I wonder... (or, NOT the post about what I thought about Mass!)

It's taking me a long time to finish the post I have in progress about my experience of attending Mass for the first time, so here's a few thoughts on another topic.

I was singing a settling-down lullaby for my baby's morning nap, which goes something like this:

Go to sleep, my baby
Close your pretty eyes
Angels up above you
Looking at you, dearie, from the skies
Great big moon is shining
Stars begin to peep
Now's the time for all good children
To go to sleep.

My mother used to sing this to me well into my childhood. I don't know if her mother sang it to her, or it came from elsewhere in the family - I learned that it's a song called Wyoming Lullaby, which was released by several popular recording artists in the 20th century; perhaps it's unusual for someone in the Midlands of the UK to sing it, I don't know!

But perhaps whether this reference to angels, together with the crucifix I used to sleep beneath when I stayed at my grandparents' house, and my paternal grandfather's perpetual 'God bless', which I use each night with my girls, rubbed off - not necessarily on me, but helped put me in the angels' care and prised slowly open the channels for God's grace to pour down upon me, an unbaptised child from a non-believing family. Hmm, I wonder!

[Oh, I must add - I just found a UK internet reference to this song being sung in the cotton mills of Lancaster, which is where a lot of my mother's family was from. And I ALSO just found out that my ministry training course will take place a stone's throw away from the old Coalboard building where my Dad, a lab technician, basically worked his whole life (until the UK coalmining industry died a death, that is.) Sometimes all the dots in life just join up, don't they!]