At GraceWorks, we read books, articles, and resources that benefit pastors in their preaching and ministry. Niall Williams’s book Time of the Child is about how one fictional village in Ireland processes grief, loss, and change. The story is set during the season of Advent and follows a Catholic parish through the routine joys and trauma of life. A widower misses an opportunity to express his affection. A priest slowly declines in his mental faculties, and the parishioners cover for him to keep his dignity and office. A father discourages his daughter from dating a man. A son dies tragically on the day electricity arrives in the village.
Here’s one quote that describes the Christian sense of vocation describing the village nurse Ronnie:
Because she was the one who opened the door to patients in the morning, the one who wrote their names in the book, helped those who needed help getting to chairs in the waiting room, help rising from them and getting down the creaking hall into the riverward room of the surgery, she shared the perspective of those statues prayed to across the penny candles: she knew the parish through its illnesses. She was also the only person in the parish you could tell your complaint and not hear that she had that too or was suffering from worse. Like many roles in life, Ronnie had fallen into it, and then come to see it as inevitable. She neither resisted nor regretted it. For the role met her need to feel useful, service and community both still retaining their sense of agency, and it answered the prompting that there was something larger than yourself. What that was she could not have said, but as her sisters left and she stayed, she had come to think of Faha first as a place as good as any other, and then better because here the people were, in a phrase she had read in a Russian novel, great-souled.