Sam Weech, a reverend, looks down the platform with alarm. As if he doesn’t have enough to worry about, as if there haven’t been enough setbacks, a bishop is hastening towards him. You can tell the man is a bishop: he’s got gaiters, an apron and a hat with strings. Sam worries, he says, that he’s going to be called “on the carpet”. We who have seen The Titfield Thunderbolt know that’s not going to happen. The bishop turns out to be every bit as train-mad as Sam, and together they get the Thunderbolt triumphantly to Mallingford.
Called “on the carpet”—that’s the expression he used. I’ve used it myself when summoned for an in-person dressing-down. In the last couple of months, though—once from a friend, and once from Giles Fraser on the radio—I’ve heard another phrase: “the Naughty Corner”. The image that comes to mind when you hear “on the carpet” is an employee standing in front of the boss’s desk. “The Naughty Corner” suggests a sad child sitting alone. What’s going on here? And also, for heaven’s sake, why can’t I just take it as it was meant, as a bit of jokiness? And why, in the midst of this Kirchedämmerung, the twilight of the Church of England, should anyone be making a fuss about a turn of phrase?
Partly because language shapes our thinking as much or more than it is shaped by it. That’s what Orwell is saying in his essay “Politics and the English Language”. It’s also unintentionally self-revealing. Part of the mess we are in right now in the Church of England with safeguarding and hierarchy has to do with confusions about who and when someone is a child, and how they are to be treated.
My go-to reading for baptisms is Mark 10:13-16, the verses where parents bring little children to Jesus to be healed and blessed, and the disciples scold them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said: “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.” There’s something special about children as far as Jesus is concerned. Maybe it’s their innocence; more likely it’s their position of unenfranchised dependence. Later, in the Epistles, Paul uses the figure of the speaking, thinking and reasoning of the child as an example of stages we grow through and put aside as we reach adulthood (1 Corinthians 13:11). “Brothers and sisters, do not be children in your thinking,” he says, “rather be infants in evil, but in thinking be adults” (1 Corin-thians 14:20). The “little ones” aren’t actual children anymore. They’re newcomers to Christianity. The church’s elders are those who guide them.
Where are we now? A bishop is Father in God to those beneath them in the hierarchy. A priest is often called Father (and occasionally now “Mother”) by members of the congregation. I’m not, but I know lots of people who are. It is a title of respect. Yes, and the assumptions that go with that, so often, are that the people whose titles signal seniority by way of parenthood are mature and need to explain things simply to those beneath them. Figurative children have taken the place of real ones. The actual children are still here, though, and the Church doesn’t seem to have much of a clue how to include them.
This may be one reason why children’s services, commonly called “All Age” in the Church, are almost invariably excruciating. A retired clergyman of my acquaintance swears he has been called upon to lead a service where the confession begins: “Now we say ‘I’m sorry’ to Jesus.” Mind you, he also insisted that the service ended with “Now we say ‘Goodbye’ to Jesus,” which sounds unlikely, even for an All Age service in the Church of England.
Who am I trying to kid by bringing in Orwell and the Bible? The truth is that I worked hard to become an adult. I was the youngest child in my family, the youngest grandchild, the youngest cousin. Growing up came late, and required significant labour on my part. God knows I’m still a child when I pray, but I need to be an adult to be a priest. If you’re adult, you take responsibility—for people, for situations, for things. You’re the one with the job of safeguarding. You learn to listen. You learn to see.
In our church at present there seems to be a structural requirement for grown-up children who will look for approval and accept correction from their elders and betters, and, if the archbishop of York’s new year letter to the clergy of the Church of England is anything to go by, will defer to the Archbishops’ Council as the final word in maturity and wisdom—the adults in the room. Except that we’ve seen too much to trust them. We don’t believe that the bishops are going to strip down to their shirtsleeves and work with us—young and old—to get the train to its glorious destination, as in The Titfield Thunderbolt.
