Here we go...

A little over six months ago, I wrote the following:

I've picked up some seriously good, incrediby pastoral flyers in my time backpacking around in these countries. Some of them were nothing short of life-changing, the work of local priests explaining in 15 lines that God loves you and that you're not "going to hell", how to make a confession, how to pray for someone who is sick, how to pray when you're not even sure that there is a God.

So I wonder if one of my next endeavours will be to retrieve some of them, translate them into English, get them printed on some gritty A4 paper, and see if the parish council wants to let me put them on a small wooden table near the entrance.

And then, a few weeks ago, while I was attending a playgroup at the RC church and had just asked what bits of "volunteering" needed to be done around the place, I was asked to do just that. I.e. to write booklets about Baptism, Confirmation and the other sacraments.

I've had a ball writing these in the most luminous, liberal way I thought I could get away with. They've been used with parents and even with angsty teenagers and went down really well.

If anything though, I thought this task was too easy. For, of course, my stated ambition is to sort out the global economic and cultural mess and to make some whopper difference. Everything else feels a bit cosmetic and ritualistic. I keep dismissing it as a displacement activity. Still, it was nice to flex those muscles again.