In the courtyard at Caulke Abbey the tables were laid out as if for summer. The trees were still winter-dark as the visitors teased the warmth from the March sun and sipped their tea. Not a flower in sight, yet there was this sense, this expectation, that Spring was arriving and would soon burst forth.

Caulke Abbey, where so much memorabilia of nature and of human life had been preserved, would soon produce a new season of flowers, lambs, and of family gatherings. Caulke Abbey, preserved for us from an earlier generation, would offer again a picture of life restored, renewed, reinvigorated.

Pictures of fatherhood can be rare, yet the way in which this father emerged from the café door bearing a tray hinted at the overriding goodness inherent in life itself. His family was elsewhere but he chose with care a place where they should sit, once gathered. Slowly, deliberately, he placed the drinks around the table, and waited eagerly for their return. His eyes spoke of patience. Today he was the host, here the provider, here the listener as the family came and told their stories of birthdays, of discoveries in the house, of tiredness and of feeling the cold.
For the youngest, the drink was not right. He so needed a lolly, and the tears came, the voice began to howl, all dissolving into a coughing fit. That lolly would so put things right. Patiently the father picked up the child and sat up on his lap, allowing the child to sob through his distress in the comfort of a parent’s love. One day the memory of a lolly not given will dissolve into an understanding of how such love excels beyond all others.

Here then was a picture of divine goodness and patience addressing human need with the depths of His own greater wisdom, forbearance and love. Here then was a picture of a Father preparing his own children for greater maturity and insight into the mysteries of human society and companionship. Within the walls of the Abbey, once a family home, now a gathering place for people, Spring emerged again as the father lifted his weary child onto his shoulders and took him home, through the fields soon to be host to a new generation of lambs.

Ian Kemp