Astray 14

I meet Rob for a drink. I’ve known him since university, when we both read the same books and watched the same films and mistook that for a life. He works for a housing charity now and attends council meetings, tenants’ meetings, food-bank meetings in rooms where people try to stop something worse happening.

He asks about work and the inheritance straight out. I tell him a little.

So do something, he says, now you’ve got time. Going to church won’t change anything.

I don’t know about that, I say.

He says they need drivers on Tuesdays. Someone to take food boxes out to people who can’t get to the centre. Nothing dramatic. Mostly tins, nappies, toilet roll.

I don’t know if I’m the right kind of person for that, I say.

He looks at me. What kind of person do you have to be to carry a box?

Of course, I say. Only it might feel like I was acting.

You are acting, he says. Everyone is. We do it anyway. It’s not like anyone’s grading us.

*

He’s not wrong. Even in my room alone it can feel as if I’m acting, before imagined witnesses. These words too, changed and changed again, can seem like the words of others. Rob might say there’s no thinking your way out: just choose an act.

*

I start volunteering on Tuesdays. I get three addresses and a clipboard. They’re working on an app, the man says. I carry the boxes from the storeroom to the car and from the car to the doors. I hand them over, say hello and go home. No opening, no draught of joy. The real work seems to be with the people who set it up and run it, who know people’s names and needs. I don’t feel a charitable glow. They don’t seem to either.

*

There must be acting in church too. I imagine some of the others also confess sins they half intend to keep committing. We say words older and better than we are before we feel them. We ask for mercy while keeping a way out. We don’t know yet what it will be like to be changed into our true selves, but maybe the old forms can hold us long enough for something true to get under us. Dear God, closer to us than we are to ourselves, who made and fashioned us, hear our prayers and act in us.