Undiminishing returns
“ALL we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” I may not be much of a Tolkien fan (is that sufficient to have me unfrocked as an Anglican cleric?), but he gives his characters some cracking lines.
Gandalf delivers his nugget of wisdom to a worried Frodo, burdened with anxiety about destroying the “one ring”. I find myself applying it to my efforts to undertake a “phased return” to work after four-and-a-half months of post-surgical recovery. Over three months, I am supposed to do a little more each week.
While Frodo was worried about the soul-destroying cost of carrying an evil focus of power, now that I am a few weeks in, I find myself anxious about how to fit a 60-hour job into the small amount of time given me. Indulgently, I wonder whether Frodo had the easier task.
The phrase “phased return” pushes me away from fantasy and towards sci-fi. In my head, an archdeacon on a phased return sounds like a character from the original Star Trek, trapped on one of those dodgy teleporters that they had — now you see me; now you don’t. Irreverently, I wonder what Christ’s return at the eschaton might look like if it were “phased”.
Think of England
I SUSPECT that all clerics, especially female ones, have a standard response when a stranger clocks the clerical collar and asks “Are you a vicar, then?” I quite like the question, as it opens up a rare opportunity to talk about faith in often abidingly secular contexts.
There is a time and place for it, however; and this week, I discovered that being asked the question during a medical examination so intimate that it would make the bravest wince is not one of them. As I tried to to keep my dignity by faking an attitude of serene peace, the cheery nurse lifted her head from her work, asked me about my role, and paused in expectation of a response. I blurted out a detailed and barely coherent account of the oddness of archidiaconal ministry — hardly surprising, given that I was undergoing a procedure that felt as if broken glass was being introduced into my body.
When I was young, I always fancied being a spy, hiding behind carefully prepared cover. Perhaps being an archdeacon is my feeble attempt to make that happen in real life. My encounter with the winsome nurse, however, revealed the depth of folly in my childish fantasies of being a Bond, a Smiley, or Slow Horses’ Diana Tanner. If the medical procedure was anything to go by, in the face of “hostile interrogation” I would give up my secrets in a trice.
Liberation theology
PERHAPS an archdeacon is the ultimate back-room cleric, forever worrying away at plans and possibilities, and trafficking in mysteries, caught up in the discreet mechanics of clergy discipline, or a geeky fascination with heritage buildings.
Sometimes, however, I do get to participate in pure joy. Recently, I was involved in the welcome service for a new, full-time area dean in one of my archdeaconries. Hymns were sung lustily, there was laughter and prayer, and moments of tender appreciation for all those who had made the service possible. It was one of those wonderful occasions when its mash-up of Charismatic-Evangelical/middle-of-the-road/Catholic liturgy, and worship was an unalloyed triumph: a reminder that — notwithstanding Anglicanism’s love of fine distinctions, labels, and tribalism — we draw a little closer to heaven when we embrace one another’s riches.
At the end of the service, as we concluded the final verse of a hymn whose refrain is “My chains fell off”, the new area dean’s face shone with what, in my Charismatic youth, we called the shekinah of God. He turned to me and proclaimed that his chains had, indeed, fallen off — reminding me in the next breath that, in coming to Manchester, he had just laid down the office of archdeacon in another diocese.
Signs and symptoms
AS I drive from meeting to meeting, I am in danger of becoming obsessed with the appearance and disappearance of flags across my patch. Overnight, fresh Union flags and crosses of St George appear on lamp posts in Bury, Bolton, Salford, Radcliffe, and elsewhere (Comment, 3 October). Clearly, someone with a line in cable ties and inexpensive regalia is making a killing. Just as often, on other streets, the flags disappear. Are there now rival gangs that, by night, play a game of cat-and-mouse over the installation and removal of the cross of St George on the A56?
I find the unauthorised appearance of flags on lamp-posts both distressing and bewildering, but, most of all, sad. Unintentionally, they are all set at half-mast — owing, one assumes, to the limited length of domestic ladders. The effect is a signal of grief, a cry for help, rather than the intended expression of pride (or, one suspects, intimidation). There is a tawdriness to the flags’ cheap nylon.
I notice that there are no flags on lamp-posts in the wealthy parts of my archdeaconries. I have also begun spotting other flags. It is telling that, when I see the Pride Progress flag flown over the fire-brigade HQ in Salford, I think it more representative of who we are in Manchester than the cheap nylon flags of St George flown at half-mast on lamp-posts.
Universal truths
THE week ends in church. Nothing unusual about that, except I am in rural Gloucestershire as guest preacher for the festal eucharist for “A Blackbird Sings. . .”, a new arts festival that celebrates the work of the Dymock poets, who counted Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, and Rupert Brooke among their number.
As I wend my way through Herefordshire from an overnight stay at my mum’s place in Worcestershire, the satnav leads me down a single-track country lane on the edges of the Forest of Dean. Juvenile pheasants hog the road ahead of me, proprietorial and unprepared to scatter as my car approaches. Fields have already been ploughed, and farms have that end-of-season feel — and then, finally, there is the surprise of an ancient church.
If it were not for my car and the telephone poles, I could be travelling through an Edwardian Gloucestershire familiar to Thomas, Frost, and the other Dymock poets. Frost later wrote about “the road not taken”: I wonder whether this morning, through the wonders of satnav, I have stumbled on it.
After church, I pause briefly to listen to the tenor James Gilchrist rehearse for his festival concert — something by Butterworth, I think. The illusion is complete: I am no longer in an England riven by foolish culture wars and confected disagreements, but in a place where, joy of joys, art and poetry can be found anywhere, especially in a village on a still October morning. As I step outside, a blackbird sings.
The Ven. Dr Rachel Mann is the Archdeacon of Bolton and Salford, in the diocese of Manchester.