Filigree of a petrified Westminster palm Charterhouse

le Chronicle I ALWAYS pick up my Catholic Herald after the Friday noon Mass, just inside our church door. Confidingly perhaps, but so far with impunity, the Catholic papers arc permanently accessible, outside the iron grille that now closes off the body of the church in extra-curricular hours; presumably those drop-in worshippers who had been walking off with anything from our clock to the candlesticks aren't great readers.
First and for fun, I usually turn to Charterhouse often before John Ryan, even before the editoriall What I like about Charterhouse is that, while I do enjoy him, I know perfectly well that at the same time he is quietly improving my mind. His is the column that cheers but seldom reprimands at least directly.
When the other week I read That Charterhouse had been to Westminster Abbey for his second visit to the Teilhard de Chardin exhibition, I thought that I had better go along for my first before it was too late. I'm grateful to him for the nudge.
Teilhard is no longer, I gather, under the Galilean cloud that so long obscured his name, and it was moving to see such honour done to his memory by his "separated bretheren." The setting was spectacular; I can't think where his own church could have matched it, in London at any rate.
Halfway round the periphery of the Abbey Chapter House the Teilhard exhibits were abruptly interrupted by a large mirror angled back against the wall. In it the fan-vaulting of the roof far above radiated in sculptured magnificence. On entry, focussing on the exhibits at ground level, one's eye was not at first to notice that the slender column in the centre soared up like a palm-tree petrified into a filigree of solid stone. THIS MNEMONIC function for which I am grateful to Charterhouse often reminds me of those excellent BBC radio institutions, "Thought For Today" and, on the World Service beloved of insomniacs, "Reflections". Their general aim is, one might say, to make the connections between "the real world" and "the other" though which is which I sometimes wonder from the subsequent news bulletins.
Like the various readings each day at Mass, the best of these brief programmes always relate to the events of the day, and make sense of them.
To me this immediacy is one of the great merits of the successive Gospel readings. They always have a punch-line that applies and helps here and now. Not long ago in St Mark's story of the deaf-and-dumb man, I was reminded of my Arabist days, when a knock on the office-door would evoke the reflex cry of "Iftah!" open up! Christ's virtually identical "Ephphatha!" came back to me
yet again when I heard that our own Prime Minister's summer holiday had been spared the threat to an equally precious faculty, thanks to a modern and technological equivalent of the Gospel Miracle.
Overseas aid to the kidnapped
ODDLY ENOUGH the surgical instrument involved turned out to be an old friend of mine, though still a relative surgical newcomer. In South America, quite some years ago, I had the privilege of presenting as a gift from our country to the capital's great Polyclinic a first specimen of that selfsame "cryoprobe" for the existence of which we can congratulate not just Mrs Thatcher.
Uruguay had the skills, but was already feeling the economic pinch. Her surgeons were old hands at the technique of spotwelding a detached retina back into place by heat. But even a microscopic burn leaves a scar; and this wondrous but costly new tool which does the same harmlessly by flash-freezing was a budgetary impossibility to them.
So to receive it out of the blue was a dream come true certainly to the Health Minister, the Director and the ophthalmic surgeons, assembled in the lecture-theatre. Yet when I came home to lunch 1 puzzled with my wife that, here and there among the white-clad young interns, students and nurses, almost tangible waves of inexplicable hostility emanated.
Yet among the smiling faces at the handover were some that glowered in a basilisk state that, shortly after, was to become all too familiar via a Ku-klux-klanstyle hood. And by then my mind would go back to the British tax-payer's cryoprobe, and wonder if our "overseas aid" was after all worthwhile.
Then one day my captors predictably ran out of food, so I offered them my prudent reserve