In the way of the glacial Church, it had taken several years and would take several more of self-flagellation and hand-wringing about how to make provision for these lachrymose bachelors, but for now the legislature looked like it really might put a ladies’ lav in the House of Bishops. I smiled at Dean with practised humility and pleasantly enough, I thought.
He tucked his chin behind his collar and continued.
“I think I can anticipate where you are on this and, of course, in many important respects, we shouldn’t be treating women candidates for episcopacy any differently from the male of the species.”
“Differently?” I asked, cocking slightly to the right. I can do coquettish. Men like Dean liked it even – especially – if they were gay.
“Well,” his hands opened, “there is at least meant to be some element of surprise in the approach from the CNC. But I thought it was only fair on you that I ask.”
I paused for a beat or two, looking at the carpet, pretending to choose my words.
“I have no desire to be a bishop,” I said evenly. “And I don’t suppose there is much desire among the entire company of the Kingdom of Heaven for me to be a bishop. More to the point, you won’t want a bishop with damn near a criminal conviction for foreign-aid food theft and lorry hijacking.”
“As I say, the general feeling is that that could be something of a public relations triumph.”
“I’m happy where I am,” I said. “Maybe some parish ministry is called for. But I’m not a symbol of unity. Or an administrator.”
“There’s a prophetic tradition in the English episcopacy too,” he said calmly. He was talking someone else’s book.
“Or a leader of men, then,” I added.
I let the phrase hang in the air. I’d enjoyed the reference to the Kingdom and now I knew I’d brought it bang down to earth. But elegantly, as Dean would appreciate. The corner of his mouth was raised, in the semblance of a quizzical smile.
“I understand that. But, in any event,” he too paused for a beat, “they have asked me to sound you out.” Well, I never, Dean, good job you pointed that out as my silly, ditzy brain may not have grasped it. “I think they’re very keen, you know.”
“Is there to be a lavender list?” I asked, doing the cocked head thing again.
“Oh, I don’t think there’d be anything so formal.” He leaned forward in his chair and shot his cuffs. I realised now we were being collegial. Men had done this stuff in senior common rooms and the tea rooms of parliament for generations, but it wasn’t a body language in which I was fluent. “I think it’s more a case of the House of Bishops being asked to get their ducks in a row, as it were.”
I resisted the temptation to change the vowel in duck. So I confined myself to: “And if I look like a duck and quack like a duck . . .”
“You develop the metaphor with a self-deprecation I hadn’t invited. But precisely.”
Dean was smiling at me now in a manner that he must have imagined was kindly. I sensed he was enjoying this more than he had expected.
“Anyway, the Bishop would like to see you on the matter of the formation of your ministry too. I’m sure if you tell him what you’ve told me he’ll be grateful.”
His use of the word “formation” was interesting. It’s what they talk about at theological colleges before ordination. But he turned conversation to my work at the cathedral and I understood his agenda for this encounter had been concluded.
Outside, I found Hugh in his small office on the first floor. It smelt caustically of lilies. In his most inquisitively camp way, he went straight for the debrief.
“Just some rubbish about whether I should ever want to be a bishop,” I said, noting privately that I was playing Dean’s confidentiality game. It was infectious. I needed quarantine.
I took a mouthful of tepid coffee from a mug whose rim was too thick and which was painted with a childish pig.
“And why are church coffee mugs so shite?”
I didn’t want to talk about bishops. I liked Hugh and didn’t want him to think I was on the make.
“It’ll be the finest porcelain for you soon enough, your grace.”
Hugh made to prod me with his ginger nut.
“Sod off, Huge. I really can’t bear this whole sketch. It’s either smarmy pussycats like Dean trying to do me a favour, or weepy, fat old faggots – like you – at Synod treating me like the Antichrist. Anyway, I don’t have any parish experience.”
“Sweets, don’t be so naïve. They’ll stick you in some gig in the City for six months – or St Mary’s in Elizabeth Street is free.”
