The Holy Haughty Huntsman

‘All things bright and beautiful,

all creatures great and small,

all things wise and wonderful,

the Lord God made them all.’

These words have taken on new meaning for the congregation at Blanchetown, on the Murray in South Australia. They were all quite familiar with Pastor’s love of ‘bugs’—he drove one regularly to church (a VW ute). But his affair with the huntsman spider was something else again.

It began when Pastor arrived early (for once) one Sunday for service, so he had time to talk with the women out in the porch. While chatting, he noticed a huntsman hanging from the light just above his head. It hung from the shade with all legs on one side of its body hanging free.  It was huge, about the size of his hand.

Thinking it might be dead, he reached up to brush it to see if it moved. With a concerted shriek, almost giving Pastor a heart attack, all the women rushed out the door—all except one poor woman who had suffered a stroke previously and couldn’t move. Talk about Christian concern and love—she was left to fend for herself!

The huntsman was alive, so Pastor helped the poor shaking woman into the church and then went back to deal with the situation. He knocked the huntsman onto the floor and then kicked it out the door. But this was a feisty devil. It didn’t want to leave; it just kept on coming back. So, Pastor kicked it across the carpark, gently of course. The huntsman was rearing up on its back legs and menacing Pastor’s foot with its fangs. At one stage it lunged forwards and grabbed hold of his shoe, so that Pastor had to kick savagely several times until he dislodged it. The huntsman was finally flicked out of the carpark.

So, all was well, nerves were settled and the service began. Towards the end of the sermon, however, Pastor noticed a look of horror on a couple of women’s faces. ‘Surely my sermon is not so bad’, he thought. The next moment he noticed something out of the corner of his eye. There, beside his shoulder, was the huntsman racing down the wall. It scurried across the floor towards Pastor’s shoe! He kicked the beast away, but it came back again and in the darkness of the pulpit he lost sight of it. He looked all around, shook his gown, but no huntsman could be found.

‘Well, I can’t find it, so I’ll continue’, he reassured his congregation, ‘but if you see me running off to the vestry, you’ll know why!’

The sermon finished without incident. As Pastor sat down in the front pew for the offering hymn, he quipped,
‘I hope I don’t squash him’. The hymn had just begun when a man in the front pew on the other side of the church pointed and yelled, ‘There it is!’  And there it was indeed, hanging on the bottom of Pastor’s gown.

So, it was on again! Pastor shook off the beastie, but it was cunning and quick and ran straight up his shoe again. This happened twice before Pastor was able to kick it down the aisle, where it at last seemed to be stunned. It was captured in a large envelope and deposited over the other side of the road.

Pastor tried to think up some moral for this incident—‘We should all be as keen as this huntsman to come to church?’—but decided it was probably far better to just mark it down as one of the trials country pastors are privileged to experience in their parish.