THOUGHT to be the oldest ordinand this Petertide, Elinor Delaney was ordained deacon in St Paul’s Cathedral on 29 June and will be 80 by the time she is priested.
“I’m living proof that once you know what you want, you can find a way through,” she says cheerfully. It is the “generosity of spirit” in the people she has encountered on the way that convinces her that the Church is the community to which she is called.
A fluent Welsh speaker, Mrs Delaney was born in Barry, and learnt the faith at Llandaff Parish Church. “Welsh is a beautiful language. I don’t think people in England realise how much it’s used. I think they think it’s just a quaint sideline,” she says. “But if you live in the Welsh-language community in those places, that’s all you heard.”
Her father was a Methodist, a son of the manse, confirmed as an Anglican during the war, and went on to worship at All Saints’, Margaret Street, in central London. Her mother was confirmed in the early 1950s, when her own father, who was a Baptist, died.
Mrs Delaney attended Howells School, a Drapers foundation, in Cardiff, which she recalls as “the most draconian environment. . . You had to wear your gloves to go outside, and change clothes at the drop of a hat.”
She went straight into nursing school after “dabbling with a religious vocation. The very wise mother superior told me to go off and get qualified first.” She took two career breaks to have her four children, but, when her first husband died in 1991, she had to look to “building a proper career, not just working odd hours”. She became one of five acute-pain nurses at the Royal Free.
At 50, she “had a brainstorm, thought, ‘I’ve got to do something different.’” She spent the next ten years as a school nurse to the choristers of St Paul’s Cathedral, which she described as “the job from heaven. It’s nursing; it’s being mum to 40 boys; it’s enjoying church music. . . What could be better?”
Statutory retirement was 60, but she became practice nurse to the school doctor for the next few years before retiring again.
Along the way, she has been a weather presenter on Welsh television, a sideline born out of some freelance reporting on early-morning Radio Cymru. When the Met Office were looking for people to present the Welsh-language broadcast, she took the plunge, learning from Bill Giles how to compile slides from the charts coming through from Bracknell, to be checked by the qualified meteorologists.
“It was a steep learning curve,” she admits.
Mrs Delaney had felt a pull towards to ministry in the late 1980s, and applied to be a deaconess, but “between ACCM and college, when the goalposts changed”, she had a new choice to make — distinctive diaconate or priesthood? She opted for the latter and got as far as securing some funding, but encouragement for women in her diocese was lacking, and, with reluctance, she pulled out.
“I’m not someone who sits around, wringing my hands,” she says. “It was the time when my husband died, and so the whole thing was parked, and there was no way, with four teenage children, that I could go back to it. But, when one door closes, the Lord will always open another.”
The open door has been at St Jude on the Hill, in Hampstead Garden Suburb, north-west London, which has been her home church since 1977, and where she has twice been churchwarden. When the church went into an 18-month interregnum, she took a significant position and “really had to run with it until the end”, she says. “The Bishop and Emily [the Revd Emily Kolltveit, the Priest-in-Charge] decided I ought to be ordained: that it was something that should happen.”
She told them she could not go to college for three years; so there was no way she could do it. “But I was recommended and accepted for the St Mellitus Caleb stream,” she marvels. “I’ve had the most wonderful time, studying with young people, and if all goes according to plan, I’ll be priested next year.
“I was told when I first started, ‘You go to theological college to discover how much you don’t know,’ and there was an awful lot. But it’s been so insightful and helpful, and there’s been such acceptance and generosity. You’re never on your own, which is great.”
She continues: “Basically, I’m doing what I’ve always done. I’m officially the pastoral lead now, and what’s so lovely about that is that I’m no longer secretary to the PCC, I’m no longer the electoral-roll officer. . . Administration has been taken off me, which is so liberating! The congregation have been so supportive of everything that I have been doing in the church. They’ve been magnificent all the way through and so generous in their appreciation.”
Her elder granddaughter was one of her supporting companions at her ordination, and “even my oldest, who is totally against institutional church, said: “Mum, go for it: you’ve always wanted to do it.”
Ms Kolltveit says: “Eli brings incredible wisdom, dedication, spirituality, and patience to her ministry, but also a Peter Pan-like energy. She really engages in Jesus’s call to be like children, to remain inspired by the wonder and awe of the world, and to find newness and mystery in the human journey.
“And she never wastes a day; she’s always got something to do and she puts God’s people first with a deep love and kindness for everyone. She’s also brilliant to minister alongside and we have a really good laugh together. I’m really looking forward to this next season and I know we will continue to learn from each other throughout her curacy.”
Read more in our Petertide features and full ordination lists with photos