TOUCHING CLOTH by Fergus Butler-Gallie tells the story of his first year as a priest at a city-centre church in Liverpool. The book is in the style of a diary following the liturgical year. It is filled with many funny stories of clerical mishaps, and profound spiritual reflections.

Above all, Butler-Gallie loves the Church of England, even with its foibles, loves being a priest, and especially loves the ordinary people there. It is a book of humour, but also of deep humanity.

Martin Buber wrote: “God created man because God likes to listen to stories.” Many of the stories are wonderful. The tone is set at the beginning, when Butler-Gallie is asked why he became a priest and replies: “I was told that black was slimming.” But beneath this is his deep sense that his vocation is dying to self for the sake of God and people.

Going into the flower-arranging room, Butler-Gallie knocks over the rape alarm, and even smashing it with rocks cannot stop the horrible noise. The wind blows his cassock over his head à la Marilyn Monroe while he is taking the Liverpool Civic Remembrance Service. And, at the end of Fire Service Carols, Liverpool Fire Brigade Dance Troupe does a striptease to “O little town of Bethlehem”.

He is ground down like many clergy by the relentless number of Christmas carol services, which repeat the same carols and the same nativity readings. He proposes that one’s personality is set by which character you are cast as in your primary-school nativity play — whether you were chosen to be Herod, or a shepherd, or whichever. Butler-Gallie was cast as a comic innkeeper. He suggests that his role in life is to be the perennial clown.

Great clowns give us amusement, but also have a quality of sadness and great depth. This book has that great duality. In the epilogue, Butler-Gallie relates that, after Liverpool, he moved on to a curacy in central London. He says that things badly did not work out there, and he feels like a failure. He may have to step back from ministry. Among his concluding words are: “The privilege of knowing and loving them: the strange, awkward, wonderful, holy people, who, despite all the Church throws at them, still come to it in search of love.”

The Ven. Dr Lyle Dennen is a former Archdeacon of Hackney, in London.

Touching Cloth
Fergus Butler-Gallie
Bantam Press £16.99
(978-1-78763-5753)
Church Times Bookshop £15.29

Read an extract here and listen to an interview with the author here.