Senior service
TELEVISION and film are all very well, but there’s nothing like what my granny called “the wireless”: the intimacy, the pictures created by words, the faded glory of a now ancient technology.
So, as I wait to offer a live Thought For The Day on Radio 4, I remind myself of the sheer wonder and privilege of what I am about to do. I cannot quite believe that an oik like me has a regular opportunity to broadcast a faith-based thought to the nation; a beat in the frenetic and sometimes panicky pulse of the world.
There’s absurdity, too. There is no glamour in this gig. Most often, I deliver my Thought from a tired old broadcasting box in Media City. It is known as the “News and Current Affairs [NCA] Box”, and, from the outside, it looks like one of those terrifying public lavatories that appeared in some city centres, back in the late ’90s — the ones everyone feared they would get locked into if they dared to enter. Except the NCA is in black rather than silver.
The inside space is even less appealing. It bears the detritus characteristic of unloved places: the discarded paper clips, crumbs, and half-filled coffee cups left by time-poor broadcasters. The broadcast kit itself appears to antedate the Falklands War, and the walls are lined with the kind of dark carpet-material last fashionable in 1975. No. No glamour at all.
Power of the Spirit
TALKING of unloved but none the less functional and important places, I currently seem to be spending a lot of time visiting hospital. It is part of the deal when you live with a nasty, chronic disease that simply refuses to behave.
This week, I was at Salford Royal for a chat with my surgical team, and I was struck — not for the first time — by the similarities between the medical world and the Church. There is the Consultant: like the Bishop, he (and it is usually still a he) holds so much power that he probably thinks he has none. Then there are the “senior leaders”: usually Registrars, who hope to impress the Consultant and “get on”. Finally, there are the nurses, who, like parish priests, do most of the heavy lifting, and talk to patients like me with an eye to our pastoral care and flourishing.
What does that make me in this scenario — a lay person, “done to” rather than “doing”? Perhaps that is where the analogy breaks down. These days, good hospital teams (and I have a world-class one) not only listen to patients, but empower our lived expertise. A wag might say, “If only the Church’s senior leadership empowered the laity in the same way. . . ” The wag might very well say that. As a senior leader myself, I couldn’t possibly comment.
All my love to give
HUMOUR aside, perhaps the most moving moment of the week was in the cathedral as it hosted, at the Bishop’s request, a service honouring the work of our parish and diocesan safeguarding teams.
The Church of England is rightly in the dock after our many fumbled, trauma-inducing attempts to address historic safeguarding failings. It was right, then, that penitence was a key theme of this service — especially for those of us involved in senior leadership.
There was appropriate thanksgiving, too: thanksgiving for the tireless work of all those seeking to establish best practice in the diocese; in churches, chaplaincies, and parishes. The speaker was a survivor, Duncan Craig OBE, who set up the charity “We Are Survivors”. He concluded his powerful talk by reading a short, handwritten letter from an anonymous elderly donor. She had attached to it two ten-pound notes, and written, “I don’t have much, but I want to give what I can. God bless you for everything you are trying to do.”
God bless you, indeed. A modern version of the widow’s mite, I wondered, as I choked back the tears.
Silence is orange
AN EPISCOPAL colleague once said to me, “There are only three things expected of clergy: to heal the incurable, to forgive the unforgivable, and to make reality go away. A key task of ministry is to know which is being asked of you at any particular time.”
He attributed the words to Wesley Carr, which is plausible, though it might have been said by any number of clerics formed in more confident and less earnest times than our own. Whoever wrote them, they gave me great comfort at a time when I faced a whirlwind of seeming ministerial impossibilities. Yet, for all that I am now a seasoned priest, nothing in those words could have prepared me for an encounter with President Trump in the lavatory, during a visit to a colleague’s parsonage.
Clergy loos can be very revealing. My own is full of silly and wry cards sent to me from all over the world (I like to give visitors something to read). Imagine, however, enthroning yourself only to see a photo of the Over-Tanned One looking down on you.
Half-amused, half-shaken, when I emerged I expressed my surprise at what I’d found there. It turns out that a member of the cleric’s household is a fan of Donald Trump. The progressive cleric within me was a little shocked: was this to be the moment when I was called to forgive the unforgivable? As so often in ministry, I found silence the better course.
Through the looking-glass
THE week ended as it began: back at Media City. Lest anyone think I have nothing better to do than offer my pensées on the radio, this has just been one of those weeks. On this visit, however, I needed to pass beyond the lobby that contains the NCA, and penetrate the holy of holies — well, the place where BBC Breakfast and Five Live are housed — to get into the BBC Manchester studios for a chat about Lent and the news.
This necessitated a full scan of body and possessions. As I lifted my arms for the security guard to wave his metal detector across my body, he said, “Thank you, Bishop.” Never usually lost for words, I admit I was thrown by his apparent certainty that, unbeknown to me, I had been elevated to the episcopate.
As he let me through the barrier, he repeated his line, complete with that odd note of deference which the word “Bishop” so often carries. At theological college, I was taught to pay attention to those with least power in any organisation; while a security guard surely counts as such, his auto-consecration of me as a bishop struck me as taking trust in the powerless too far.
On this matter, if no other, I was confident that it was I rather than he who had a solid grip on reality. This was no occasion, pace Carr, to attempt to dispel reality.
The Ven. Dr Rachel Mann is the Archdeacon of Bolton and Salford, in the diocese of Manchester.
