Holy Disorder

 I have a novel coming out in October. The novel is a fictionalised 'biography'. Well they do say that everyone has a novel in them and I guess that I am no exception, although the critical reader will be the best judge of that.

The main character is an ordinand David and we meet him at his ordination where he is made Deacon. During the ordination service he reflects on all that had brought him to this point in his life and then the story takes us forward into his new life as curate in the Church of England. Friends who have read the story have been complimentary and my publisher has clearly felt that the novel is worth taking a risk over.

There are some risky elements to the story most of which is true but some of. which I have, as someone once complained about novels, ' they read as though someone is making it up as they go along', made up as I went along!

So the affair, the attempted rape and the girlfriend who goes off to seek ordination in the USA are? If you ever get to read the novel you will make your own mind up.

Running through the novel is a recurring theme, implied at the start by the title, which as a friend commented, I can see what you're doing there! The recurring theme is of course the sad, inevitable and possibly irreversible decline of the Church I, as we all I'm sure would agree, love.

I was made Deacon in 1969 at the age of 24 and Priested a year later, more by chance than design as I was told by the Archdeacon who had found an unopened letter of complaint on the Bishop's desk, about the prayers I had led at the main service which had been objected to by the commanding officer of the local airfield who had written a letter protesting my forthcoming ordination. Apparently my view that the excursion into Cambodia by Richard Nixon was neither winnable nor did it make strategic sense was treasonable at the very least. I thought it was a simple prayer for peace and an end to conflict. I thought the Air Vice Marshall or Commodore or Group Captain had made his point very well when he slammed the 14th Century door of the Church as he left dragging his wife with him without writing a letter trying to destroy my career before it started.

Many years later when I was a Diocesan Officer, Social Responsibility Adviser in a Northern Diocese the technique was to use sarcasm as when during a Synod someone referred to me and 'my' 'Board for Socialist Irresponsibility'.

So the novel steers a path between my sense that my vocation and my Priesthood have been a both a blessing and a privilege, 'a duty and a joy' as well as a challenge that has at times caused me to think very seriously about finding the exit ASAP.

As I say in my biography I have been a Civil Servant twice, my first job was as a Clerical Assistant my second as a Grade 7 leading a small team in the West Midlands as part of the Home office. I then left again to lead an international charity for the last 7 years before retirement. 

I have also held two House for Duty Posts. One very successfully one less so.

The key to the success in my first House for Duty post was that I wasn't the Vicar the key to my failing in the second post was that I was the vicar.

What I realised had happened in the 12 years that elapsed between the first and the second job was that the Church had changed. It was no longer good enough to be out and about in the parish as Giles Fraser commented, although I probably misquote him, visiting the sick, the lonely and the bereaved. Rather I had to sit in front of a computer filling in a wide variety of forms whose relevance was questionable and then as Covid struck, sit in front of a computer leading worship.

As my stress levels rose and as I began to realise that I had made a huge mistake by taking on a job in my mid seventies I was advised by a friend, himself going through a stressful safeguarding challenge, that I should join the Faith Workers Branch of Unite, which I'm delighted to say, I did.

The advice and support which I received from the Union has been quite tremendous as I wrote in a blog recently quoting The Strawbs song:

Oh, oh, you don't get me, I'm part of the union
You don't get me, I'm part of the union
You don't get me, I'm part of the union
Until the day I die, until the day I die

Before the union did appear
My life was half as clear
Now I've got the power to the working hour
And every other day of the year

Apart from the support I received at meetings I was required to attend I was given two pieces of advice from the Help Line:

'No meeting with a Bishop is or ever can be informal, it is part of a process, and so it is essential that a record is kept and the meeting doesn't happen without you having a representative present'.

The second piece of advice was even more crucial and represents a warning that we should all heed:

The hierarchy doesn't want conflict so, even if they know that the situation into which you are being placed is potentially conflictual they will put you in and then of course when things get difficult you're on your own.

This is why my novel is entitled Holy Disorder.

It seems to me that, after 53 years since my being made Deacon, the Church predicated on patronage as it is, is failing both its Clergy, the poverty of pastoral support that I have experienced from senior staff is frankly shocking, the only exception to that, apart from my Area Dean, is the Diocesan Secretary. 

But the church is failing its membership.Some years ago a friend of mine was inducted into a very rural parish in Northumberland where there were more sheep than parishioners. The Bishop preached a whimsical sermon about sheep and shepherds possibly failing to recognise that sheep are bred for meat, for which they have to be slaughtered and wool for which they have to be fleeced.

Pretty fair description of what the Diocese now expects from the average congregation.

I think that after 53 years I am concluding that the Church (generally) but the Church of England particularly has pitched its much narrower tent on three wonky legs:

It now demands Management rather than Mission - but sadly the present Bench of Bishops and Synod is simply not very good at Management so we slide from order to disorder very much like todays Tory Party.

Productivity to pastoral care: We hear so much from the top about growth, church planting, recruitment of the young, growing vocations. What we fail to do is what the young curate who encouraged my vocation both by his example and his words described to me when I asked him what his job entailed, his response has stayed with me ever since 

'Love them into believing". From order based on New Testament Principles of loving to disorder based on some out of touch management text.

Wishful thinking to worship. I think that the biggest tragedy is our losing touch with the poetic glory of Cranmer's liturgical language. A Bishop, who visited our parish to lead morning prayer was criticised because he didn't 'pray from the heart' but instead handed out copies of Cranmer's Morning Prayer with readings and psalms for the day.

He spoke about what moved him about being able to say his prayers with those gathered there but they didn't recognise the truth of his words, in their wishful thinking they saw extemporary prayer as true worship. They preferred the disorder of laying competing requests before God to the order of Cranmer's Liturgy.

I finish with a reading from the opening Chapter of Holy Disorder.

The Ordination

His knees hurt.

Try as he might he could not raise his thoughts above this pain, this intrusion into what he was promised would be, and which was meant to be, the most profound spiritual experience of his life.

His knees hurt.

He tried to move his body, a discreet exercise regime intended to relieve the pressure on his knees. He remembered an old school friend who, on hearing of his plans for ordination, had pulled his leg about wearing out the knees of his jeans, but today it felt as though it was his knees that would not survive. If only he could stand and stretch, but the Bishop was edging closer.

His knees hurt.

He tried raising his feet, one ankle at a time, but that only made the pain that much more unbearable, and knew that fidgeting would just draw the attention of the Bishop’s Chaplain who had been watching him closely since yesterday’s row with the Cathedral verger. 

As the Bishop came closer he tried to turn the grimace he knew was clearly written on his face, into the semblance of someone in the embrace of a spiritual experience. But it was hard, what was he doing here? 

How had all this happened? 

The strange turn of events that had brought him from the back-to-backs of his home town, the boring, routine work in the garage, the early mornings and later nights, the fighting, the drinking, the laddishness that had been his past and was meant to be his future – to this? 

The soaring arches of the Cathedral, the clerestory lights high in the vaulting of the ceiling. This was poetry in stone, conceived and constructed by masons who had a story to tell, and for whom this was their worship. Even as they built, they knew that they would not be welcome amongst the Sunday-best worshipping congregation and the ‘Barchester’ clergy that would run the place. He had noticed the sign on the back of the chairs, ‘Close Harmony’. How droll, how witty, given the lack of any sign of Christianity, not even love, just good manners, existing between the clergy in the Cathedral Close.