He rolled his eyes roguishly. St Mary the Virgin was a very high church, where women knew their place.
“And purple would so suit you. Or maybe you could get away with mauve. Do it for me, darling. We’ve got to have a bishop that nobody minds men shagging for once. What happens next?”
“I’m seeing Londin next week, Tuesday.”
Short for Londinium. Bishops style themselves in Latin.
Hugh made a sound and gesture like he’d taken an arrow to the breast. “They’re so lining you up, dear. What time? Promise me you’ll meet me straight afterwards in the Cock.”
“Three.”
“I have choir at four. Cock at five.”
You didn’t contradict Hugh when he was on a gossip roll. I remember smiling at how much I loved having him around. How I trusted him completely. I would instinctively not talk about this stuff to anyone else. Not Adrian. But Hugh was metabolically incapable of letting me down. It just wasn’t in his make-up. I wished then that we could have worked together until we were two hundred years old. He would have kept me clean, if I’d let him. If I’d just hung out with Hugh, nothing would have happened. And not much comes of nothing.
4
I first met Toby from the Foreign Office some weeks before the Bishop introduced us, at one of those pointless debates about women bishops – pointless because the same people always came, not unlike Sunday church. We weren’t telling anyone anything they didn’t know already and everyone came with their irreversible ripe-soft or rock-hard opinions on the subject. All they want to do is to roll the stone over the tomb and let nothing out that might change them.
But you didn’t dare fail to turn up, because that might hand the initiative to the other side. I’d thought of withdrawing from the women debate, because I’d already said what I wanted to say so many times that I recited it involuntarily, sometimes as I cycled or walked, rather like that schoolgirl hopscotch rhyme. It had become a chant, a plainsong, with such a familiarity that you could think of something else entirely as you said it. But I kept coming back because you can’t leave the floor unguarded, and apparently we’d all invested too much time and effort in it.
As I took my place on the altar steps, the floor that night was depressingly full. It’s my experience that the conservatives and traditionalists – or misogyniks as Hugh called them – got their act together far more effectively than the liberati. When we did a soft gig to supporters, preaching to the liberal choir as it were, all we got was a sprinkling of pale vegetarians in scarves and the odd librarian doing a masters in gender politics. By contrast, the righties always whip themselves in through social media like a Tea Party laced with coke.
We were in one of those City churches, which, whatever the show-off Blue Badge guides say, all look the same, even if they’ve been bombed. Dark and dull just about covers it. At this one, a war bomb had taken out the east end, which was replaced by a white marble altar in-the-round, with a vacuous sculpture as its reredos, a lump of rounded white stone supposedly “cradling” a smaller one. It looks like a lozenge mothering a jelly bean.
We sat in chairs just too small to be comfortable – a church leitmotif, that – on the steps in front of this smug installation, the early evening light illuminating the lazily squiggled coloured-glass windows. I was looking down the original nave, which was dark wood and smelt of death, laid out collegiate-style wit
h those raked pews facing each other, across an aisle full of loose chairs facing forwards. These were now filled with the retired, carrying fussy bags full of papers, which evidently needed chairs too. For all his apparently innovative genius, Christopher Wren built places where today the bourgeoisie collated notes.
I was alongside Gerry, one of our male-priest camp followers, who wore a fixed grin and, with his forward-combed fringe that was almost a quiff, looked like a bit-part actor facing a first-night house for a post-performance discussion. To my far right (a gag I’d leveraged all too often at these events) was the opposition, Angela Vincent, the traditionalists’ trophy wife, who knew her place in the Church and it wasn’t in its sacraments, and David Buxted, from the oxymoronic Free in Faith, all high clerical collar and florid jowls.
Angela had a talent for crossing her pale-tighted legs seemingly two or three times at the calves, as if no man, or woman for that matter, this side of Phrygia was going to part them. She wore a crimson suit, in contempt of her tightly tied-back red hair, with a Seventies silk scarf. She looked like an air hostess. Between us was a celeb-columnist who had once been an editor of a newspaper, exuding a patronising bonhomie like a chat-show host. Two women on a panel of four and he still made it feel like tokenism.
