Fr Ben Garren

Dear Siblings in Christ,

Herefordshire in the west of England is lovely this time of year as the summer heat dissipates and the bucolic vistas begin to transform towards the harvest. It is a good day to sit and slowly enjoy a cup of tea.

We go back just a few decades and one would find people pleasantly taking half an hour or so enjoying a pipe. For those of us fond of the hobbits in Tolkien this is the very type of pleasant setting he was describing as he wrote about the Shire and Hobbiton. As we roll back the decades and centuries we have a situation nearer and nearer to what that famous author romanticized as an ideal society.

For our purposes we are going to trace our way back to this day in 1678, to a few chairs set outside a municipal building where an eighty-year-old priest and the local deputy have pipes coming to their final billows and the last cups from the pot about halfway finished. The priest has been faithfully serving his flock in the area for fifty years. There might be something a bit stronger than tea poured into this last cup between colleagues and friends. This is a leave-taking pipe and the last cup to be shared between them. The priest is departing.

I want to hope there was some sense of normality, some ability for the priest to look out on that town, down over the fields beginning to be heavy with the harvest, and for it to be the pleasant life of shire living for just a moment or so. A moment to relish everything we romanticize about country life, being a country parson, and an idle moment for a sharing fellowship and a bit of pastoral care over a cup of tea. I wonder if, with everything about to happen, the priest had some last pastoral advice over the little things to provide the sheriff.

The cups were drained, the last bit of fire burned out of the pipes, and the two got up. The sheriff and the priest walked from the goal to the gallows. The hangman’s head hung low as they approached. It is said the priest looked at the man, whom he had probably known from birth, and encouraged him to do his job and do it well.

The priest had known the potential price of his ministry when he came from France to England fifty years ago to run a covert illegal catholic parish under the rule of the English Monarchs and their Church of England. Fr. John Kemble, catholic priest, last of the Martyrs of England and Wales, absolved the hangman for his actions and accepted his death.

In Herefordshire then started the tradition of the Kemble Cup and the Kemble Pipe at any major leave-taking. A moment to reflect on all the good, all the peaceful, all the normal joys of friendship. This day, to honor Kemble, take the time with a cup of tea, or what you may like, to enjoy the little things about our lives we cherish, but rarely see the beauty of, until we must part and pray for an end to all forms of persecution that unjustly cause such partings.

Pax,

—Ben