January: when the many services of Christmas are done and in the register, and Ash Wednesday hasn’t yet appeared over the horizon, is the classic time for a priest to escape from the parish. I’d been looking forward to my holiday in the north for a year and a half. I’d turned off my email, and handed all parish matters to the churchwardens to deal with. There would be services in the benefice, but other people would lead them. Meanwhile, I looked forward to reading in bed, walking on the beach, making a fire in the fireplace, reading more and then eating Christmas leftovers. I’d knit. I’d nap.
I would look at the sky and the fells and bask in the silence.
On the way up the motorway, a blinking light on the dashboard indicated that the diesel particulate filter was not, as I had hoped, regenerating itself. And on the drive back from our first beach walk, the “check engine” light came on. All bad signs. That night I woke up at 4am. Fear and trembling came upon me; my teeth chattered and my bowels turned to water, like the Psalmist’s. Unlike the Psalmist, I went into the bathroom and took a sertraline and a couple of loperamide tablets, and then lay down again, listening to the BBC World Service and the quiet breathing of the dogs. The things I’d been holding together in the parish had all come loose; the griefs—my own and those of my neighbours, the worries, the responsibilities, the form-filling, the money needed to repair the roof of the little church at Six Mile Bottom and the money needed to pay the parish share; the people I’d not been able to visit and hadn’t even managed to call. Things past and things to come. The state of the world—the state of it! Oh, and the “check engine” light, which had set off this horror. If the engine failed, how was I going to get back home? Whom could I call?
Gradually, over the course of the holiday, I regained my equilibrium. Even now my hands still shake, making the carrying of a cup of coffee and a plate of toast more of a task than it should be, but when I wake at 4am the sounds of the house send me back to sleep. After New Year’s when everything reopened, the master mechanic at the garage in Barnoldswick regenerated the car’s diesel particulate filter while I waited, and changed the oil. It almost sounds like something from the psalms, doesn’t it? “For he hath regenerated my diesel particulate filter, and my oil hath he changed; My soul is quieted like a weaned child upon its mother’s breast.”
The model and justification of most holidays taken by clergy is Jesus’s custom of going to a deserted place to pray. “He did it: you should too.” From the earliest centuries, Christianity had its contemplative side; these stories are its foundation.
Before that, though, there’s the account of the flight of the Prophet Elijah from the vengeance of Jezebel in the 19th chapter of the first book of Kings. This is the model of clergy burnout. An angel gives him a hot cake baked on a stone, and lets him sleep. Then, when he wakes, he is offered another cake, and sleeps again. Only after that does he go up to the mountain of God where the Lord speaks to him, not in the sound of gale or earthquake, but in sheer silence, the echoing silence when the wind and the earthquake have passed. In that silence, God tells Elijah that there will be a new king, and also that there will be a new prophet, because more people have been faithful than Elijah is willing to credit.
That’s a favourite story of mine, as is the one told by the reclusive 19th-century Hasidic sage Menachem Mendel Morgensztern of Kotzk, better known as the Kotzker Rebbe. It concerns the sacred goat whose horns reached up to the heavens. As he walked through the world, the goat heard a poor old man crying. “Why do you weep?” asked the goat. “Because I have lost my snuffbox.” “Cut a bit from one of my horns,” said the goat, “Take what you need to make a new one.” You can guess what happened next. There are more poor folk in the world who have lost their snuff boxes than you can count.
The last five days of the holiday were idyllic. I listened to the sounds of the river in spate, the sparrows in the hedge, the hum of a quiet house. My thoughts moved together like a school of transparent hatchling fish. I’m not Jesus, not Elijah, not the Kotzker Rebbe, but if I were a sacred goat my horns would be growing back.
