Anorexia, Whooping Cough and Nits
June 22nd 2023
“Priests are called by God to work with the bishop and with their fellow-priests, as servant and shepherd among the people to whom they are sent…”
The ASB Ordinal 1980
On the 28th of June this year I will have been a priest in the Church of England for twenty years.
I once heard a story about a vicar who took a communion service in a nursing home. Legend has it that as the hapless priest raised the chalice in his right hand an elderly resident stepped forward and, before the staff could stop him, pressed a used incontinence pad into the vicar’s left hand. Over the years I have found myself returning to this scene in my own mind. More often than I would like. Curious about the way in which the wine, so recently blessed, somehow got mixed up in the same space – a hand width apart – with some stale old wee. I’ve questioned how God got pressed into that space with us. I find this story so completely and beautifully compelling that it makes me laugh and catch my breath. And I love the long dead resident for his calm insistence on the truth. Everything is sacred. Everything belongs.
Why am I telling you this story? It didn’t happen to me. I can’t say I wish it had. But the important point is it could have done. It would have made sense. There has been a lot of wine and piss to be perfectly honest. It’s called incarnational ministry. I love the bones of it.
The priesthood thing came a bit out of the blue for me. I wanted to be a journalist. But an adolescent yearning for God emerged, and – when my heart, like a lighthouse, threw its beams out for love, connection, and meaning – it Illuminated a calling which was sacramental, pastoral, full of life and full of death too. I was so young that it was a long time before I had any clue what any of it meant. Even before the Church of England was ordaining women as priests, God was forming up this thing inside my body. Composing a song . A Magnificat with a base note, like a low hum. Almost as if the Holy Spirit knew me before I knew myself. I wasn’t worried about evangelism or leadership but with the question of how an encounter with Jesus transforms our suffering. Turns our wee into wine. Our trauma into mercy and grace. A spirit of despair into a garment of praise. I recently told the men in the prison where I currently serve that I had just prayed God’s mercy all over the chapel carpet so that they could feel it washing their feet. Some of them came to me afterwards and said that it had washed them, “Right up to my fucking ankles, Miss!” That’s what I’m talking about. As a young woman I wept with longing for the profound encounter. The incarnation of God. Mediated through our crazy-paved and broken selves . Shine a light! Did I get what I asked for? Well here it is. You decide.
They give you a script at your ordination. Isaiah 6. Delivered by an angel with some barbecue tongs and an absurd number of wings. It goes like this: “And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “whom shall I send, and who will go for us” and I said, “Here am I send me!” When I read that now it sounds so naïve – and so like me. So skinless and wanting to help. So grateful to be offered a life full of meaning. I just think Jesus saw me coming. The Church of England most certainly did.
“They are to proclaim the word of the Lord, to call there hearers to repentance, and in Christ’s name to absolve and to declare the forgiveness of sins.
They are to baptize and prepare the baptized for Confirmation. They are to preside at the celebration of the Holy Communion. They are to lead his people in prayer and worship, to intercede for them, to bless them in the name of the Lord, and to teach and encourage by word and example“
It’s a vocation which can get a bit whiffy when it comes in over your knees. There have certainly been times where the sky fell in on Chicken- Licken and I threw a look over my shoulder to the university chaplain who said to me “I think God might be calling you to be ordained”. I ask her, hypothetically, “Were you actually thinking about anything in particular – or just throwing mud at a wall and seeing if it stuck?”. Whatever her motivation (and it turned out she was right) I was the wall it stuck to. Many of my friends escaped the deluge but I did not. I once asked her if she thought I would be a good priest. She said, “It will wear you out and break your heart”. I lean out in time to the day when yet another email with the title ‘Student Death: Confidential’ dropped into my university chaplain’s inbox and I felt my toes curling into a ball and my head composing what the writer Ann Lamott calls ‘beggy prayers’. “Please God, please don’t make me have to do this again…I don’t want too. Please make it stop”. I was exhausted and It had only been a few weeks since I had stood in a field up on the Furness Peninsula, behind a mum and a dad, while they gently placed the cremated remains of their 18-year-old daughter into the River Duddon. I stood behind with my green pastoral services book in hand, my hopeless prayers of commendation turning to ash in my mouth. Now there was another …
Once the process of discernment started more people added more mud.
