Come Holy Ghost, Do

On the second day of the Triennial Clergy Conference this week, I went for what was a short walk down the hill and back again, and got dreadfully lost, eventually making my way back to the conference centre hot, exhausted and half an hour after the beginning of the afternoon’s first lecture, but I got a nice photograph of some cows from a footpath I shouldn’t even have been on.

There were a lot of words. Revd Isabelle Hamley gave us a series of Bible studies examining examples of spiritual change (when the Bishop asked us to share with our neighbour what one insight we might take away from the conference, Fr Benjamin beside me claimed that it would be Revd Isabelle’s revelation that her native French has no separate words for tortoise and turtle – ‘I tell my husband, it’s just the same animal in a different place’); Bishop Ruth Bushyager of Horsham encouraged us to subject everything we did to the test of whether it took people forward in discipleship; Dr Sam Wells of St-Martin-in-the-Fields urged us to start doing ‘interesting things’ (the Church had abandoned all these to the Welfare State in 1948, he maintained) beginning with more interaction with our communities; and Bishop Tim Wambunya, who told us a tale of discrimination which has led to him going back into parish ministry in Slough. There was other stuff, but they were the headliners.

Over the years I have become less prone to plunge into a depressive spiral at the Triennial, questioning the worth of my ministry and even of my own existence. Partly this is because I’ve learned to see my clergy colleagues as just as frail and ridiculous as me, and their self-confidence, where it exists, as a bit of a show. It’s just as well, because the Diocese of Guildford’s descent into monocultural Evangelicalism has now reached the point where it feels hard for any other kind of crop to flourish. Accounts from my colleagues indicate without any shadow of a doubt that if Bishop Andrew can wrest a church from any kind of high-side-of-centre orientation, he will, without any regard to what it may have been in the past, or the health and viability of its current congregation. To stand in the main hall at The Hayes as we did this past week for Morning or Evening Prayer, and find oneself surrounded by people holding their hands in the air ‘like they’re trying to grab God’s bollocks’, as my old vicar Fr Barkley so picturesquely put it, does make one feel less than fully at home. I tend to keep my mouth shut because I know hardly anyone will understand anything I feel inclined to say.

I was glad I stayed for the final eucharist, though. The outgoing cathedral dean presided, a woman, I have been told by two people independently, ‘who doesn’t give a shit anymore’, not that that was particularly in evidence. The Bishop presided and, notwithstanding what he does, his words usually come across rather well. This time he decided to finish his sermon by reminding us of the truth of our ordination by singing the Veni Creator. For someone it was the most natural thing in the world to follow him intoning ‘Come Holy Ghost our souls inspire’ with ‘And lighten with celestial fire …’ – only sotto voce – and within a moment or two that whisper went round the whole hall so those of us who knew it were all joined in with that ancient hymn linking us, not just to Anglicanism past, but to the whole of the Western Church. A glorious moment, if a lonely one.