parishioners at St Mildred’s in Montagu.

The service there started at 9.30am. During the winter months I was occasionally late as the Keisie River might overflow its banks in the Kloof between the two towns (St Mildred’s was so named, I’ve been told, after the wife of an officer stationed in the area during the Anglo- Boer War). The three-service schedule ended with the 11am mass at The Chapel of St James- the- Less at Rietvlei, 45 minutes east of Montagu on the road to Barrydale.

My priestly predecessors in the parish were friends of mine. I often drew comfort from reading the names of Chris Ahrends and Andrew Hunter in the service register, knowing that they too had laboured in this often lonely part of God’s vineyard.

We all had benefited, in our young and brave days, from the gentle counsel of the late Father John Titus. He had been principal of the church school at Rietvlei.

All of us would acknowledge that the people of Rietvlei held a special place in our hearts.

The ones who held the flame of the gospel aloft in the area, in ways that we urban wise-guys struggled with, were the likes of Oom Salmon and his nephew, Jan Weavers.

On a Sunday they would be seated with the other men and boys on one side of the church, the women folk and young girls on the other side.

A most happy-looking dog languished in the aisle in between: he would lay his head down in the pool of Karoo sunshine just as I began my sermon.

It was my sermon that preoccupied the mind of Oom Jan to the extent that he approached me about it. “Vader,” said Oom Jan after mass one Sunday, “Your sermon is too long.” His words hung awkwardly between us.I knew he was right.

I struggled to translate my homily from English to Afrikaans via my Cape Flats distance to the heights of the suiwer Boland taal.

But I also wanted to share, while getting lost in a valley of verbs and concepts, the ideas of theologians Karl Barth, Gustavo Gutierrez and others who enthralled my mind and spirit. In my response, I rallied my forces from the land of the insecure.

I reminded Oom Jan of how he visited his daughter in Montagu on Saturdays.

How he sat in front of the TV there and watched sport, then the news and, of course, an almost two-hour long movie.

We stood again in silence broken by Oom Jan, looking upon me as a source of perplexing, perpetual mystery, as he replied, “Yes, Vader, but one can always switch off the TV.”