The Vicar, in Lancaster, who I had been reassured was glacial in his acceptance of a call to ordination from one of his flock, gave it half an hour from the start of our first meeting. He said two things, “I have no doubt whatsoever that God is calling you to be ordained. Don’t do it unless you absolutely have too”
“Oh, hell. Right. OK. Just to remind you that I am still only 23”
The letter, when it came from The Bishop, left no one in any doubt either. It said, “I am very pleased to endorse their positive recommendation that you should train for the ordained ministry”
I often liken it to that scene in Jungle Book where Colonel Hathi, a pompous military elephant who thinks he’s in charge, asks for all the volunteers who want to ‘search for the man-cub’ to take ‘one step forward’. As he turns away, they all take one step back. Except the dim one with the hairy head who continues to chew grass placidly, unaware that he is now fodder himself. I was a placid chewing pachyderm, ‘positively’ chosen for a ghastly vocation. A lamb to the slaughter. Well, there is precedent for that. In this process of selection for ministry I was called ‘a waste of space’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘tenacious ‘. How could I possibly be all three, I wondered ? The Assistant Director of Ordinands got the most out of me by giving me a glass of wine and his cat to stroke while we talked. My Cambridge placement vicar was kind and encouraging: “we can teach you how to take a funeral. We can’t teach you how to love people. But you know how to do that already”.
As it turned out my first funeral was for a lovely woman called Patricia who died in January of 2003. She was 70. I was 29. I remember the fear as I stepped out of the west door at St Mary’s Church in Penwortham and saw the hearse, parked with its tail gate up, the coffin, covered in flowers, and her family in tears. I walked in front of her into the church. Commended her to God. Buried her in the thick Preston clay, which stuck to the bottom of my cassock and never washed off.
“In the name of our Lord we bid you remember the greatness of the trust now to be committed to your charge, about which you have been taught in your preparation for this ministry.
You are to be messengers, watchmen, and stewards of the Lord; you are to teach and to admonish, to feed and to provide for the Lord’s family, to search for his children in the wilderness of this world’s temptations and to guide them through its confusions, so that they may be saved through Christ for ever.”
My two ordinations, as a deacon in Blackburn Cathedral and a priest in Lancaster Priory, remain the two proudest moments of my life. I felt ontologically changed on both occasions and, true to form, in Blackburn, I had two pieces of sublime musical accompaniment. ‘Come Holy Ghost Our Souls Inspire’ , a beautiful plainchant sung at ordinations for a thousand years led by the cathedral choir, and ‘Bob the Builder’ sung by a small child and his wind up toy , two feet to my left. Before the priesting Bishop Steven anointed the backs of our hands with chrism oil . It ran though my fingers. As if it didn’t, as yet, have anything to stick to.
This is what I have spent the last twenty years doing with that anointing.
I have anointed others ,the sick and the dying, commending their souls to Almighty God in the last few moments of their lives. I have conducted a baptism , a wedding, and a burial of ashes, on the same day, in the wrong order. I have baptised a toddler in a washing up bowl. I have presided at The Eucharist: In a psychiatric hospital, in nursing homes and hospices, in a park in Harlem, on a beach, in a high security prison, facing east, facing north.I have spilled the wine all over the altar table and consumed the wafer that someone spat back into my hand. Received the Sunday offering in a child’s sombrero hat because we lost the offering plate. Stopped the pensioners having a séance in the church hall. Laid hands on half healed operation scars and pustulating cancerous lumps. Cut parishioner’s toenails. Fixed the hinges on their bathroom doors. Removed a fox from a church crypt with a lightly applied broom handle. Walked a parishioner up and down a ward praying while carrying his catheter bag full of wee. I have stroked dead hands in the mortuary and at the funeral directors. Rubbed thumbs over elderly transparent skin. I have given the C of E equivalent of the last rites to a dog, lying next to him on the floor in the vet’s surgery, rubbing oil for the healing of the sick into the fur above his eyes. I have said prayers over the ashes of a colleague’s dead cat. Walked in front of more hearses than I can count. If I hear ‘My Way’ by Frank Sinatra one more time I won’t be responsible for my actions. I have taken weddings; where I have confiscated the bride’s lipstick, where the horse refused to move and the bride had been sewn into her dress, where the page boy produced a snail from his pocket during the signing of the registers. I have located a wedding ring from up a teddy bear’s fundament and stopped a ceremony while my church warden evicted a swearing photographer who was standing on a pew because he couldn’t see. I have baptised babies who were – in no particular order – poorly; enormous; drugged for the occasion; swathed head to foot in menacing slippery fabric. I have taken school assemblies with a fight going on at the back and a Christmas morning communion with two paramedics resuscitating a guy having a heart attack on the back row. I have delivered a kids talk while a drunk guy stood right up in front of me shouting obscenities into my face.
