an interesting conversation

I was looking for a mirror in the local antique (junk) shops round here...

'do you have a mirror without a frame that I could buy cheap please?'
'whats it for?'
'to smash... for an 'art' project' (lie)

man fumbles around the back of a large display cabinet containing all the knots that the scouts used to have to learn.

'I bought this for a tenner and was going to do it up... but...'
'I'll give you fifteen then...'
'in that case you can have all these other bits back here too...'
'I don't really want them, anyway that would add up to 21 years of bad luck!!' (plays the colloquialism card)
'not if you mean it!'
'really?'
'if you do it by accident then its bad luck, if you do it on purpose then it isn't...'
'that's just as well? i take it it's cash only'
'you can get cashback at the post office'

I walk up to the post office and back...

''So what's this then some kind of art project?'
a moment of temporal blindness ensued as my life's ministerial experience unfolded in a flash in a corner of my brain, all the times I'd covered my intentions with an easy covering story melted into a somehow all empowering knowledge that I was now being paid to tell the Truth...
'I'm a minister and this mirror will be used to translate a message...'
I've no idea why I said that, I've no idea if I am a minister or not? I've no idea what I am, I've no idea what I'm saying, or where I'm going...
'a minister??'
'a minister. A Methodist minister??! (blimey nora)  we'll get everyone to write everything they hold dear about the church on this mirror and then smash it up...'
The antique dealer didn't miss a beat...
'You'll never believe it but I just threw away about ten old pictures of Conwy Methodist Ministers from the 1850's, they came in frames which I was interested in, and I think we binned the pictures. Believe it, I should never throw anything away... they all looked like hippies too...' nods my way...
'that was around the time of great welsh revival in these parts'
'well here's a story, my partner, she lives in the actual house that the guy who started that revival was born in. He went of to America and came back and started preaching in the local churches'
'He (Evan Thomas) preached in a call to action revival style.  He asked people to make a commitment in their hearts and come to the front by way of recognition and affirmation through witness of that commitment. It brought whole communities to turn to the church and to accept God as their saviour...'
'well there was all sorts of strange goings on at that place, there was a ghostly spirit, which used to move the workmens' tools about the place.  One time a man's tools we moved to the windowsill on the other side of a room across a wet cement floor... no one knew how that happened...'
'perhaps it was the great wars that ended the whole thing?'
'you look very young to be a minister if you don't mind my asking your age?'
'I'm 32.'
'blimey, well I'm a Catholic... non practising of course... if you come in here on a saturday you'll meet my mrs and she'll tell you all about it; the house and everything else...'
'could I get a receipt for these mirrors please, do you mind?'

------------

I could go on and on about this tale, but I won't. All I'll say is that in my searchings for the roots (radicals) of the welsh revivals, and in a mental plotting and landmarking of the history of the methodist church in wales; I seem to be stumbling upon some interesting tales and urban legends left over in the swirling remnants of an ancient culture's memory. 

There's something of a spiritual story in the everyday, the day to day, and the 'by the way', there's a glimpse of life in the seemingly hidden; beneath the surface of the now accustomary catatonic glaze of consumerist brainwash; deep and dying in the confusions of a lost language and buried tradition, there's a yearning for a spark of explorative initiative and an intrigue into 'what lies beneath' the boarded up spiritual chasm left dormant inside every one of us.

I'll probably go along again to that shop on saturday...