Our introductory five-minute set pieces were OK, so far as they went. I was the first up to the lectern, with a thoroughly well-worked routine about our divisions being like tennis nets over which we tried to deliver polemical ace serves. Sometimes our shots were ruled out, sometimes faults were called, but the net was low enough to shake hands, even hug, at the end. And when the match was won, I hoped the victor might jump the net like they did in the old days to join the vanquished where they were, on the same side. It’s a middle-class and twee routine – it’s what’s required – and it was a trite little spiel about Christian division and made it all sound like a game, which is how the Home Counties like it.
Angela went with the headship of the Church (St Paul and all other men) not being about seniority and Mary being the Mother of Heaven. Gerry talked about scripture being used down the ages to endorse a flat Earth and the slave trade. Finally, the jowls reddening to magenta over the high collar, we heard from Buxted about honouring God’s creation of fatherhood and motherhood as enshrined in the teachings of the Church on the incarnation.
Then a short colloquium, during which our old hack got to showcase his abilities as a charming and quick-witted anchorman for any broadcast producers who might have been present. As if. And the panel got to repeat several times what we had just said.
Then the floor had it. Surely Jesus chose twelve male disciples? If I’d had a pound for every time I’d heard that we’d go somewhere nice for dinner, sir. Surely women were persecuting their oppressors? Nothing wrong with women priests, but they should know their place. All the Catholics want is legal protection from offensive radicalism.
Angela was enjoying herself. “In many respects, Natalie and I are the same – we’re both serving Jesus Christ in His Church.”
Amazing how some can actually pronounce His with a capital H. I started to look forward very much indeed to a drink with Hugh with a capital H. I usually stay as silent as possible during this part of a debate. I hoped it might look Christ-like. What is truth, after all.
Then a fair and solid young man stood and took the roaming microphone.
“Toby Naismith from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office,” he said.
None of the others had introduced themselves or their occupations. It went something like this: “I’d like to ask the Reverend Cross the degree to which she feels not so much persecuted but isolated and marginalised, like so many other Christians in even more uncomfortable parts of the world” – I liked that word “even” and remember it particularly – “I think, for example, of the Christians in what we might still call the Holy Lands, who to all intents and purposes are increasingly being denied the opportunity to worship. Does she feel that she is denied? Is women’s ordained ministry like being a living stone?”
It was a reference to the First Letter of Peter, written to first-century persecuted Christians. Peter, stones, get it? The “living stones” are these days used as a metaphor for the churches in the Middle East, a dwindling physical link with the original witnesses to the risen Christ.
“It’s a dramatic analogy,” I said, playing for time.
Then new, fresh words came to me, expressions I hadn’t used before.
“We’re all the warp and weft of faith, the fabric of the Church. But some, by gender, are denied connection with apostolic mission and that’s a direct denial of access to Christ’s ministry. Like being given a different part of a church to sit in. Our web is severed from the loom. Is that what you mean?”
It was a neat scriptural shot to his baseline. But he was still on his feet.
“Are you saying that your bones are dry – your thread of life is snapped?”
Some of the grey heads turned to look at him now. But he was smiling and his head was inclined quizzically and courteously towards me.
The chair-hack wasn’t about to be out-smartarsed.
“Are you quite all right? Sounds like osteoporosis,” he said and some of his audience laughed as if along for a cruise-controlled ride.
“It’s Ezekiel,” I said evenly. They were all still listening and I was surprised. “It’s true. Women’s priesthood in the Church of England does feel like a kind of Babylonian exile.”
This brought a derisive snort from chair-hack. “It’s not so much being in exile from the Church,” I continued, “it’s losing hope that our Church may ever return from its self-imposed exile from women’s original witness of the Christ, which is well attested in scripture. That’s as dispiriting as being in exile myself.”
