TRUTH matters in my opinion. The details matter. I’ve always been like this.
This story happened when I was seven:
I was brought up in a village in East Anglia and we went to the parish church each Sunday. In those days churches were open all the time and nothing went missing.
I went alone through the graveyard when no one was about, I pushed open the heavy church door and went into the empty church. I was on a mission.
What had happened is that it was Easter time and I had made an Easter Garden that was on display in the church.
I loved flowers and flower arranging, so I had picked spring flowers and put them in little pots and arranged them around an empty tomb made of big stones with a flat one on top. I put moss around the three crosses on a raised hill on the other side of the table to the tomb. There were little paths made of gravel. Inside the empty tomb were the strips of white cloth symbolic of the Resurrection of Jesus.
I was quite proud of my Easter Garden and that I had been chosen to make it for the church. I was a very creative child unlike some others I could have named.
Then my younger sister had said it wasn’t fair and she had to be allowed to do something. So Mum had said she could put in the animals. Eleanor put in plastic cows, sheep and chickens from her farmyard set. I was not happy but tolerated it because Eleanor liked animals and I liked flowers, so that was fair.
Then when I had gone to church on Sunday with my parents for the Holy Communion Service, to my horror I found that some other children had put dinosaurs in my Easter Garden. There was a Tyrannosaurus Rex peering into the empty tomb. I was furious.
Mum said to me, try not to be cross, after all the Anglican Church is a broad church, so no one will mind. But I minded.
NB The image is of the Church of San Francisco, Castro, Chile. It is not related to the text of the post.
Merry and True 