I didn't know where to look.

            I’ve not found it easy, becoming an overnight YouTube sensation. Who would have thought, four dizzying months ago, that our parish YouTube channel would have no fewer than EIGHTY subscribers. I’m virtually a Televangelist.

            One of things I’ve struggled with, when we’ve been recording our services on a Friday, is knowing where to look…

            When we set up All Saints’ beautiful Lady Chapel to make our recording, the camera stands proud and central on its tripod, and the boys sit off to one side. When we were first recording services together, the natural place for me to look to was towards the boys, the people in the room there with me. Unfortunately, when I watched the videos back I looked weird, even weirder than I’d expected to look. There was this man on my laptop screen, looking off in an odd direction, towards an audience I couldn’t see, and ignoring the audience that was me.

            And so it was that I learned one of the more elementary lessons of broadcasting – look at the camera.

            Except, that didn’t get rid of the weirdness, it just transferred it. Instead of finding watching the recording peculiar, now it was the making of the recording that was peculiar. As the two boys sat there with immense patience, listening to me waffling on, I was ignoring them completely and giving my all to a dark circle of glass which just gazed, and didn’t laugh at any of my jokes, or respond to anything in any way at all. I didn’t know where to look.

            Even when we weren’t filming, I began to feel a similar discombobulation. On Sunday mornings, Susie and I celebrate Mass together. There’s no camera, there’s no other point of focus, there’s a congregation of one. And that’s what makes it hard to look at her; it’s Sunday morning at All Saints, Edmonton, and there’s a congregation of only one. To look into the middle distance, is to entertain the possibility that all those people I dearly love and dearly miss, are still there; somehow still there. To look at the one person who is there, is to face the truth of all the people who aren’t.