an auspicious encounter

A strangely auspicious event this (Sunday) afternoon : two days after being elected to Oxford City Council as a Green Party member, my wife Karen and I were cycling back from our county councillor's birthday party in Iffley along the Isis towpath. We got separated when I stopped to take a picture for two foreign visitors and after finding each other again ended up taking an unintended route back across the grassy Port Meadow.

As we approached the Trap Grounds allotments we saw a group of twenty or so parishioners and choirboys from St Margarets Church processing in their cassocks and choir vestments behind a large silver crucifix, swinging incense as they went. It was like something out of Monty Python's 'Holy Grail'.

We stayed with them as they blessed the vegetable allotments and prayed for their fruitfulness, then the meadow and river, then back over to the canal, blessing the railway en route to the children's playground next door to the school where Karen teaches. It was very moving to hear the famous Gospel passage "Jesus said . . let the little children come to me" in the context of a playground, and to see the swings and climbing frames censed.

Somehow everything about it reflected the spiritual heart of the Green vision; the simple liturgy and ritual with its completely serious intent (in years gone by, lives depended on those prayers being answered) was the 'carrier' for a light-hearted and inclusive social occasion that gathered the curious as it went. The bizarre nature of the encounter and the amazing coincidence of the timing seemed to augur well for the service that lies ahead of me.