Strange messengers

[resonant]

If this were a story instead of real life, it would actually be finished instead of just inspiring me to speculate. But it's a pretty cool story anyway.

St. Sapient is involved in a lawsuit with the city. It's a long story, but to sum up: in the 1950s, a parishioner gave the church an adjacent lot with a house on it; the church didn't have a pressing need for the land and didn't have the money to tear the house down; in between, the neighborhood became a historic district, and now tearing down anything requires permission from the city's historic preservation commission; and they say no way.

So the house sits there, costing the church several thousand dollars a month in utilities and security and the sort of minimal repairs necessary to keep the roof on and the raccoons and drug users out, while the lawyers try to persuade the city to allow it to be torn down.

Pastor Fixit has left the church and is now a chaplain at the local hospital, but she has to stay in touch because she's heavily involved in the lawsuit. Meanwhile, we hired a sweet but slightly corny retired guy to be our new interim: Pastor Singalong.

So Pastor Fixit stopped by yesterday to give us the latest lawsuit update, and the Head Monkey dragged a dusty, smelly box out of his office and said, "This might interest you."

The box contained two old-fashioned leather binders full of mostly hand-written pages. Here's the story he told about it.



Wednesday was the Head Monkey's wife's birthday, and he planned to leave early to meet up with some other people to take her out to dinner. But just about the time he was getting ready to leave, an elderly man waylaid him in the lane.

"He was either a township assessor or a township inspector -- I never did figure out which one, because I'm telling you people, this man had the worst stutter I ever heard. I mean the worst. It was taking him sometimes thirty seconds to get a word out. I was in a big hurry, but I didn't want to interrupt him or fill in the blanks on him or anything --" (the Head Monkey's daughter is a speech-language pathologist, so he knows what you don't do to stutterers) -- "so there wasn't nothing I could do but be patient."

After nearly an hour's conversation, it developed that the man had gone to turn some teenage squatters out of an abandoned house in an outlying village, and in the attic he'd found this box, and these books had the church's name on them, so he'd brought them to us.

Pastor Fixit started idly looking through the books, and then the looking became less idle, and then it became avid. "Look, these are minutes from the thirties and forties," she said. "See, here's an action the board took on the building of the parish hall. When I was preparing for the lawsuit, I stared at microfiches for hours but I never could find this stuff."

Now, one of the things that came out of her microfiche sessions was an agreement with the city from the 1970s that promised the church would never be held responsible for the maintenance of the lane -- something that saved us a lot of trouble and money, since the city has been, yes, holding us responsible for the maintenance of the lane. So we know that there's all sorts of useful stuff in the old records.

"You know," I said, "if it turns out that there was some critical information from these records that would help us win that lawsuit, and they were hidden in the attic of an abandoned house in the country until a stuttering township assessor brought them to us ..."

"... then," Pastor Singalong said, "we know how an angel talks."

Comments

[resonant]

I hope so too!