Meeting in the Big House

At various points during the meeting at the house of our suffragan bishop, her cat positively launched itself at the arm of the chair occupied by the Diocesan Director of Training, and then, failing to gain purchase, slipped off back onto the floor, much to the Director's discomfiture. It then ran around the room chasing imaginary things. It would be unfair to suggest this was any kind of metaphor for the activity of the Church of England as a whole. 

We Local Vocations Advisers had been summoned after the departure of the diocesan Vocations Co-ordinator to - well, most of us didn't seem to have had the memo with the agenda, so I think it was mainly exchanging our experiences and outlining the diocese's general approach to the discernment of vocations. The diocese is keen:

• to broaden the body of Advisers to include laypeople and a wider range of people generally;
• to make sure the process isn't so sclerotic and controlled it stops people calling one of the Advisers for a chat and not being immediately channelled down the runnels of The System; 
• to emphasise that vocation includes what people do in their working lives - that the Church needs more Christian teachers, doctors, and so on.

This is of course all to the good, though the bishop also definitely felt that raising the numbers of people being ordained would also encourage people to consider other vocations too. 

'Thank you so much for coming', she said to me and Daniel, the Vicar of Throop at the top end of the diocese. 'It's so important that we do all we can to make sure people from the Catholic end of the Church are encouraged to come forward, it's not healthy if it's all one-way'. Oy, tell me about it. Ideas on a postcard. 

Somewhere downstairs in the house is a cuckoo clock. It cuckooed five times at one point: I checked my watch and discovered it was eight minutes past 8pm. There's another metaphor one should resist.