I spent half the ordination service wondering whether a special knowledge would descend on me the moment the bishop placed his hands on my head. It didn’t.
I was never a great curate, really. Always too insubordinate and rather heterodox in my beliefs. But I enjoyed the amazing privilege of being close to people at some of the most acute moments in their lives. Like the very first lady I visited, who died in my arms, happy that the curate had come. Or the funeral of a disabled teenager who believed equally passionately in social justice and Paul Simon, so we sat in tears at the crematorium listening to all four minutes and 50 seconds of “Bridge over Troubled Water”. Or the joy of visiting the special care baby unit every Wednesday with communion for exhausted, exhilarant mums.
And in the end there is (was?) something profoundly decent about the Church of England, because contrary to rumour, most churchgoers are not self-righteous hypocrites, but liberal-minded people who are looking for a sense of meaning in their lives….
It is hard to characterize people correctly when done so liberally.
Then again, perhaps one could ask given the degree of commitment he showed as a liberal: Are most churchgoers trying to find meaning in vicars?
Does he still go – hopefully in more than his underpants?
There’s something vaguely melancolic in this piece: trying to persuade Independent readers that COE parishioners should be respected as decent because they’re really “liberals” who sit a bit light to all that religious mumbo jumbo and just want their lives to have a bit more gravitas. The half proffered, half withdrawn apology for faith with which he ends – it’s sorrowfuly pathetic.
If you read on, the next piece in his column is filled with declarative moral judgments and passion. Compared to that, his vaguely embarrassed gesture to the “decency” of religious communities has, a bit, the feel of a man trying to explain that train spotting is not as weird as it looks.