Sede Vacante

That progressed shockingly quickly. The announcement that the Bishop of Guildford had inoperable pancreatic cancer only came a month ago. Very quickly a message followed to say that the disease was advancing faster than expected - 'possibly my last letter to the diocese', he stated - and this morning he passed to his reward. Last week I went to the Cathedral to take part in a vigil of prayer for the Bishop - nothing organised, simply (and rather affectingly) people sitting quietly in the nave for as long as they wanted to - and now the journey is over. This happened recently to a neighbour, therefore a parishioner though not a member of any church, who went from diagnosis to death within a month; a much-loved member of the congregation died a couple of years ago from a brain tumour, but that took three months, and we all thought that was fast. This gives no time for adjustment and assimilation, and as I'm not sure any bishop in recent times has ever perished in an accident, such an experience is very rare. This is not something that happens to bishops: they retire, write the odd book, maybe wait for the media to start questioning the decisions they took in office. Recently I reflected that the business of his 'dying well', as he put it, might be the most important ministry +Andrew would carry out - but, as it has turned out, there hasn't even been much of that.

Of course my relationship with my diocesan has been an odd, distant one. At times I got the impression he rather preferred that, not just with me but with everyone apart from those immediately around him. He was my father-in-Christ who I was committed to obeying in all things lawful and honest, as the phrase goes, but that was about it. Nevertheless he was the one person the whole of the diocese related to, in whatever way: a bishop is 'the focus of unity' not in the sense that everyone agrees with them, or even ought to, but simply because the bishop is connected with them all and, through the bishop, they to each other (including the worshippers of the past in the diocese's churches, as the bishop is a link in a chain). So +Andrew's sudden removal plucks out a kind of axle around which everything else revolves, however eccentrically or remotely. Without a bishop, with a sedes left vacans for stretching months or years, would we spin away from one another? No, we would be kept in tenuous connection by the diocesan mechanisms of parish share and safeguarding training. But there would not even be the potential of love, which is what any relationship should include.