Advancing with Plasticine

VIT is away on a retreat.  (In a few weeks I’m going on a retreat too. Except that the dynamo that is leading it for our company  says he does not “retreat” and so we are having a “Company Advance.”)

Anyway, VIT is on retreat, and so today the wonderful people from the spouses group laid on a bring and share lunch which was a relief on both the catering and childcare front.  This was no soggy quiche experience.  The stew and the puddings were fab.  Smallest VIT ate a full portion of both.     One marvellous person spent almost her whole lunchtime painting an inexhaustible line of small children, including smallest VKIT who now has a Liverpool logo on one hand and Toon Army stripes on the other.

Various absent spouses had communicated from the diocesan advance house is the wilds of the countryside. Some have texted, at least one has managed a Facebook status update. (I think he’s the one with the turbocharged telephone, since all the others claim the signal is awful.) There has evidently been some serious late night whisky drinking (I like to imagine them at 2 in the morning deciding to invade Scotland even though they claim to have been praying for each other) – and lots of intense stuff about their vocation and future plans.

It’s an odd business this vicar factory.  Church of England training uses the word “formation” a lot.  Are they are being “formed” like Plasticine into a C of E mould like the familiar character opposite?  I don’t think so, but there’s something a bit disturbing about the term.  Some of the VITs are single, some just married, others like us have been married for longer than most life sentences.  I’ve known my VIT for more than half my life.  It’s quite easy to slip into fearing that this formation process risks forming them into a shape you don’t know any more, and I think they fear this too at times.  Except that the end result is something they believe and feel called to in an inexplicable and inescapable fashion.  So this should actually help them become more perfectly formed.  Let’s hope Coverdale Hall takes care of them during the moulding and that they all end up with as much of a smile as Morph.