Angela leaned in.
“If I may,” she said. She’s rattled, I thought, by this whole scriptural authority riff. “It’s really a very grave error to suggest that women’s ministry and witness has been denied by the Church. Down the centuries, women have been venerated, women have been sanctified. From Mary Magdalene to Mother Teresa.”
“I don’t think that’s what the gentleman means,” I said. Why are they always “gentlemen” when they’re in audiences? He had sat down again, but I could feel him watching me through the sea of grey. “I think the suggestion is that we’re in exile from women’s first witness of the Christ. We need liberating from that exile.”
“You’re not suggesting the women at the Cross – Mary the Mother of Christ was one of them, you know – you’re not suggesting they need liberating by the Church. We’re liberated by God, by our faith,” said Angela.
She was flushed and her mouth had tightened.
“I’m suggesting we’re cut off from the experience of women at the time of Christ,” I replied with what I hoped was measured calmness. “The Syrophoenician woman, who thought she was a dog for wanting crumbs from the Christ’s table. The Samaritan woman, who had slept with more than one man so she had to fetch her water in the midday sun to avoid the scorn of the Jews. The bleeding woman, who tugged his robe.”
“You’re making the women sound more special than the men,” Angela shouted, and there was a murmur of ironic laughter from the chairs. “I mean, you’re suggesting that there’s something different about the women whom Jesus healed from the men. They are – we are – all the same disciples, we just have different roles.”
“But only men can exercise priestly ministry,” said chair-hack, detecting the mood.
“We can all exercise our ministries. But let’s not bring gender politics into it. There are no gender politics in the Kingdom of Heaven,” said Angela, firmly regaining control.
“And that’s what we’re trying to build,” I said. “But there are plenty of gender politics in this world.”
“Well, let’s keep them out of the Church,” said Angela, looking straight ahead. “Natalie just wants to turn this into a socio-political argument and I don’t see the gospel i
n that.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I think politics only properly liberates when we bring our faith to it. And faith is nothing unless it liberates.”
“I’m glad you concede you’re a politician. May I remind you, Natalie, that we’re called to fulfil the law, not to destroy it.”
There was a pause as this gospel injunction was ingested. Then I blew it. I don’t know why.
“Angela, I hope you’re not having your period at the moment. Because if you are, under Levitical law, you shouldn’t be sitting with these men.”
I’d like to say there was a frisson. Actually, there was a honk of disapproval from the nave and I’d lost the audience. Chair-hack changed the subject matter, like a teacher stumbling across a Shakespearian profanity. Angela pursed her thin lips and left as soon as it wound up, claiming pressing “pastoral” demands.
I hung about for the drinks, if only to demonstrate that I hadn’t done a runner like Angela. I wanted to be ostracised a bit too. I enjoy people being uncomfortable in my presence. I soak up opprobrium like a Scientologist.
Tight-arsed Christians struggle with their disapproval of people like me, because they know they’re not really meant to do hating. But they do. So do I, but the difference is I admit it. To them – some of them – I’m a woman dressed as a priest and still an odd outsider. But it’s more than that. I’m an icon of the overthrow of their clubby little structures and good offices, where only men wear frocks and the women do Marian obedience.
Ever notice what really gets them going at the Feast of the Annunciation? Not the divine ravaging of the child-bride’s womb, not her sheer bloody fear, but Mary’s flipping obedience. I’ve only ever seen one painting, by Lotto, I think, where Mary looks like she’s wondering what she’s eaten to be having this hallucination. The Archangel Gabriel even scares her cat. Otherwise, even the Pre-Raphaelites do obedient. Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Well, you can argue I might be that, but I’m not your bloody handmaid, you jerk, you in your blazer and bifocals, with your little plasters over your shaving cuts, dabbed into place by your ministering Mrs Minnie Mouse. There, you’ve set me off.
A Dark Nativity Page 5