“Remember always with thanksgiving that the treasure now to be entrusted to you is Christ’s own flock, bought through the shedding of his blood on the cross. The Church and congregation among whom you will serve are one with him: they are his body. Serve them with joy, build them up in faith, and do all in your power to bring them to loving obedience to Christ”.
And then there is the liturgy. The words you get given to say. Repeated and repeated until they are burned into your fascia. Until they run through you like a river….
“I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…”
“If any of you know any reason in law why these persons may not marry each other you are to declare it now…“
“Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread…”
“I give you this ring, as a sign of our marriage…”
“Though we are dust and ashes God has prepared for those who love him a heavenly dwelling place “
“Father of all we pray to you for those we love but see no longer..”
“Lord grant us a quiet night and a perfect end”
“Because you cannot bear the weight of this ministry in your own strength but only by the grace and power of God, pray earnestly for his Holy Spirit. Pray that he will each day enlarge and enlighten your understanding of the Scriptures, so that you may grow stronger and more mature in your ministry, as you fashion your life and the lives of your people on the word of God”.
Because of how the timings of ordinations work many of my friends from theological college will be celebrating their anniversaries at the end of June too. I salute them all. All my friends who also took this crazy path and have taken the hit. The ones who it has made poorly even though they carry on trucking on. The ones who disappeared behind a clerical facade and a building project and never came back. The ones whose marriages didn’t survive the relentless emotional and spiritual cascade of grief, need and projection that rolls like a fog under the vicarage door.
And, oh, there is a bit they forgot to say during the ‘death and dying’ course which they roll out just before you are ordained. They talked about the elderly and baby deaths and road traffic accidents and cancer. They don’t say this : There will be people in your congregation who you will come to love fiercely. The one who never told anyone she made you jam sandwiches and tea when you were a young curate out of your depth, weeping with exhaustion at her kitchen table. You will end up burying her. Holding the space for everyone else. There will be the young man with a lovely round face and red shoes, who you teased because he liked Cliff Richard, who you knew would be on the church doorstep faithfully every Sunday morning tapping his watch at you and grinning. He will die, suddenly. And you will take the funeral. Bury him with his Leyton Orient flag even though he has broken your heart too. It will be six months before you can use that door on a Sunday morning again. They don’t tell you that. But they should have done. Although it may not have helped.
These days I lead Sunday services in a prison. After some wilderness years fifty or so long serving and life sentenced prisoners – noisy, sweary, and occasionally beautiful – as all human beings are, have handed me back my priesthood. I also work in private practice as a psychotherapist. My late addition to this vocation towards suffering and new life. I sometimes imagine that I go looking for people in hell. Not the ‘pointy fire’ kind but the kind which feels like living in spiritual, emotional and physical exile. From ourselves and from God. From love. We go hunting together for the pieces of self that got dropped and shattered. I ask, where does it hurt? We talk. We breathe. As my therapist says, “So we can all have a better day”. So all in all this is turning out to be a rather beautiful and soulful life. As Zora Hurston said ‘Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place’. Amen to that.
“We trust that long ago you began to weigh and ponder all this, and that you are fully determined, by the grace of God, to give yourselves wholly to his service and devote to him your best powers of mind and spirit, so that, as you daily follow the rule and teaching of our Lord, with the heavenly assistance of his Holy Spirit, you may grow up into his likeness, and sanctify the lives of all with whom you have to do”
* Stewart Henderson: ‘Priestly Duties’ – From ‘Limited Edition’ published by Plover Books
