My friends and I have been checking in on one another. “How are you doing?” I ask my two North American clerical friends in Cambridge. “Hanging on in there, people,” one of them messages back. The other one says he has either a very long answer or a very short one, but currently it’s ODTAA, and feels like an ecclesiastical version of Die Hard with clocks ticking. “Sending you love” another friend texted when the US election results were coming in. A fourth friend sends me a “good night” text every night, and we correspond as if by telegram about the day just past. On 6th November, we woke to the news that Donald Trump would be back in the White House. The next day, after years of delay and postponement, the Makin report into the Church of England’s response to allegations of serious abuse by the late John Smyth was published. Less than a week later, the archbishop of Canterbury resigned.
Here, I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day as Hopkins put it, and have stopped trying to taper off the anti-depressants. What is this grief? Can it really be grief for the Church of England, my beloved home, into which I was baptised, confirmed and ordained? Can it really be grief for the institution about which I grumble and snark on countless occasions? Why is this report, this abuse, this resignation, different from all the others? Maybe it’s the double whammy of the Trump victory (White House, Congress, Senate and, already, the Supreme Court) alongside the Makin report. Everything is being affected by galloping entropy. It was only a few months ago that we were sitting in Great St Mary’s, applauding bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani’s address on the weariness of the clergy, “Encouraging the Weary with a Word”. Now I’m not sure that we weary preachers would have the energy to clap. And yet when the rural dean took the chapter out for a pub lunch yesterday, there was all the usual chat about funerals and assemblies. Keep it local and stay cheerful. Clergy in a chapter are bound to pray for one another and support one another. We are not necessarily friends.
Who are your friends when you’re a parish priest? Some of them will be -people you trained with. Some of them will be local, like my friends in Cambridge. More will be distant. Many of my clerical friends were ordinands on placement here: young clergy now, in their first or second post. Only a few clergy friends knew me before I was ordained. I might see local friends every couple of months if I’m lucky—our diaries are brutal. And the others? We might meet once a year, or once in five years. Or, as with my friend Ant who left his post in Cradley for one in Bermuda, we don’t meet at all, but know that we’re on each other’s side, and praying for one another. As for friends in the parish, that is a vexed question.
Strictly speaking, a priest should not have friends in the parish, just as a doctor should not have friends among her patients. It’s difficult to describe the boundaries of a friendly relationship (which is not, I repeat, not a friendship) with a parishioner. There’s mutual liking and understanding. You know a little about each other’s lives, but you listen like a pastor, and they listen like a friendly acquaintance. You are never, in any sense, unbuttoned. And yet within these parameters, I suppose I have, and have had, friends in the parish. The late Edward Bond was a friend, and I miss him. We used to talk about Jesus and death and Euripides and exclaim over the horror of our times. I used to drop off a box of cookies at his door at Christmas and another at Easter, and he’d give me a potted plant. He liked the cookies. I’ve managed to keep the potted plants clinging to life.
And then there are friends who are neither priestly colleagues nor parishioners. Normal people. Some you may have known in a previous life.
One of the most enjoyable details of the biographies of the great Victorian churchmen is the attention paid to their university friendships, right down to their nicknames and the holidays they took. Who would have thought these things would be worth noting? Oh, but they are. They are of great importance. Our friends tell us, with or without words, that we are understood and loved and that we can speak freely. Friends these days aren’t getting together to set the world to rights, at least not in my corner of the world. We don’t talk about who the next archbishop will be. We don’t even speculate who our next bishop will be. We just check in and send love, and sometimes memes.
