Sheep have a pleasant enough smell, though it can be a little sharp as you go into the barn. There’s a lingering top note of lanolin which compensates for the initial whiff of urine and straw. “Be shepherds with the smell of sheep,” Pope Francis famously advised—pastors in the midst of Christ’s flock.
I recognise the smell of the sheep here in the tobacco smoke as I walk up the path to visit someone after a death, in the smells of coffee and soap and honeysuckle, in the smells of sweat and hair product, in the funeral director’s Giorgio Beverly Hills, which makes me sneeze as we process side by side down Manor Walk, ahead of the hearse. No doubt my flock recognises my scent too: their dogs certainly do, standing on their hind legs to sniff the legs of my jeans. “Ah, she can smell your dogs,” someone will say, while I’ll say, “Don’t worry about the paw marks. They’ll brush off.”
I’m a disappointment to some of my parishioners, and this too can be expressed in terms of smell. A group in another village that enjoys discussing my failings over coffee after morning prayer gave me a bottle of Listerine as a present a couple of years ago. Do I brush and floss religiously? Indeed, I do. I had a middle-class American upbringing, and the fear of bad breath is worse than the consciousness of sin. The Listerine was an outward and visible sign of a metaphorical statement: “You stink.”
Everything in our lives is personal and concrete, even when it’s not. You pay attention with your senses. And then there’s this mutual knowledge thing going on—I find that the person I’m coming to know is coming to know me, whether I like it or not. “I’m off to sing nursery rhymes to the Baby Dragons,” I say, ending a conversation. “Is your singing as bad as ever?” my parishioner asks. “Worse,” I say, “but it’s better than no singing at all.” Then I hug him and he hugs me, because we both have had cancer and his mother has just died. Or, on another day, I’m sitting outside the café on the high street, and I get to hear the impressive whistle that a seven-year-old girl can produce now she’s lost her two front teeth. I’ve known her since she was a baby and have been waiting for the moment when demure little Z would come out with that big, loud whistle.
When I said that the life of a country parson is the highest calling a priest can aspire to, it’s this personal element that I’m thinking of. Christians say that Christ is fully human and fully God, that even in the eternal mystery of the Trinity, God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—is personal. I come to know the people in these villages, and they come to know me as I cannot know myself. Day by day, albeit with a few setbacks, we become more fully human, more like Christ—more the people we’re intended to be.
None of this would work without honesty. I would be delighted if more people came to church on a Sunday. I realise, though, that after something like three unchurched generations here, that isn’t going to happen overnight. Mrs M, aged 91, whose funeral is on Friday, had her children baptised and made sure that, at the very least, they knew the Lord’s Prayer, the 23rd psalm and “All Things Bright and Beautiful”. Mrs M didn’t attend church on Sundays, and neither do her children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren. I suspect she thought that the people who do would turn up their noses at her and her brood. And yet her children are giving her a church funeral.
I’m not going to this family’s house and drinking their tea, listening to their stories and saying the Lord’s Prayer with them in order to get their bums onto a pew on Sunday. Likewise with the family of the whistling girl—though it may be that when she’s a little older, she might join her friends in the choir. People don’t like it when you act like a friend because you want something out of them. One element of being “shepherds with the smell of sheep” is honesty: the sheep know what bullshit smells like.
In the old days (by which I mean the turn of the millennium), once a year, a parish priest would go to the bishop’s study, sit down and have a conversation about how things were going in the priest’s life and in the benefice. Then the bishop might pray for that priest and that place, and they’d exchange pleasantries and part. What is the smell of a bishop’s study? Books, as I recall; furniture polish and the tea tray; sometimes sweat. These days you see a “Reviewer”, and are designated as a “Reviewee”. The Ministry Development Review form drops into my inbox like the Auditors into Ankh-Morpork in a Terry Pratchett novel. “Hi Alice!” it begins. Who’s this? Smells fishy.
