The Random Thoughts of Henry Holloway
There is an old rhyme with goes like this:
‘I eat my peas with honey, I have done all my life;
It makes the peas taste funny, but it keeps them on the knife.’
Peas and honey! Was there ever such a mixture of opposites? Of course they don’t go together. But what a lot of things there are that do go together.’ To separate them is to lose more than half their value. Roast duck and green peas! Roast Lamb and mint sauce! I can still recall vividly the first time I had roast lamb and mint sauce! Ever afterwards the lamb without the mint sauce seemed an insult. With the price of meat what it is now I’m quite thankful to have the flavour of the mint without the lamb.
I think of the days when I was a nipper running the messages! Those were the days of pork fillet and lamb and tasty ribs - with real meat on them. They tell me that pork butchers are employed now for their skill in removing the last vestige of meat from the ribs. Probably they use the old cutthroat razors nowadays for the job. I mind once a woman going into the butchers for some meat. She did a lot of grumbling, not only about the price but about the quality she was getting. ‘Mam,’ said the butcher, ‘I had to buy the horns.’ Anyway, in those days you’d have got enough for a bob to feed a family of six.
When you think of people who are inseparable you think of Darby and Joan. Either without the other is a lonely figure. Romeo kills himself rather than live without his Juliet. In the early days of the Bible story it was said, ‘It is not good that man should be alone.’
A Philipino school teacher was ordered by the Japs to pull down the American flag in front of the school during the war. He refused and was given two minutes in which to comply with the order. A shot rang out. Two years later the world heard the amazing story of this man’s miraculous survival. In telling his story he said ‘There are moments in the lives of men when they are impelled to certify - to seal - with their actions what they believe and what they teach.’ There is a word about that too in the Bible. It says, ‘Faith without works is dead.’
Then there is this thing we call love. Love has got mixed up with an awful lot of rubbish in men’s minds - sickly sentiment, imbecile infatuation, sugary romance - that is not love. In fact, real love is not concerned with getting but with giving. It matches need with deeds. It goes on living only so long as it gives. When we are told to love our neighbour it means loving our neighbour into friendship. David Grayson once wrote, ‘I wonder if you ever make any real difference to human beings without loving them and understanding them? . . . there is nothing in this world that people so much thrive upon, grow fine and rosy and robust upon . . . as being loved.’ Dr. Moffatt gives us a lovely reading of a Bible passage, ‘Let us put our love not into words or into talk, but into deeds and make it real.’ One writer has put it -‘The glory of life is to love, not to be loved; to give and not to get; to serve and not to be served; to be a strong hand in the dark to another in a time of need; to be a cup of strength to any soul in a time of weakness - that is to know the glory of life.’
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